Issue: 20 November 2004	PAGE 2 of 4 next >>

Even more disgraceful are the shameful perks, from the pay-offs when MPs lose their seats to pensions. Not long ago the very idea that MPs should have pensions would have seemed unthinkable, but our rulers know how to look after themselves better than they know anything else. And they are in the unique position where they can guarantee the value of their pensions: while ordinary people’s are collapsing in value, thanks not least to the government’s policies, politicians can take as much money as they like from honest taxpayers.

What makes it worse is the political background to the hunting ban. This legislation is ostensibly on a free vote, and a ban as such has never been official Labour party policy (which is why Roy Jenkins, the last honourable man of the liberal Left, thought the use of the Parliament Act to force it through would be a constitutional outrage). But in reality a hunting ban has become a shibboleth for Labour, to the point where an MP like the admirable Kate Hoey can be threatened with deselection if she steps out of line. This is the one and only issue that many Labour Members still care about.

They are a miserable lot nowadays, those Labour MPs, full of self-hatred and self-contempt, and with good reason. Two political commentators explain why this is so. Well before the 1997 election, Alan Watkins said that although Labour had gone along with Blair in their hearts most Labour MPs hated what he was doing to their party. And Robert Harris wrote on the tenth anniversary of Blair’s assumption of the Labour leadership that if he had a political centre of gravity, it was ‘not on the Left at all, but located somewhere deep within the Conservative party. Right-wing in his instincts even before he became party leader, Blair has clearly moved further to the Right since entering Downing Street.... On crime, education and health, he has shamelessly filched the rhetoric — and in some cases even the policies — of his Tory opponents.’

That is perfectly true. Over the past seven years, Labour MPs have over and again voted for measures they detested (cutting benefits for single mothers was a nice one) and supported ministers they despised. Blair first appointed a home secretary reminiscent of the Tsarist minister of the interior of whom it was said that the only thing further to the Right of him was the wall, and then achieved a feat almost contrary to the laws of physics by finding in David Blunkett a home secretary even more obscurantist than Jack Straw. Although most Labour MPs voted for foundation hospitals and top-up fees, there is not an honest majority in the parliamentary Labour party for either.

Above all, Blair has led Labour into an unnecessary, illegal and immoral war unwanted by most British people — or in their hearts by most Labour MPs. I would surmise that most Cabinet ministers were privately opposed, but decided, as Lloyd George would have said, to perish with their drawn salaries in their hands. To his credit, Robin Cook resigned, and, to theirs, 139 Labour MPs voted against the war, but a majority of the party held their noses and voted for it.

Then again, even if they hate what he has done to their party and the wars he wages, Blair did get more than 400 Labour MPs aboard the Commons gravy train. If the estimate published by the Lancet is anything like the truth, then up to 100,000 Iraqis may have been killed in the past 18 months (far more than died in the final 18 months of Saddam Hussein’s regime), but when an MP is pocketing more than £100,000 in expenses, that’s £1 for every dead Iraqi, which helps ease the pain.

So does the Hunting Bill. The ban has patently become a form of transference activity for Labour. Several commentators, notably in the Guardian, and even one or two Labour MPs, have asked why on earth Parliament has wasted so much time on this question when there are many more important matters to tackle, but here is the answer. ‘Si vendicano gli uomini delle leggiere offese; delli gravi non possono’: hunting is a fine example of Machiavelli’s saying that men take revenge for small offences, unable to avenge the larger ones.