New Labour corruption is a little like religion. As with belief in God, more people believe that Tony Blair is bent than don’t but they are unable to produce a scrap of evidence to back up their faith.

It’s all so circumstantial (although circumstantial enough for the police to have a sniff, not that they’ll do anything as vulgar as proscecute members of the Greater Good). And a bit like intelligent design - a lot of signs point towards the New Labour high command being a bunch of liars and wrigglers but as DSquared says in the comments over at Tim Worstall’s blog:

Of course it’s all a bit smelly, but I would not want to get my hopes up or stake material personal credibility on there being a paper trail linking the loans to the contracts in any way more substantial than just saying “phwoar, look at that, pretty dodgy”.

It’s the smoking gun that refused to bark and other such utterances. Until somebody produces a piece of paper saying “I, Tony Blair, offer you Mr X a peerage in return for a £1m loan” - much like God popping up and declaring, “it’s a fair cop” - you can bet what’s left of your pension that even if (and that’s an if as big as the Ritz) Blair does go over this it’ll be with “no stain of impropriety against him whatsoever“. It won’t be the Prime Minister’s fault if he’s put out into the street. Just you wait - it’ll be the fault of the media and the cynics and the Left. Blair, like God, moves in mysterious ways and he may yet salvage his reputation on a technicality.

Not that saying any of this gives me any pleasure. It can’t be emphasised enough that this government holds the public in utter contempt. If it didn’t why would it feel compelled to continue to swathe itself in its thick cloak of deceit?

Real people can’t be trusted enough to deserve an invite to question the Prime Minister - events must be stage managed to the nth degree. Bogus letters must be planted in newspapers and actors must pose as the public at rallies. Posters must tell lies when the truth would be enough. A parallel universe, never mind a parallel party-funding system, must be implemented so the proles don’t get a whiff of the stink of high politics.

And then there are the lobby correspondents, those parliamentary journalists given precious access to our masters, charged with the responsibility of informing the public of what’s going on in the ivory towers. Instead of showing their mettle and properly questioning our leaders, they bend their knee to them or else risk losing that precious access and the privilege of breathing that heady stench. To ask the questions that matter means risking being cast down. It seems the deal is - it’s a good quote from Blade Runner so I’ll use it again - “If you’re not a cop, you’re little people”.

As for this business of New Labour and soft money, anyone with even an ounce of common sense could write a list of the questions that our media representatives on their six-figure salaries have failed to ask. The loans weren’t illegal so why the cover up? If this wasn’t about peerages in return for loans or influence peddling, why the secrecy?

(See also, Lobbygate. “THE LIAR” screamed the headline of The Mirror about Greg Palast, the journalist who broke the Lobbygate story. That was in more innocent times when the fresh-faced Prime Minister was still in the morning of his premiership and the newspapers were happy to cut him some slack. I think you can safely say that Palast’s story would receive a more sympathetic hearing than it did in 1998 were it to break in 2006. His account of the saga is related in his book, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, which I heartily recommend.)

Given that the party treasurer was ignorant of this second funding system, if the money didn’t go through the normal Labour party channels then into which accounts did they go? Who set up those accounts? Somebody banked the cheques from the benefactors but not in the Labour party account, so where? Somebody wrote the cheques that paid for the election campaign - who was it? The 14 million quid that was raised by loans filtered into the party to pay for the General Election campaign. How was that facilitated?

That New Labour finances are in a parlous state has been public knowledge for years. That’s what you get for hollowing out the membership. If the likes of Gordon Brown and John Precott say they had no knowledge of these loans, where the hell did they think the money was coming from for posters, adverts and softly-lit, televised Blair-Brown bonhomie sessions?

“You have to wonder how well he was doing his work” is a perfectly reasonable thing to say about New Labour treasurer, Jack Dromey, it just depends who says it. From someone like Charles Clarke it just comes across as a petty, vindictive smear - an exercise in blame sharing - to which you’d be forgiven for mentally appending “…while my boss was accepting numerous secret loans from millionaire businessmen”. I also wonder if Clarke has had the courage to say that to Dromey’s face as well as saying behind his back at a supposedly off the record lunch with women journalists.

And if the New Labour party finances are as knackered as everybody says, how is the party going to pay the money back? Or are these loans to miraculously become gifts when the stench blows away? Will Lord Sainsbury and the others eventually say, “Nah, don’t bother paying it back”?

Were backs mutually scratched? All but one donor (Lakshmi Mittal, got the wooden spoon of the Romanian steel industry instead) giving £1m or over were nominated for honours. One of the 12 lending money to New Labour, Ron Aldridge, just happens to be the chairman of Capita, the beneficiary of huge government contracts (Nosemonkey has more).

Reform of the Honours system was nowhere on the Government’s agenda two months ago. Why is it the hot topic now, if not because of the current scandal? When Lord Falconer says he is “bringing forward” legislation, doesn’t he actually mean “making it up on the hoof”?

But I, like Nosemonkey and many others, have as much chance of getting our questions answered as we have seeing the likes of Nick Robinson or Adam Boulton ask them. The Budget may also go some way towards sweeping this all away. Nosemonkey, again in Tim Worstall’s comments:

I’ve had confirmation from someone at the BBC this morning that most of their resources are tied up in preparing for the budget, leaving few people to investigate the other people behind the loans.

And let’s hope this year’s Budget is a more edifying spectacle than last year when there were quite a few New Labour tricks employed, including a leak of the statement’s major points to the Evening Standard.

But it’s much worse than that. As Matthew Parris says (via Jamie Kenny):

Political journalists love it. Lobby corrrespondents don’t want to talk about Crossrail, nuclear-generated electricity, DNA fingerprinting, child poverty, Trident, congestion charging, a new North-South rail line. Lies and misdemeanours are our stock-in-trade. We rejoice when the worthy gives way to the unworthy and a boring but important centrepiece of the parliamentary session is elbowed to the margins by some slimy little half-truth or grubby impropriety.

Nobody’s interested in the bigger picture. The media is feverishly all over the loans for honours scandal in the vague hope they might get a scalp. But it’s the short game they’re playing, like having a Mars Bar for a quick sugar-rush of energy when a big bowl of hearty, sustaining soup would be better.

Yes, allegations of corruption are important and should be investigated but the damage to public confidence done by bent, or seemingly bent, politicians can be repaired over time: New Labour are doing far greater, longer lasting and less easily repaired damage elsewhere.

This government and this Prime Minister are attacking our values and our way of life in a way no terrorist cell ever could: ID cards, the incipient totalitarianism being ushered in by the Legislative and Regulatory Reform bill (a subject deemed too dull by most journalists and their quest for tales of derring-do), imprisonment without trial and the abuse of anti-terrorism laws, to name but a few ways.

Journalists should realise that if you want someone’s scalp you don’t start by nibbling their toes. The pursuit of the public interest, it seems, is as ineffable as God and New Labour funding.

(Also published at Comment is Free.)

Posted on March 22nd, 2006 at 12:08 pm

See also • Peter Mandelson: was Darth Vader busy? • Telegraph: We’ve failed on crime, says Blair • Stick it in your family album		• Permalink • Trackback • Subscribe • Print
• Filed under Comment is Free, Culture, media and sport, Off Yoghurt, Sleaze, UK politics		•