Eddie Koch
SLEAZE, secrecy and corruption are targets of the toughest action taken in Britain this century to enforce ethical behaviour by MPs in the House of
Prime Minister John Major’s cabinet last week accepted the broad thrust of the controversial Nolan Committee’s report, which laid down “seven principles of public life” to guard against “slackness in the observation and enforcement of high standards”.
The Nolan ethics committee urges British MPs not to undertake parliamentary services for lobbyists and to declare all earnings from outside consultancies. It recommends that a Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards be set up to police a new code.
Nolan suggests former cabinet members be vetted by an independent committee before they can take paid employment for at least two years after they leave office, so that they are prevented from trading in strategic information obtained while in public office.
It also proposes a complex investigation mechanism in which MPs’ behaviour is subject to independent scrutiny, while final judgments on guilt and penalties be left up to the House of Commons.
The committee’s recommendations include tighter enforcement of the Commons Register of Members’ Interests, so that precise categories are declared, mainly in bands of R5 000.
‘Financial misbehaviour, in particular, matters to us all because it strikes at the very heart of that confidence which people must have in ministers and the motives behind their decisions,” says the report.
To force the pace of implementing its proposals, the committee suggests three categories of action. Some proposals must be immediately applied, others this year and the rest before the end of 1996.
Four members of the committee have also urged parliament to extend its inquiry into ways of ensuring that party political funds are disclosed and monitored — although this has so far been resisted by Major.
The Tory cabinet is expected to set up an all-party select committee this week to implement the proposals, but the ink had hardly dried on Nolan’s report before infuriated Conservative backbenchers began mobilising against it.
Tory MPs staged a counter-attack last week by saying the demand to disclose earnings outside parliament would destroy representation by “professional, middle class” people in the Commons. The House of Lords is exempt from disclosure provisions because they are not elected officials.
The backlash was lead by former prime minister Edward Heath. “You are about to obliterate the professional classes’ representation in the House of Commons. It is a very, very dangerous game,” backbencher Alan Duncan told Lord Nolan in a heated exchange.
Labour leader Tony Blair has urged Major to accept Nolan’s recomendations in full and warned that referring its report to yet another commission — a demand being made by some Tories — would reduce the cabinet to a laughing stock.
The controversy in Britain over sleaze in parliament was sparked by media exposes of expensive trips taken abroad by MPs whose expenses were paid by lobbying firms, and revelations that some MPs were taking cash in exchange for asking questions in the House.
A survey conducted by the Mail & Guardian last month shows a number of western democracies are tightening up on the pecuniary activities of elected
Intense debate is taking place in Ireland, Finland, Sweden, France and Germany over ways to ensure that there is no clash of interests between parliamentarians’ national duties and their private business interests.