When it comes to expenses, members of the Scottish Parliament are basking in a virtuous glow. Maybe that’s because, unlike their Westminster counterparts, they have to disclose theirs online.
MSPs have been walking taller in the past few weeks as Westminster has sunk deeper into the mire of expenses scandals. Holyrood has not been caught in the Telegraph net because MSPs’ expenses are already open to view.
Suddenly the Scots appear paragons of virtue. This is a novel experience for a Parliament that has had its share of scandals over the past ten years, such as the cost of the Holyrood building itself. It has had its financial scandals too, but they have tended to be of a bonsai nature compared with the show-stoppers in Westminster.
The leader of the Scottish Conservatives, David McLetchie, resigned in 2005 over his excessive use of taxis. The Labour leader, Wendy Alexander, resigned last year over campaign funding irregularities amounting to £950. Her predecessor as Labour leader, Henry McLeish, resigned from the office of first minister in 2001, after it emerged that he had been subletting his constituency offices in contravention of the rules in Westminster.
No, that isn’t a mistake. McLeish’s offence related to his days as an MP in Westminster, before he entered the Scottish Parliament, when he came to an arrangement with the Fees Office over letting out his offices. He said it was a ‘muddle, not a fiddle’ and it was — but he had to resign anyway.
It’s a measure of the rigour of the rules on expenses in the Scottish Parliament that MSPs can lose their jobs for transgressions in other Parliaments. Many MSPs have said, ruefully, that the Holyrood regime is too strict, too rule-bound, too unforgiving. They are not saying that now. Indeed they are congratulating themselves on their foresight. If only the Commons had adopted the Holyrood expenses regime, the recent scandal might never have happened.
It’s simple. All you need to do is ensure that all expenses are declared openly and posted on the Parliament’s website.
Go and have a look. MSPs don’t claim for moat cleaning, duck houses, dry rot, trouser presses, hob nobs, dog food, toilet seats or fake Tudor beams. This is because it would be front page news the moment they posted it on the expenses website. With transparency, there is no story, just a lot of boring numbers — except when something odd arises, such as when 15 MSPs apparently claimed for poppy wreaths for Remembrance Day, money they will now pay back.
The one area on which MSPs might have been vulnerable, the use of parliamentary expenses to finance the purchase of second homes, was also tightened up just in time. From 2011, MSPs will have to rent or use hotels when attending Parliament. This reform was the result again of newspaper revelations about certain MSPs making large capital gains on selling houses bought with public money in the Edinburgh property market. Some of them are still sitting on substantial profits — though not as big as before. Last week, one MSP came up to me and asked when I was going to report that he had lost £100,000 on his second home now that the Edinburgh property market had collapsed.
It was inevitable that the Holyrood system would eventually be applied in Westminster because democracy is porous. Heather Brooke, the freedom of information campaigner who started the campaign to disclose MPs’ expenses, was inspired to do so by her discovery that expenses in the Scottish Parliament were open to view.
Why did MPs not see this coming? Why didn’t they realise that full disclosure was inevitable? Myopia, I am afraid, and a degree of arrogance. MPs didn’t think they had anything to learn from this upstart Parliament that many thought of as not a proper legislature but a jumped-up council.
I suspect also that MPs, moving in wealthier circles in London and exposed to City salaries, lost their sense of values. In Holyrood, they’re still grateful for their £58,000-a-year salaries because they know that relatively few people in Scotland earn more than that. MPs came to regard their expenses as de facto salaries — a fatal error that will cost many of them their jobs.
Westminster might now learn from Holyrood in other ways — fixed-term Parliaments for example. First ministers cannot set the date of an election to the best advantage of their own parties, although governments can still be forced out during the four-year terms.
Scottish committees have greater say in pre-legislative scrutiny and promoting public petitions. And, of course, Holyrood is elected on proportional representation, which means parties have to co-operate to rule and there are fewer underemployed backbenchers in safe seats. Eventually, I believe, these other reforms will percolate to Westminster.
But first the boil of corruption must be lanced by complete transparency. MSPs are living proof that open declaration of expenses insulates politicians from scandal by ensuring that they don’t indulge in behaviour that their constituents would find unacceptable. It saves them from themselves.
Iain Macwhirter is political commentator on the Sunday Herald
