News from the New Party

This week's scandal

Let's recap.  At the end of October it became clear that the Home Office had grossly underestimated the number of migrant workers in the economy; then a couple of weeks later announced that "five thousand" illegal immigrants had been cleared to work in airport security, and that this information had been suppressed since July (almost certainly for reasons of political expediency).  While all this is going on the Metropolitan Police is convicted on health and safety charges over the death of Jean Charles de Menezes, and in spite of an astonishing and horrific series of blunders by his force, the Commissioner not only refuses to resign but is actually supported by the government.  Then we had the return of the Northern Rock fiasco last week, followed immediately by the catastrophic loss of the entire corpus of personal and financial data of every household in the country with children.  Now this week the news that for years the Labour Party has been accepting large donations from a businessman through intermediaries, which is certainly against the spirit and may yet prove to be against the letter of the law.

In the light of all this, we might be forgiven for concluding that the current government is simultaneously ignorant, incompetent and corrupt.  If the Prime Minister and his senior colleagues are not shell-shocked by the recent turn of events then they certainly ought to be.  Gordon Brown's regime increasingly resembles that of John Major, another prime minister who inherited his position from a rather more formidable and substantial predecessor.  Lord Lamont effectively condemned the Major government with the description "in office, but not in power".  With respect to the current administration we might more accurately observe that they are in office, but out of control.  If ministers are unaware of what is going on in their departments, if the prime minister is really unaware of the revenue raising techniques of senior party officials, we should ask ourselves to what extent we have a democratically accountable, competent government at all.

A government which has got away with far too much for far too long is now languishing in the polls.  This at least is fitting.  It is however, small compensation for the fatally compromised integrity of public service in this country.  Higher standards in public life must be demanded and expected: incompetent and irresponsible officials should be sacked if they will not resign; criminally corrupt politicians, donors and party hacks should be charged, tried and if convicted, jailed.  It is time to eradicate the culture of scandal once and for all.