Political freebies matter immensely

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It’s an odd feeling when your private obsessions go mainstream. In June, I published a book about British corruption. Today, a favoured topic of the national political conversation is the free clothes, Arsenal and Taylor Swift concert tickets given to Keir Starmer, his wife, and other senior Labour figures. It’s an international issue too. New York’s mayor Eric Adams is one of several Americans indicted for allegedly accepting presents from foreign states, in his case fancy travel. And Singapore is jailing a minister for taking gifts including (of course) tickets to English football matches.

You might dismiss all this as tittle-tattle, a distraction in a time of climate change, war and Donald Trump. But political freebies matter immensely. Nothing destroys trust in politics like the sight of grasping politicians on the make. And once trust goes, voters won’t support government action on, say, climate. The usual political beneficiaries are shysters posing as swamp-drainers. So we have to drain the swamp first.

A rare mainstream politician who grasped this was the shortlived Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi. He noticed that voters cared more about MPs’ salaries and limousines than about big issues. Small perks registered precisely because they were life-sized and intelligible to every Italian.

Shrewder public figures don’t make those mistakes. Pope Francis, raised in Argentina’s populist Peronist tradition, made sure to drive a used 1984 Renault 4. Trump ostentatiously didn’t take his presidential salary. He was positioning himself as in touch with ordinary voters. It worked because most politicians are, personally, out of touch. That’s how Starmer could fall into the freebie trap. His world is high-end London, where everyone wears fancy clothes. Politicians inhabit that world’s nether reaches, absorbing rich people’s political concerns, but feeling poor by comparison. Lord Alli, the Labour peer who showered the Starmers with stuff, is a businessman worth an estimated £200mn. Starmer earns a mere £167,000. MPs get £91,346 — not much, in their London.

But to almost all Britons outside London, these are fortunes. The average salary in most British regions is a bit over £30,000. The average single pensioner lives on £267 a week. It’s not simply that ordinary Britons can’t afford to live in London. Lots can’t afford to eat dinner there. They feel like unwanted paupers in their nation’s capital. Many of them assume that politicians went into politics for the money. Starmer’s freebies confirm their prejudices. He can’t now easily turn around and preach shared sacrifice.

I’m not saying politicians should take vows of poverty. But they should sign up for mere upper-middle-class existences, including after they leave office. Trust is decimated by the self-enrichment of ex-leaders such as Tony Blair, David Cameron and Renzi himself, an adviser to Saudi Arabia.

Britain needs what it has never had: serious rules curtailing money in politics. Labour’s election manifesto promised to strengthen “rules around donations to political parties”, and to create an “independent Ethics and Integrity Commission . . . to ensure probity in government”. That’s essential. If voters decide that Labour is as dirty as the Tories, then Nigel Farage’s Reform party has a bright future. As Starmer says: “The fight for trust is the battle that defines our political era.”

Stricter rules will catch erring politicians. How to punish them? I’m wary of prosecutions, especially in Britain, where austerity has slashed law enforcement. The Tories defunded the police before it was cool, most English and Welsh courts closed in the 2010s, and in 2022/2023, only 5.7 per cent of the record numbers of crimes reported to police led to a charge or summons, let alone a conviction. Then there’s the fear that prosecutions might be used to sideline political opponents. Trump damaged trust in US justice by making exactly that claim.

Instead, the UK could institute a “dishonourable discharge” for miscreant politicians. It would be like striking off a doctor or lawyer. The guilty couldn’t work in politics again, couldn’t get into the Lords, and their names would be sullied for life.

Ideally, people inside the system will eventually internalise the new rules. Then they won’t dream of accepting free suits again. I glimpsed a cleaner system when a former Swedish cabinet minister told me about the time a businessman offered to take him to see England-Sweden at a football World Cup. The minister longed to go, but he knew Swedish voters would be outraged. He didn’t have to check the rules; he said no.

The UK needs to get there, fast.

Email Simon at [email protected]

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