As the saying goes, the fish rots from the head down. Research has shown that the integrity of governments and institutions has an impact on broader society. Competence and decency at the top affects the behaviour of the rest. In short, well-run countries tend to be happier, healthier, more prosperous places.
If those at the top misbehave then it sends a message down the chain – if the elites are corrupt and filling their boots, then why shouldn’t you try to do the same? Why should you treat the next guy fairly if you can’t be sure he’ll do the same to you.
I’d still hold that the UK remains a relatively uncorrupt country, but this has undoubtedly been a challenging week. As an unrepentant Blairite, the downfall of Peter Mandelson, and the actions that brought it about, have been tough to take. I liked and admired Mandelson as a political strategist and a policy thinker. He was central to the government that helped shape my political identity. The revelations about what he was up to behind the scenes have been not just disappointing, but upsetting.
We waited a long time for this current Labour government, too. Keir Starmer’s first speech on the steps of Downing Street was a moment of hope and promised renewal: “When the gap between the sacrifices made by people and the service they receive from politicians grows this big, it leads to a weariness in the heart of a nation, a draining away of the hope, the spirit, the belief in a better future, that we need to move forward together. You have given us a clear mandate and we will use it to deliver change, to restore service and respect to politics, end the era of noisy performance, tread more lightly on your lives and unite our country.”
Well. Everyone has a plan until you get punched in the mouth, and today Starmer is a heavyweight lolling on the canvas. The towel may be about to be thrown in. Service and respect have not been as prominent as one might have hoped. Almost every significant British institution has faced or is facing its own form of scandal, from the Royal family to the BBC to the Lords and beyond. There is still a weariness in the heart of the nation – in fact, it is growing.
You can see the calculation a growing number of voters are making: if you’re going to have a government led by chancers who don’t really know what they’re doing, then why not opt for the biggest chancers of them all? At least Nigel Farage and his crew are more transparent bullshitters. There is plenty to dislike, but then Reform UK don’t pretend to be pious or all things to all people. There might be an opacity to Farage’s personal finances and legitimate questions about who is funding his party, but that’s priced into the brand.
What of Scotland? There has been plenty of preening from the SNP about Mandelson’s downfall. The timing couldn’t be better for them, with the elections due in May. Scottish Labour have already been hamstrung by Starmer’s failures, and this latest outrage will not help. This week, a poll by More in Common found the SNP still on course to emerge as the largest party. It also found Reform only five points behind in the regional part of the Holyrood vote. Reform is the most popular party among unionists, supported by 31 per cent of those opposed to independence, ahead of Labour on 23 per cent.
So is Reform about to become the official opposition in Scotland? Perhaps. It’s worth making the case that this is not just down to Labour’s failures but to those of the SNP too. The past few years have seen the Nats avoid transparency and accountability whenever they felt it in their interests. They have developed bad habits of obfuscation and intransigence, the kind often seen in long-serving governments which develop an arrogant, born-to-rule tendency.
The government is currently, and unprecedentedly, being taken taken to court by the Information Commissioner after it missed deadlines to produce documents from an ethics investigation into Nicola Sturgeon, relating to the investigation into Alex Salmond. It is also being challenged for dragging its heels over implementing the Supreme Court’s decision last year which made it clear that single-sex spaces were for biological women only. The government is still arguing that trans women can be placed in women-only prisons.
There have been various scandals involving SNP ministers in recent times, from Michael Matheson’s iPad expenses to Angela Constance’s misrepresenting an expert on child abuse and grooming. Every time an SNP politician in the inner circle threatens to come a cropper, the wagons are circled, regardless of the strength of the evidence against them. Most of this might amount to political sharp practice rather than apparent corruption on the Mandelsonian scale. But remember that the Nats have still to go through the trial of Peter Murrell, its former chief executive and estranged husband of Sturgeon, who faces charges of embezzlement of SNP funds.
It goes without saying that we should try to be honest and decent in our daily dealings with one another. There are plenty of bad apples out there, but most of us are trying our best to live honourably. But if the fish rots from the head down, if we look to our leaders for an example of competence and integrity, then the UK and Scotland might be closer to low, dishonest nations than any of us should be comfortable with.
[Further reading: Peter Mandelson is gone, and so is New Labour]
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Subscribe here to commentThe nettle that isn’t being grasped is that too many politicians won’t challenge the status quo. They are prepared to accept that we don’t really have a democratic economy. They are prepared to accept the financial world order as a fait accompli. As such they work on the assumption that government as a tool of the dominant wealthy and powerful interests is the only game in town. Their job becomes an extension of the lobbyist; a career that so many later take up in any case, selling influence to the highest bidder.
The incumbent party “n power” is a PR department for their paymasters, selling the preordained fiscal and monetary policies of transnational neoliberalism as pragmatism; grown up politics that know the way the world works. Mandelson is just the tip of a very big iceberg and only the most egregious example of a direction in politics that saw parties only too happy to outsource one-sided extortinate contracts, underwrite risk, and to forego huge swathes of regulatory power, influence and tax policy to vested interests who’s agenda and endgame is ultimately anything but democratic.
Mandelson or not, the Centre Left and Centre Right of western politics helped usher in this age whether as venal operators like him or passive dupes like Starmer, Cameron and all the rest. If people do end up voting for Farage on the grounds that one might as well have a good con man as a bad one, then they need to realise that they are his mark and they will be burned and go on being burned not so much beyond as until recognition. He and his party can be no more entrusted to be agents of the dispossessed, than a shiver of sharks can be reiled upon to protect swimmers art the beach.
I think we have to be honest about the failure of centrist political parties to acknowledge their part in upholding an iniquitous economic model where too much power and policy control has been given away to vested interests in the name of “wealth creation”.It long a go reached a point where cronyism, sweetheart contracts, and the “revolving door” of rich people, lobbyists and parliamentarians trading places, became a feature of the political landscape in western democracies. Mandelson is only the most egregious example and it’s a bit much to be dismayed at his demise, given his past affiliations. It bears spelling out. If New Labour, the Tories and Reform are all guilty of going along with the whole Politics- for-sale- to-the-highest bidder game, where will the honest analysis of systemic and institutional failure caused by neoliberalism and the policies to rectify this come from?