“I was completely unsurprised by the expenses scandal”: The Tony Wright interview

Tony Wright is the Labour MP for Cannock Chase and is currently heading up the Commission on Parliamentary Reform. He met Alex Smith in his office at Portcullis House on Wednesday, 15th July, 2009.

You’re heading up the commission for Parliamentary reform. Why do you think you’re the right person to spearhead that?
It’s not up to me to think whether I’m the right person. I wrote to the Prime Minister a few weeks ago, suggesting what we might do to catch the tide of political reform that seemed to be running, and he asked if I would chair this parliamentary reform group, which I’ve agreed to do.

Tell me a bit about the commission. How does it work, who sits on it, what’s the process?
It’s in the form of a select committee, but it’s for a limited duration – we’re to report by the end of this parliamentary session. We’ve got broad areas of work and all the parties have had balance to see who will sit on it and now the committee is ready to go. But we’ll have to work at high speed to produce a report.

Is it likely now that the work won’t start until after the recess?
Well we have to get on with it so we’re planning to do some work during the recess and we are planning to hold meetings and a seminar in September. A lot of these issues have been well trawled, so it’s a question of bringing them together in a form in which the House can make a decision on them.

This is inevitably a result of this year’s expenses scandal. What was your personal reaction to what you read in the newspapers about that?
I was completely unsurprised. I gave evidence to the Committee on Standards in Public Life seven years ago and said that the next scandal would be to do with MPs’ expenses and that we ought to do something about it. But of course nothing was done about it. Everyone has known that here was a system that was going to cause us trouble at some point, so it’s entirely our own fault. I was surprised about the scale and the ingenuity of some of the claims. I thought the main issue would turn out to be the fact that the taxpayer was paying the interest on mortgages, enabling MPs to make capital gains on housing. But I didn’t think the issue was going to be about moats or the size of televisions and so on.

Because you weren’t aware of those abuses..?
I wasn’t aware of moats! As I say, I was only surprised by the ingenuity in which people were using this system.

If you knew this was going to be the next big scandal, why didn’t you come out more vociferously and say that this is wrong, that abuses are occurring in Parliament?
I could point you to quite a few speeches I made in Parliament. In fact it was one of the first things I ever said when I came into Parliament in 1992, when they were discussing the mileage allowance on cars, because at that time you got more money if you had a bigger engine, which I thought was complete nonsense. I said in a speech that I’d been told to buy a certain kind of car, one with a large engine so that I’d get a higher allowance, but also a diesel model that would simultaneously get a higher mileage so I could make a lot of money out of it. A very senior Labour MP came up to me afterwards and said that I would never be forgiven for speaking out on that – a senior Labour MP who is still a senior Labour MP and who has had some involvement in the expenses scandal.

So what sort of claims are reasonable?
Well that’s what the Kelly Committee is dealing with and I gave evidence to them last week and they’ll be reporting later in the year. The Committee that I’m working on is looking at how we reform how this place works in the general sense – it’s not to do with clearing up expenses. Essentially the expenses issue has now been resolved. Once you have full transparency, once you publish everything on a quarterly basis and everyone can see what MPs are claiming for, you’ve effectively stopped the abuses. All you have to do then is to make sure the system is properly regulated, hence the proposals for an independent body. Then you have to have rules that seem to be fair, which is what the Kelly committee is looking at. Most people understand that Members of Parliament need certain things to do the job. They need to be able to employ staff; they need somewhere to live when they are in London for several nights a week; and they need to be able to travel regularly between the constituency and London. It’s pretty obvious what MPs need, but from that fairly straightforward understanding, this bloated system has developed and we now need to go back to the core of it. If you went back 100 years, MPs were not even paid, at all. Obviously in terms of the labour movement and the ability of people of modest means to get into parliament, it’s crucial that we have paid members and obviously it is important that other basic allowances are met. But from that core need, I’m afraid the system has been grossly extended and abused over the years.

So moving on to the type of parliamentary reforms that your commission is looking at, I’m interested to know where you stand personally and more importantly where the commission stands currently on specific issues such as fixed terms, reform of the House of Lords, a written constitution.
Some of these things are not in our terms of reference, but I can tell you what I think about them personally. I’ve always been in favour of fixed term Parliaments and I’ve introduced bills on that over the years. My view on the House of Lords has also been consistent: I’ve always favoured a mixed House made up by elections and appointments so you can have the benefits of legitimacy through election but you also capture the benefits of having non-party people to provide balance. The Public Administration Committee that I chair has produced what I think is still the best report on House of Lords reform. We got the government at one point to basically adopt it, but then the house didn’t go with it.

In terms of our Committee that’s been set up now, it’s designed to address key deficiencies with the system. One of those is the fact that the House of Commons, for the last 100 years or so, has not been able to control its own business, which has instead been essentially controlled by the government of the day. There’s been consistent demand to change that, so we’re trying to formulate a proposal that will enable the Commons to control more of what it does and that will affect fundamentally the balance between the executive and the legislature. So that’s the biggest thing on our agenda because it would have implications for many, many things that occur in Parliament. A second area is the way in which people are chosen to sit on select committees and chair select committees, which has always been felt to be unsatisfactory. Committee members are essentially approved, if not chosen, by the same people who are supposed to be scrutinising them – that is completely unacceptable. So we are going to explore ways in which the House of Commons can elect members and chairs of select committees itself. The third area is to do with how we can enable the public to connect more directly with this place. That means talking about some of the things that have been talked about in Scotland and Wales in terms of petitions, committees and how people can have their voice taken up here more directly.

Speaking about that lack of a connection between the public and politics, politicians and our institutions, how will the work of your commission be informed by a consultation or convention with the citizenship?
It won’t – not in any direct way – because we just don’t have the time to do that. Normally a Select Committee holds hearings over an extended period of time. We’re not going to hold any hearings because it’s quite impossible if we’re to report by November. The public can send us their ideas – and we’re going to ask them to – but many of the arguments about these issues have been studied and written about by people like me for as long as I can remember, so there’s a huge body of evidence out there already. The issues are well known, now we have to try and do something about them.

There’s a lot of support currently for a system of Proportional Representation. As you perceive it what are the advantages and disadvantages of PR over the First Past the Post system?
It depends on the specific system, but broadly the advantages are that a proportional system potentially gives a more direct choice to voters. The First Past the Post system is a quick and dirty way of choosing governments. It depends on what you want form the electoral system: if you want a pretty crude way of changing one government for another and aren’t too worried about the niceties of proportionality, then First Past the Post does the trick.

And you often get a strong government.
Well, it’s said you get a strong government, though I’m not so sure. You get a single party government, usually – which may not be the same things as a strong government – but you do get a government that’s directly accountable to the electorate, a government where everybody can see who is responsible for things, and you can replace one government with another. But the problem is that it disenfranchises most of the electorate, because the only elections that really matter are those in the marginal seats. That has a depressing effect on citizenship more generally. I suspect the time is coming where people probably want their vote to do something other than a straight choice between alternative governments, and they want to be able to choose between people as well. So I think there is a head of steam building up. But it’s no good saying you want a different electoral system; you’ve got to know what you want the system to do.

And it’s not a panacea; PR has problems of its own.
Yes, but every electoral system has upsides and downsides. Like most things in life, they’re all compromises: each brings some good things and some bad things. You have to decide, on balance, which of the systems is right. I suspect the Labour party, certainly the other side of a general election, will adopt the Alternative Vote. But the Alternative Vote is not a proportional system: it simply enables people in individual seats to obtain the majority of the votes through by the expression of preferences. But in fact it’s less proportionate.

I met with Martin Bell last week and he had a sense that the public disconnect with politics and politicians isn’t merely the result of expenses, but that the expenses scandal and people’s reaction was a symptom of the public disconnect. He said that actually the anger and lack of accountability stems more deeply from the war in Iraq, the deregulation of the markets under Thatcher and the continuation of that under this government, and all of those things compounding and coming together now to bring a backlash against a politics that broadly is not functioning for the good of the people. What can politics and politicians do to try and repair that bond?
Yes, there was an anti-politics mood out there before the expenses thing happened. What the expenses have done is to justify that anger, and enabled people to turn their back on politics in a big way. But what you have to do is to make politics look as though it’s an activity that is worth pursuing – that’s pretty basic but it’s important. I agree with some of what Martin Bell has said to you, but it’s even more complicated than that, I’m afraid. A lot of the disconnection of people from politics has been seen in the collapse of parties and their old ideological support, reflected in the drop of electoral turnout. These are things that are occurring and being discussed, debated and agonised over in almost every similar society in the world. That suggests there are bigger forces at work that made politics a complicated antiquity. For instance, we haven’t yet found a place for where politics fits in wider contemporary cultures. That’s because politics is complicated, it’s difficult, it’s frustrating, it’s requires compromise and often politicians are choosing the least-worst options and so it’s guaranteed to disappoint vast numbers of people all the time. A great deal of contemporary culture is about getting what you want, but politics on the whole is not about getting what you want – in fact it’s often about getting what other people want. So there’s something about politics that’s a challenge in a consumerist culture, which likes instant gratification through shopping and celebrity and all that. So if it’s not sustained by old ideological allegiances or class supports or some of the old building blocks, then you can see why people think politics is not an activity they want to get close to.

But it should at least be involving.
Yeah, but those are the reasons we have this problem with political disconnection. Some of these wider issues go beyond conversations that we have in this country, and go beyond thinking that an elected House of Lords and everything else would fix things. These are good things, and it’s worth trying to improve your political system in every way that you can, but if you think about the range of constitutional reforms that we’ve introduced since 1997 – really big stuff – and you ask if that’s rejuvenated the democratic system, then no, it hasn’t – in some ways we are in a worse position than we were in 1997. But I caution people who think that the next institutional change will make the big difference. It will take more than that: we’ve got to find a way of doing politics that persuades people that it’s important, that some sort of critical citizenship is worth developing. That means being honest about what politics is and what it isn’t.

You mention that this is a problem for politics and political systems around the world. There are a lot of discussions within the Labour party at the moment of how to reengage and reconnect with the grassroots of the party, and a lot of talk about how Obama did that through a focus on caucusing and primaries and how that inspired a whole movement. Do you think open primaries are a logical solution to some of these problems for the Labour party?
I think we should explore open primaries. We would have to think about how to run them, because there are a lot of different models – even within the American system – and you’ve got to find one that fits our system. But certainly getting the broad constituency of party voters to vote for candidates, if we can develop that and get people to be involved – which is the big issue – would certainly be worth exploring. But it’s easier when there’s a huge political and cultural tide running with you, as there was with Obama.

But that didn’t develop by accident; Obama and his people had to create it.
Well, I think both actually. After the Bush years there was a huge political opening for something different that would draw a line under that era. Had Hillary Clinton’s campaign been successful, we’d still be talking about how she mobilised a citizen’s movement against the old regime. Of course, Obama took it to a different level.

And he used her as an example of where things had gone wrong in the past.
Yeah, absolutely, but I think the moment was right, the generation was right, and then obviously the techniques were right. But the idea that if only we transplant that to here than we will be alright is far too simplistic. The terrible truth will be, I’m afraid, that eventually the Obama honeymoon will be over and eventually he will be attacked for not having delivered on all those promises, because that’s the nature of things. And I think we just have to have a political understanding that says that – despite all the constraints, despite all the inevitable disillusionments, despite the fact that problems are intractable – just putting an Obama in the White House doesn’t mean that you’ve solved the Middle East problem. You want it to mean that, but it doesn’t mean that! But neither should we give up on politics, which is a reaction that is too prevalent. You stick with it even though it’s difficult. This is the thing about campaigning in poetry and governing in prose – Obama is now in the position where he has to govern in prose.

So if the purpose of your commission is to investigate the circumstances in which and the methods by which we can encourage that reconnection that we’ve been speaking about – but also working within the limitations and the expectations of what can realistically be achieved – what can tangibly be gained and what might be in place by the end of, say, the next parliament?
Well, we want it done by the end of this parliament, because I am retiring at the election and I would like to do something to leave this place different. I think we need to do many things to our political life, but one of them is we’ve got to make Parliament, which is out central representative institution, a rather more vital and dynamic place than it is. We shall never make it like the American Congress because that operates in a quite different constitutional arrangement. But certainly the American Congress isn’t quite as subservient to the executive as is the case here. Part of a new politics is making a parliament that’s more dynamic than we have now, and one that can recover its self-confidence.

Do we have to frame that idea and those roles in something like a written constitution?
I think that would be the end of a process that we’ve not even started yet. There’s so much about our system that we don’t know. When people talk about a written constitution here, it’s not clear whether they mean we should codify what we’ve got now or whether we should sit down and start over afresh. And of course you don’t start over afresh unless something pretty dramatic happens to you, as happened in the Unites States and elsewhere. So that is a huge issue. But it’s only after we’ve decided about the House of Lords and the electoral system and the status of local government or any of these things that we can begin to put all this together. Apart from what we’re doing in Parliament, what I’ve proposed recently – and I’ve proposed this to the Prime Minister although he hasn’t adopted it – is that we should try to catch the moment in all this discussion about the political system by setting up what I call a Democracy Commission, which would sit for about ten years and maybe even turn out to be permanent. It would do the sort of things you speak about – go out, start doing public hearings and try then to come forward with a worked out set of propositions, as well as pros and cons on each. But at the moment we’ve got no body in this country that does this kind of work and that engages in a continuing conversation with the public about it. So every time an issue blows up, it’s in the headlines for five minutes, everyone comes forward with their proposals and then it all dies away again. So I’m very keen that we set up some sort of body that can keep the conversation going and become a source of genuine expertise, one that doesn’t sit in an ivory tower but that actually does work with the public as well. I’m very keen that we should do that but I can’t persuade anybody else.

Finally, you said that you’ve been speaking about these things since you first came to the house in 1992 and now you’re retiring at a time when the conversation is gaining momentum and will perhaps come to a head. Is there nothing that could re-inspire you and make you think again about being involved?
I’m only standing down because I’m unwell and have been for some time and will be in the future. So I decided a year or so ago that I would stand down. I wasn’t even sure I could continue through this Parliament, but that’s an entirely personal thing. Having said that, it does feel like a bit of a retiring moment, but that’s independent of why I’m leaving this place.