What MPs’ expenses may reveal about our society

David Marquand’s ‘Decline of the Public: the hollowing out of citizenship’ (Polity Press, 2004) and Michael Power’s ‘The Audit Society: rituals of verification’ (Oxford University Press, 1997) both made a big impression on me. ‘Decline of the Public’ explains how the marketisation of society has turned citizens into consumers, or buyers and sellers, with few opportunities to behave as citizens, to make decisions on social and political priorities, to be involved in governance. Instead, as ‘The Audit Society’ details, there are endless tick lists that purport to prove that everything in the national garden is weed-free and sweet-smelling. Often the lists get in the way of constructive activities, and prove no more than that there is a system for recording x, y, z and everything else under the sun. The BBC Radio 4 readings this last week (June 15 to 19) of Woman Police Constable E E Bloggs’ ‘Diary of an On-Call Girl’ (Monday Books, 2007) were funny yet at the same time depressing because police work appears weighed down with lists and tick boxes. WPC Bloggs (see http://pcbloggs.blogspot.com) is supposed to make eight arrests a month, her ‘target’. She resists, but does no favours to her career prospects. To meet the target, officers have to focus on easy cases, rather than delving into difficult but socially important areas. WPC Bloggs spends hours at her computer, on reports and ticks. The inadvertent missed tick brings questioning emails from the officer/s who spend hours checking through reports and lists.

Audit trails are evidence when aggrieved persons go to law, often with the help of a ‘no win no fee’ solicitor, or when the fees are claimed from the counter-party’s insurance company. Litigation for malpractice is very big business. This means people are terrified of making any mistake, hence the tick, tick, tick, lists to demonstrate that everything was done by the book. Fear of prosecution for simple mistakes makes us risk-averse and unwilling to innovate. It enmeshes us tightly in nets of the proverbial red tape.

When we are not allowed to make mistakes, we cannot learn from them. Learning is essential to development. Learning is essential to any real citizenship. “Well,” you may say, “I’ve learnt a lot about members of Parliament from reading their expenses claims in the ‘Daily Telegraph’.” True. What were the expense claims really about? Easy money, no questions asked? Exploiting legal loopholes, such as calling your second home your main home for a few weeks, so you can sell it and avoid 40% capital gains tax? Keeping up appearances with mansions, moats, and phantom mortgages, so that MPs do not appear the poor country cousins of bank bosses, professional footballers and Russian oligarchs? Do we measure personal worth by the number of black noughts on bank balances? Apparently yes, but this is a consequence of the marketisation of society, to paraphrase Professor Michael Sandel in the first of this year’s Reith Lectures.

Thinking about it, are we just following the negative trend by criticising MPs for taking advantage of citizen taxpayers? Perhaps we should consider the intention behind actions that result in ‘mistakes’. Creating a system that enriches yourself is not particularly moral, but morals are intangible and thus incomprehensible to markets, which have to place exchange values on everything. MPs have been working the market, no more. Our challenge is to relegate the market to a subsidiary role and to elevate social equity and justice above the market place. To achieve such a transformation, we have to be able to make mistakes, to use audits as aids to understanding rather than them controlling us, and to open up politics as collaborative and co-operative arenas, not as party fiefdoms. Maybe the MPs’ expenses scandal is a marker on the uphill climb towards the end of traditional party politics and its replacement with new forms of governance that citizens will try out, refine, adopt and keep refining, in the light of changing contexts and new challenges.