By The Standards Of The System

Peter Hitchens writes:

I said it during the 'cash for honours' investigation and I say it again now. The police should stay out of politics. Prosecuting politicians for what they do in office is filled with dangers. I'd obviously exclude prosecutions dealing with actions taken in the normal course of life. An MP caught shoplifting, or driving like a homicidal maniac, should be prosecuted and, if convicted, punished like a normal subject. The MPs who are accused of false accounting in their expenses should, if convicted, be sent off into obscurity, not sent to prison. I feel the need to stress that they haven't actually been convicted, since I believe so strongly in the presumption of innocence as one of our basic freedoms.

Partly my revulsion at these events is instinctive. The sight of police officers rifling through MPs' affairs gives me the creeps, very deep inside, just as I very strongly disapprove of the presence of armed officers in the Palace of Westminster, as we have sometimes seen at moments of official panic over terrorist outrages. Parliament, not the police, is sovereign. Who are the police serving here? The law, or the state or the media elite? Or the mob, which has currently turned on MPs in a vague, directionless 'to blazes with the lot of them' way - which cannot actually be dealt with by a general election which will elect another almost-identical parliament - after months of increasingly shallow and thoughtless coverage of the expenses affair.

But there are rational grounds for my disquiet, as well as instinctive ones. The first is this simple point. All police investigations and all prosecutions in modern Britain are selective. The volume of wrongdoing means they have to be. The police simply don't bother with many offences, and with many offenders, and I am mildly surprised that a force which is so reluctant to investigate a burglary, and has virtually given up investigating car thefts, is so keen to throw allegedly scarce resources into probing an allegation of fiddled expenses, an offence which is committed (if it has been) whether the money involved is public or private, and which, er, never happens in the police, the media or business. Does it?

So how do the police and the CPS or the DPP decide which cases to pursue and which not to pursue? What public good is promoted by pursuing these particular broken, finished old has-beens through the courts? Where was the bar set, and by whom, that meant three obscure Labour MPs and one even more obscure Tory peer were the only ones who deserved to be prosecuted after months of revelations of greed and fiddling? That presumably means that the prosecuting authorities have decided that all the hundreds of others were acting within the law.
So a great frenzy about the three MPs who are alleged (I haven't seen proof) to have considered sheltering behind the Bill of Rights is a bit of a diversion from the real headline, which ought to be:

Four charged. Everyone else in Parliament let off

This concentrated rage against people who have already tumbled from grace, and are the designated sacrificial victims at the end of a national frenzy about 'sleaze', is a bit reminiscent of the unhinged police pursuit (a squadron of cars coming up the drive, filmed by TV cameras, all lights flashing, how did the TV station know they were coming?) of the former Tory MP Neil Hamilton when some dingbat ludicrously and falsely accused him of rape. And it also reminds me of the nonsensically vindictive (by the standards of the system) prison sentence imposed on Jeffrey Archer and served in unjustifiably harsh conditions (by the standards of the system) for perjury in a civil case (where nobody's liberty was at stake). This was demonstrably out of line with normal practice by the standards of the system in such cases. For example: Archer got four years for lying in a libel case where nobody was at risk of imprisonment. Neil Hamilton's accuser - whose allegations could have sent him to jail for many years - got three.

I'm not excusing his perjury (as I know I will be accused of doing), or saying Archer shouldn't have been imprisoned for it (as I likewise know I'll be accused of doing). He should have been. I'm merely pointing out that the punishment was excessive by the standards of the system which imposed it, that he was held in excessively confined conditions by the standards of the system which inflicted them for someone in his position, and that these things appeared to have been driven by a desire in the criminal justice system to show off to whoever happens to be political top dog at the moment. In that case, it was a triumphalist New Labour. Those who applauded this sort of thing then may yet live to regret it, if the Cameroons ever do end up on top. This tacky, rackety, personally vengeful Continental-style or American-style politics does not belong here, and lowers respect for Parliament.

It isn't actually the false accounting that has infuriated the public, as it happens. As always (and as was famously said by the excellent American journalist Michael Kinsley) the surprise is not about what's illegal. The surprise is about what is legal. That is to say, that things most people would regard as wrong, greedy and despicable are officially permitted, and still remain so despite months of scandal.

And, as I have often pointed out, it is quite legal for the rather rich leader of a major political party to charge the taxpayers - most of whom struggle to pay for one home - many thousands of pounds a year for the interest on the mortgage of his second home. This is a substantial family house in easy reach of London, which in my view he does not actually need for his parliamentary duties. The place is in reasonable commuting distance of London, and if he really can't face the journey (many of his constituents do it daily) what's wrong with a small flat or a room in a B&B? Or if he wants a nice big house up there, why not just pay for it himself?

He concludes:

If the police started investigating every sniff of impropriety among politicians and their friends, there'd be no end to it, ever. Look at Israel, where being Prime Minister almost invariably seems to trigger a prosecution of the incumbent and or his family. Apart from undermining the electorate's sole right to appoint and dismiss MPs, and apart from giving power to publicity-seeking police officers, prosecutors and judges, I cannot see what this achieves.