Does Labour really have the nerve to take tough action on expenses?

By Jessica Asato / @Jessica_Asato

I’ve just finished listening to Harriet Harman on the Today Programme. I’m left none the wiser about what Labour’s leadership deems to be unacceptable behaviour in relation to expense claims, and about what action Labour MPs should face.

I still can’t see why all of this couldn’t have been sorted out in July, or through an extended summer parliament as Nick Clegg proposed. It is understandable that MPs are upset when their families are attacked in the street and when they are asked to repay expenses which were claimed in good faith. But life isn’t fair a lot of the time for ordinary people, particularly at the moment with the recession.

I’m sure that many constituents who face repayments of their child tax credits because of administrative errors, also rail against a system which changes the rules retrospectively. It happens, and they have to deal with it. So do our MPs.

As someone who is not ‘anti-politics’, it is clear that the longer this affair stays on the front pages the more that the whole body politic suffers. But, there are some serious questions which remain unanswered:

1 – What has happened to Labour’s National Executive Committee ‘star chamber’. The one which made a scapegoat of Ian Gibson, forcing a by-election which Labour then lost? Why hasn’t Jacqui Smith appeared in front of it? Or Geoff Hoon?

2 – It’s broadly accepted that there is a scale of abuse of the expenses system, from claiming for chocolate bars at one end, to making a profit on house sales at the other. Why isn’t Sir Thomas Legg demanding repayments from those MPs who are widely viewed to have been at the more serious end of abuse?

3 – What will the sanction be from the Labour Party’s hierarchy if MPs refuse to pay back monies Sir Thomas deems necessary? Will they be forced to seek reselection and, if so, will it be full selection which others will be allowed to participate in, rather than just a vote of confidence from their Constituency Labour Parties?

This has been a mess right from the start. Those of us outside Parliament were quicker off the mark to try and undo some of the damage than those inside. Progress ran a campaign to get Labour’s Prospective Parliamentary Candidates to sign up to an ethics pledge. The Party’s pledges followed weeks later when the impact was totally lost. There was also a strong grassroots petition to ask the NEC to allow Constituency Parties to make a judgment on whether their sitting MP should stay or go. In my view this would have still been the right course of action. If the NEC had been brave enough to take this advice we would have had a definitive judgment by now from local party members. They are the people after all who will have to work damned hard to re-elect their MPs.

The argument from those on the NEC was that it would have been unfair for CLPs to act as judge and jury without the full knowledge of the expenses claims of their MP. But it appears that the NEC itself acted as judge and jury on a handful of MPs when others with equally poor claims records have not been given the same treatment. Moreover, Sir Thomas now seems to be acting arbitrarily – penalising MPs who paid their cleaners a proper wage and therefore submitted higher cleaning bills, instead of really investigating how much money some MPs made out of flipping their homes.

Cameron acted decisively in identifying the worst offenders in the Tory party and forcing them out. The Totnes selection was a triumph in buying off the electorate and cleansing the memory of Sir Anthony Steen’s ridiculousness. Why didn’t Labour show the same boldness? We should have introduced primaries and let Labour fight the next election with candidates the public had some faith in.

Imagine too if instead of Sir Christopher Kelly, Gordon Brown had been bold and set up a Citizens’ Convention, as Progress has been arguing for? It could still have been led by a grand figure, or panel of constitutional experts, but it would have been informed by the men and women on the Clapham omnibus. In one fell swoop we’d have had the public determining a new system of parliamentary expenses (and they would come out with a reasonably fair system, if an experiment by Demos is anything to go by).

This isn’t just an expenses crisis, it’s a constitutional crisis, and the damage won’t be undone even after Legg and Kelly have reached the end of their processes. There’s still time for Brown to accept legislation for a Citizens’ Convention to determine other constitutional change, such as reducing the powers of the executive and reform of the House of Lords. But time is really running out now to take some bold measures. Does anyone have the nerve?