Expenses as Spectacle

The ‘issue’ of MPs expenses has been dominating the media of late, with even the usually sensible and restrained C4 News devoting almost its whole 50-minute prog to the issue yesterday evening, mostly voxpopping. What is the ‘issue’, though? Some MPs have fiddled their exes – so what’s new? Being ‘creative’ with expenses claims is a national pastime which we’ve all of us indulged in at one time or another – you claim what you can within the rules laid down. So fiddling exes is no big deal. Neither is it news that some, if not most, MPs are corrupt and self-serving – this has always been the case to some degree, and since the advent of NuLabor in 1997 with its amoral neo-liberalism and ‘business-friendly’ culture there’s been strong evolutionary selection towards careerists seeking to feather their own nests and ascend through the ranks of the Westminster court to gain power. Indeed, it’s been counter-productive for a MPs career to be at all ideological or moral or just plain honest – the few (such as the old class warrior Dennis Skinner, or the posh but effective Tam Dalyell) who are find themselves languishing forever on the back benches, waiting for their 15 minutes of fame before sinking back into obscurity. If you want to get on, you need to be ambitious, self-serving, untroubled by morals or ideology, and to adopt ‘business practices’.

Of course, that everyone fiddles exes doesn’t make it right that MPs should do it, particularly on the public purse and in the public view at a time of recession, but in truth it really doesn’t matter. What the ‘crisis’ is useful for, though, is distracting attention away from the far more grievous and damaging corruption that is an everyday part of political and business life in the UK. An ex-minister rips off 16 grand? Into the stocks with him, suspend him from the Labour Party and call for him to be prosecuted. An ex-Home Secretary picks up a cushy £50k consultancy for a security company, using his insider knowledge and contacts to profit them mightily [2]? Silence. High-ranking civil servants in the Defence Ministry join arms companies – sorry, “defence contractors” – at fat salaries and bonuses[3]? Silence. Major public IT companies (eg Capita, EDS) who ’sponsor’ NuLabor events and donate to the party get contracts worth hundreds of millions? Mostly silence, other than from some right-wing papers which conveniently ignore the exact same corruption which occurred during the Thatcher years.

What the expenses “scandal” is very good at is grabbing the headlines, column inches, and TV news bulletins, and deflecting attention away from the massive, institutional corruption of UK politics and capitalism. Deals of many hundreds of millions, sometimes billions [4], of pounds, with eye-watering profit margins, are made behind closed doors on a regular basis, with close collusion between capitalists and government politicians, deals worth many orders of magnitude more than even the most extravagant MP expenses claim. We rarely hear, watch or read about these, other than in niche magazines like Private Eye (the In The Back section is a paragon of investigative journalism). If such corruption does come to light, it’s usually a long time after the fact [5] by which time the major players have made their stash and politicians involved have retired.

The UK and US are intensely corrupt nations, but because corruption is built into the institutions and indeed laws, their governments can claim publicly, with a straight face, that they’re not corrupt and that all get held to account. This is plainly a lie of quite gigantic proportions, but because, say, the ‘revolving door’ between the Ministry of Defence and arms companies is legal it’s not counted as corrupt. This is how to eliminate corruption without eliminating it – just make it legal.

So the expenses scandal is very useful for distracting attention from institutional corruption, and is a Spectacle in the Situationist sense[6] as it absorbs public attention and at the same time renders the public as impotent passive spectators. There is one possible sting in the tail, though. The essence of the “scandal” is that claiming within the rules can be, and often is, still “immoral”[7]. Apply that to the institutional corruption of the UK State, and the Defence revolving door would be seen as corrupt, even though legal. Expect some finessing by politicians, pundits and civil servants when this issue is brought up…

[1] Profile: Elliot Morley. BBC News online, 14/5/09

[2] John Reid, aka Big Bampot, joins Group 4 Security in December 2008. See Security Oracle news item announcing his engagement, and a Taxpayer’s Alliance blog article quoting in full the Daily Mail story on how G4 won a major contract just 3 months after Reid joined up.  (The DM URL for the story is currently broken. )

[3] Solomon Hughes excellent but little-known book “War on Terror, Inc” details the institutional corruption within the UK and US security and arms sectors, and their organic links with politicians and governments on both sides of The Pond. A must-read. See Socialist Review for a review of the book.

[4] The infamous Al Yamamah arms deal, enthusiastically backed by La Thatcher and enormously profitable for the UK’s largest arms manufacturer, BAe, comes immediately to mind. See Wikipedia for background.

[5] Al Yamamah again.

[6] See nice Wikipedia synopsis of the Spectacle, which is rather more readable than the insanely abstract and jargon-ridden writings of the Situationists, Debord in particular.

[7] In “Brown wants all claims reviewed“, BBC Online, 13/5/09, David Cameron, Tory leader and Little Lord Fauntelroy lookalike is quoted:

“I don’t care if they were within the rules,” he said of claims made in the past. “They were wrong.”