The curious outing of David Laws

The story of how David Laws, the Lib Dem chief secretary to the Treasury, came to step down from his post at the weekend after just a couple of weeks in the job, is a curious one, to say the least.

Ostensibly, his departure was a straightforward “expenses scandal” tale. The Daily Telegraph revealed on Saturday that Laws had claimed £40,000 in Parliamentary expenses which had been used to pay rent for rooms in properties owned by his long-term, but secret, partner. The cabinet minister for cuts had used the expenses to hide the fact that he was gay.

By the end of the evening, the outed Laws – who immediately sent his own case for investigation by the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards – had quit the Lib-Con coalition government, which was severely weakened as a result. Laws was an architect of the coalition agreement and the man put in charge of cutting the massive budget deficit.

He was replaced by Danny Alexander, a much younger and inexperienced politician. Lo and behold, he was next in the firing line. Today’s Telegraph accused Alexander of avoiding tax on the sale of a second home, something the Lib-Dem MP hotly disputed.

One of the questions in this murky affair is why did the Telegraph choose to publish their investigation at this particular time? And where did they get the information from? We ask, not because we hold any brief for the reactionary coalition government, but simply to check if something more serious than a scandal is involved.

The Telegraph, for example, is deeply ambivalent about the coalition. This leading Tory newspaper has columnists like Simon Heffer and Lord Tebbit who would like to see Cameron’s government collapse. They despise Cameron who they see as “not one of us” and who, the paper believes, used the election stalemate to form a coalition that would distance itself from “traditional Tory values”.

Last week, the Telegaph launched a campaign to defeat the coalition’s plans to raise the rate of capital gains tax and widen its scope. Some Tory backbenchers have also threatened to block the coalition’s plans for a referendum on the voting system and other policies they don’t like. They also reversed Cameron’s plans for a takeover of their backbench committee.

So the obvious question is: is there a systematic campaign by the Tory right-wing to destabilise the government. Who fed the Telegraph the closely-guarded information about Laws? Undoubtedly the paper has friends in high (and low) places, such as MI5 who presumably vetted Laws before he joined the cabinet. The paper has already said that its original investigation into Parliamentary expenses did not reveal what Laws had done. I am sure no one is readily going to provide the answers to these questions, but they are worth asking.

A major post-election political crisis was kept in the box only by Cameron and Clegg deciding to ditch their own programmes and party rank-and-files to form Britain’s first peacetime, full-scale coalition. The fact that the British state is near bankrupt, as one Tory cabinet member admitted over the weekend, will not stop its enemies from plotting against it..

These are uncharted, dangerous political times for the British state. There are signs that it is at war with itself, as well as ordinary people whose jobs and living standards are now in the coalition’s sights. Don’t be surprised if the Laws affair is only the first of many such stories.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

Vacuum at heart of the system

The expenses scandal continues to stoke up outrage and fury everywhere from deepest Tunbridge Wells right up to the north of Scotland, as the credibility of the political class continues to sink into the mire.

Commentators from New York to Berlin are realising that the crisis is far deeper than simple embarrassment over dodgy expenses claims, like Chancellor Alistair Darling’s for accountancy advice or New Labour deputy leader Harriett Harman’s £10,000 for a “media trainer”.

As a New York Times writer notes, “the expenses abuses are only the tip of a malaise that has seen parliament grow ever more remote from the voters, and governments grow ever more oblivious of Parliament”. He compares today’s popular resentment to the time when the Great Reform Act was “speeded through Parliament by riots in several cities”.

The constitutional crisis, marked by the resignation of Speaker Michael Martin, is much more than a storm over a jaded and discredited institution. Britain’s modern parliament was the result of a Civil War and the political revolution of 1688 which enabled the emerging capitalist class to rule after the end of the feudal monarchy. So what is happening now is no small thing. What is at stake is the entire capitalist system of political rule and control.

The leaders of all the parliamentary parties and editorialists from the Telegraph to the Guardian hope and pray they can soothe over anger by a “root and branch overhaul” that will restore the credibility of politicians to the people. Facing not only public scrutiny of their greed but also the loss of their seats in the next election, MPs are looking desperately for ways to rescue the existing order of things.

Health Secretary Alan Johnson, for example, is calling for electoral reform. Others hope that proportional representation will do the trick. The Tory leader David Cameron is purging his party of MPs from the shires – who have used expenses to clean their moats and build duck houses – in a bid to appease the electorate.

But what the advocates of parliamentary reform miss out is that behind the constitutional crisis is the even deeper crisis of globalised capitalism itself. The revelations of parliamentary sleaze shows Parliament for what it is – not the centre of real political power but a club of parasitic hangers-on, far more concerned with looking after their own interests than those of the electorate.

The question must therefore arise – where then are the real centres of power? These are actually to be found in the boardroms of the corporations and the banks. And it is no accident that the scandal comes in the wake of convulsions in the banking system which go to the very heart of globalised corporate capitalism.

It is becoming abundantly clear that all the parties which make up the existing political classes are incapable of dealing with the worsening economic crisis. In fact, they are far more concerned with hiding their own greed at a time when hundreds of thousands of people are losing their jobs, their savings and their pensions as the effects of the economic crisis take hold.

Yes, the existing parliamentarians need to be swept away. But we desperately need new forms of democracy and representation and that must happen at the same time as a fundamental restructuring of the economic system itself, to create not-for-profit forms of co-operative enterprises in place of a profit-driven capitalism that is in meltdown on all fronts.

Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary