News from the New Party

Spivocracy in action

The Labour Party's increasingly labyrinthine funding scandal has taken a further turn for the worse now that it has embroiled the Labour leader at Holyrood, Wendy Alexander.  Ms Alexander accepted a donation of £950 from a Jersey-based businessman (who was ineligible as a donor) as part of her leadership campaign, and has been under fierce pressure to resign.  However, the Times has reported that she has been under still fiercer pressure to hang on from her brother, Cabinet minister and key Brown-loyalist Douglas Alexander.  The reason for this "support" is that a resignation by Wendy Alexander would fatally weaken the position of Labour's Deputy Leader Harriet Harman.

This is an unusual turn of events for a scapegoat.  It used to be the case that sacrificial victims were led to the slaughter in order to propitiate an angry god - in this case the god of public opinion.  However, these days the situation is so bad that Labour cannot afford to risk even this.  Gordon Brown's scapegoat has to be kept alive artificially to be endlessly tortured, lest public demand for the shedding of ministerial blood become insatiable.

There is an argument (made by Libby Purves, among others) that this is all a storm in a teacup and nobody really cares about financial corruption in government.  Purves, in particular, invokes "the Mussolini principle": as long as the trains run on time, why should the rest of us be bothered?  Matthew Parris, on the other hand, makes an ostensibly similar but actually opposite point:

Were I a senior Labour politician this weekend, much of the shame I'd feel would be because people in my party had behaved like crooks; but a little, secret bit of it would be because they've proved such incompetent crooks. We're not talking the Old Bailey here; not even Crown Court. We're talking Woking Magistrates' Court on a wet winter Tuesday; a shuffling line of dysfunctional miscreants in soiled shell-suits, struggling to read the oath, let alone to understand the charges against them.

We have a party leader incapable even of colluding with his own deputy. We have a Prime Minister so pathetically anxious to elbow blame on to his colleagues that in the first five minutes of the story breaking he volunteers - volunteers - the opinion that what has happened is "unlawful", thus permanently settling the argument about whether it should be a matter for the police.

We see a chief fundraiser prominent in the Labour Friends of Israel who has made an apparently personal donation to the most pro-Palestinian of all the candidates for the deputy leadership. Unveiled too is a Mr Big so not big that he struggles to find halfway credible launderers for his secret donations. Hissed from the stage, as much in pity as anger, is a Labour general secretary who claims to have forgotten - or never understood - the simplest rules in the new legislation it is his job to implement.

Where do they find these people? What possessed Gordon Brown to declare, before he had the least reason to know it to be true, that there was one individual alone, Labour's general secretary, who knew about the fake donors just as the media began unearthing all the others, and, as I write, are still unearthing? Didn't that great strategist, that colossus of a political intellect, pause for a moment to wonder whether there might be more to come out?

In what stunted imagination but Mr Brown's could the plan then be hatched to make Harriet Harman the scapegoat for receiving, on Mr Brown's own lieutenant's advice, a sum representing less than 1 per cent of the total monies paid by David Abrahams? To what bully's mind but Mr Brown's could it fail to occur that if he kicked her in the stomach she might defend herself?

The discovery that politicians are involved in petty and not-so-petty dishonesty is, sadly, hardly a great surprise these days, but things will never improve if we seek to overlook it. Parris is right about this, however: if anything the present fiasco is yet more sordid than the average on account of its sheer incompetence.  At one moment ministers are scurrying around trying to cover each other backs, while others are equally busy stabbing each other in the back.  We have a government which is incapable of deciding whether it would rather hang together or hang separately.  And we've got two and a half more years of it.

Roll on 2010.