Joan McApline: Suspicions build when politicians meet property

Steven Purcell, the disgraced former leader of Glasgow City Council, has been given a job by two men who made a 350,000 profit on land deemed "essential" for the Commonwealth Games. After selling the plot to the Purcell-led council for 1.7 million, Allan Stewart and Stephen McKenna donated more than 9,000 to the Labour party for the first time.

The council and the businessmen say the deal was above board and not connected to the two separate party donations. Nor is the new job "payback" for Purcell, who will work gratis for the businessmen's charity.

Everybody deserves a second chance and perhaps Messrs Stewart and McKenna, who belong to an evangelical church, are practising a central tenet of their faith - forgiveness. But the accumulation of such coincidences should concern anyone keen to improve standards of behaviour in public life.

Dealing with property barons is a risky business for politicians. Wendy Alexander was brought down by a donation from Paul Green, a Channel Islands-based developer who financed several major projects in Glasgow, including the retail citadel that is the Silverburn Shopping Mall. She didn't know him - he was approached by Charlie Gordon MSP, Steven Purcell's predecessor at the head of Glasgow City Council. To this day I wonder what it was about the Labour party in Glasgow that compelled Mr Green, who seldom set foot in the city, to his acts of generosity.

There was an era when such friendships, however superficial, would be political suicide for a Scottish Labour politician. Anyone who made a quick profit from buying and selling the ground beneath our feet was considered the worst sort of capitalist. Land reform was as central to the early party's core beliefs as the eradication of want. Under Keir Hardie, the manifesto condemned the "waste" of land speculation.

How times change. Sometimes it seems that property speculators/developers have replaced the trade union barons of legend in the scale of their influence and the depth of their pockets. Last week BBC Scotland exposed the close friendship between the Labour donor James Kean, who owns large parcels of South Lanarkshire, and James Docherty, who sits on the local council's planning committee and who, it is alleged, failed to declare the nature of their relationship. Kean is godfather to Docherty's daughter and the two socialise together at one of the businessman's properties on Loch Fyne. The Standards Commission recently cleared both men, saying there was no evidence of any connection. It found that although Kean sold Docherty a house, the transaction was at market value. The BBC has forwarded the new evidence to the commission.

Politics, in practice, is as much about people as it is about ideology. All modern parties encourage relationships with business, not just because winning elections is an expensive exercise, but because companies generate the wealth and jobs on which our economy depends. Hostility towards business is hardly the pathway to national prosperity.

But when does a politician's healthy engagement with the private sector start to turn to rancid self-interest? When does a wealthy individual's legitimate desire to assist a cause in which he or she believes become cash for favours?

Property in particular is problematic. Partnership deals with developers could be said to provide construction jobs, in-demand housing and shopping. The flip side was greed and self-deception. It is surely no coincidence that allegations concerning Purcell's running of Glasgow City Council focus on City Building, the arms-length company he established to maintain council property and pitch for work elsewhere. The chief executive, on 120,000 a year, was married to a Labour councillor. Lesley Quinn, Labour's former General Secretary in Scotland, walked into an (unadvertised) post as business development manager. City Building, which is funded by taxpayers, donated around 4,000 to the party. Between 2008 and 2009 the "company" spent nearly 20,000 on corporate hospitality at 18 dinners. Labour politicians were guests at 11 of them.

The scandal around Purcell was about drug-taking - once in the company of an underworld figure. Juicy as that detail might appear, his political activities are the main source of concern. Only this week there was another lurid allegation about links between Purcell's close political associates and the gangster Paul Ferris.

But it is the influence of a legitimate businessman, Willie Haughey, which created most column inches. Haughey has donated more than 1m to Labour. Nobody has ever proved that he behaved improperly. Not when his compensation package for land that lay in the path of the M74 motorway was revised upwards by millions, coincidently after another party donation. Not when he sold a pub to the former MP Tommy McAvoy. Not when he was made chairman of Scottish Enterprise Glasgow, the publicly funded development agency.

His company received a grant of almost 1m from SE Glasgow at a meeting where he declared an interest. Steven Purcell took the chair instead. Before the recession scuppered it, one of Haughey's companies was shortlisted for a contract to sell off council property.

Strangest of all is the relationship between Haughey and Purcell. During the council leader's breakdown, the two men attended a secret meeting to "decide his fate" in the car park of a pub that Haughey owned.

No newspaper column is long enough to recount the complex web of influence centred on Mr Haughey, let alone smaller-fry Labour donors who also win council contracts. They say no rules are broken. Perhaps.

The stories are reported, then forgotten. But we would do well to remember such details when David Miliband, the front runner for the UK Labour leadership, says the Scottish party offers a model for political renewal.

Miliband wrote this week that Scottish Labour had re-invented itself and reconnected with voters. Purcell's reappearance on the front pages ought to make us ask what exactly has changed?