Blairusconi's Britain - just a little Italy?

Published on Sunday 16 July 2006 00:37

JON Snow on Channel Four News was aghast. "You mean selling peerages is part of the system?" he demanded. "Then we're no better than Italy." He seemed to have a point. The Prime Minister's personal envoy and tennis partner, Lord Levy, had just been arrested on suspicion of trading honours for party donations; two ministers, Lord Sainsbury and Ian McCartney, were being questioned by police; detectives are pursuing a criminal investigation which seems to lead to the very door of Downing Street.

No wonder comparisons are being made between the administrations of Tony Blair and his bandana-wearing friend, Silvio Berlusconi. There are other ingredients which add to the whiff of Italian-style corruption. John Prescott's visit to the Texan ranch of an American businessman who wants to turn the Dome into a casino sounds a little too cosy for comfort; Tessa Jowell may have distanced herself from her husband because of his Berlusconi links, but is still tainted with her own promotion of gambling in Britain; the courting of rich donors like Bernie Ecclestone, and the Blair family's holidays in various European palazzi, suggest a fatal blurring of the barriers between money and politics; a Prime Minister seriously concerned about public morality should perhaps not have promoted Peter Mandelson as an EU Commissioner and retained him as an adviser following his track record of scandal.

We should not, of course, exaggerate. Comparisons with Italy, where corruption is virtually endemic in the political system, are far-fetched. It would, I imagine, be inconceivable to have a Prime Minister controlling all the major TV stations, to say nothing of a Premier Division football club, while at the same time facing corruption charges and attempting to discipline the judges who are to try him. We have not, so far, had a Prime Minister (Bettino Craxi) sentenced to 26 years in prison for bribery and corruption; another (Berlusconi) sentenced to 33 months for bribes to tax inspectors, then charged with false accounting, channelling money abroad through offshore accounts, and persuading parliament to pass a bill granting himself immunity from prosecution.

Equally, we are, as a country, free of the endemic corruption which infects public life in Italy at almost every level. An Italian friend told me recently that there are, at any one time, more than 20,000 cases of fraud, graft, bribery or minor corruption proceeding through the Italian courts. Such is the stranglehold of invasive legislation that companies are almost driven to buying their way through the dead weight of bureaucracy if they want to get anything done. The Parmalat case in 2004 revealed a level of fraud, embezzlement and false accounting of such astronomical proportions - false assets of up to $5bn created over a 15-year period to offset massive debts, the theft of more than $600m by the company boss - that even Italy was shocked. There are more routine cases which we hardly hear about - hundreds of doctors bribed by pharmaceutical companies to prescribe their products, personal and company tax fraud on a massive scale, and, of course, the match-fixing scandal which has rocked Italian football.

Compared with all of this what is happening in Britain seems pretty tame. We should remember too that Levy - or Lord Cashpoint as he is now cruelly dubbed - has not formally been charged with any crime. He seems, on the face of it, to have exploited a loophole in an Act passed six years ago which requires political donations, but not loans, over 5,000 to be declared. He may, or may not, have suggested that those who gave money to the Labour Party might qualify for an honour, or even a peerage. Unless there is damning evidence on paper or an e-mail, it may be hard to prove. He himself insists that he is innocent. We will have to wait for the 100 or so police who are said to have been assigned to the investigation, to plod through the evidence.

Corruption, pure and simple, may never be proved. Already, however, the Levy affair has added to something which is almost as serious - the steady undermining of public confidence in the integrity of government. When Blair came to power in 1997, he promised an end to the sleaze which had collected around the Tory government, with its cash-for-questions scandals, its Neil Hamilton, Jonathan Aitken and David Mellor affairs. The Blair regime, he promised, would clean up politics and put an end to the idea that politicians simply had their noses in the trough. That promise has not been fulfilled. A credibility gap has opened up between the Blair, who once described himself as "a pretty straight kind of guy", and the image of a man who is frankly contemptuous of the normal constraints of public life in Britain.

The delivery of the Blair Project, whatever shape that takes, has come to be seen as more important than maintaining trust in the structures and traditions which are meant to curb the excessive exercise of power. What emerged from the Hutton and Butler inquiries into the war in Iraq was a picture of centralised decision-making which rode roughshod over all opposition, whether from civil servants, intelligence agencies, Parliament or Cabinet. Meetings were left un-minuted, experts were either ignored or suborned, and the Prime Minister's coterie of advisers bullied and blustered their way through the carefully constructed Whitehall system which is there to vet and assess the delivery of policy. The same cavalier attitude applied to the Blair approach to education, with sponsors lined up to back his favoured system of city academies bypassing the local authorities who were seen merely as impediments to progress. Legislators have lost count of the number of laws proposed by Blair then quietly dropped when they were found to be unworkable. Bills are pushed through parliament without time to debate them, then left to the Lords to discover that they are either unworkable or illiberal or both, while judges who question them are deemed to be soft or out of tune with the public.

The impression we are left with is of a government that is frankly impatient with, and even scornful of, the normal processes of democracy. That, in turn, has undermined public trust - not great at the best of times - in its political leaders. We should not lay all the blame for this at Blair's feet. The process can be seen at work in any government that arrives with a substantial built-in majority. Mrs Thatcher can be said to have begun the process of undermining the civil service in order to deliver her policies more quickly. Her memorable phrase "not one of us" was applied to any candidate for permanent secretary who failed to live up to her demanding standards of reliability, and it meant that under her the civil service became politicised - to the great detriment of British public life. If anything, Blair has reinforced that impression.

The combination of a Prime Minister who can no longer rely on the trust of the voter, a demoralised civil service, and a general sense that moral codes are less important than achieving political goals, all contribute to a serious erosion of public standards. It may not add up to corruption in its normal sense. It is certainly nothing like as bad as the Italian model. But it does, nevertheless, undermine the confidence we are meant to have in our political leaders, and it saps the credibility of the democratic system on which we all depend.