And now, a word from our sponsors. Tony Blair tried to limit the political damage of the fall of Peter Mandelson by protesting that the fate of a politician was just so much froth. What was important instead was "schoolsanhospitalsanjobs". Nice try, prime minister, but it won't wash.
For the significance of the Hinduja "pounds for passports" scandal is not the fall of Mandelson, nor the fate of Keith Vaz. It is that our public life is corrupt because it is governed by money - and not just because of the courting of donors to fund political parties.
Big business is increasingly sponsoring schools and universities and sports and the arts and a whole host of things that make up everyday life, of which the supreme emblem is the very thing that was Mandelson's nemesis, the Millennium Dome. And sponsorship generally requires a return.
The reason the dome was so unutterably dreary was that it resembled a trade fair, a monument to corporate sponsorship. But of course there was one bit that business was not queueing up to fund. Faith, which gave the dome its meaning if it was about anything at all, was hardly a glittering advertising pitch. So there was a desperate search for someone to sponsor this zone. The Hindujas stumped up, but the impression has been created that is was a quid pro quo for a passport.
This wasn't a case of big business lining a politician's pocket but bankrolling a government policy. This kind of cash nexus is now at the heart of political life. The political animal lobby gives Labour £1m and gets its hunting bill. Genetically modified crops are pushed by Lord Sainsbury, the well-known grocer, biotechnology enthusiast and Labour donor, who just happens to have been made science minister.
University dons tailor research to the agendas of the commissioning interests that hold their livelihoods in their hands. The management consultancy KPMG kindly produces a numeracy project to promote the enjoyment of maths in primary schools. It describes this as a "win-win-win situation". You bet it is. KPMG does a lot of work for the government, not least in assessing failing education authorities. Not so much pounds for passports as maths for contracts?
Big corporations are anxious to put money into socially useful projects. Social conscience plays a part, but the main purpose is to maximise business and improve their corporate image by wrapping themselves in a mantle of good works. In response they get a chance to rub shoulders with politicians who have at their disposal patronage, peerages or passports, which they dish out in return for money, endorsement and loyalty, not to mention the odd glamorous party or holiday in the millionaire's chateau.
How, after all, did our squeaky- clean, devout, idealistic prime minister fall into the hands of Bernie Ecclestone or the Hindujas? How could he take freebie holidays in Tuscan villas belonging to Geoffrey Robinson or Italian plutocrats? This reliance on big money is about something deeper than the Islington set trying to stitch the chic onto their radical clothes. It's even deeper than getting money to fund the party.
It's about the way our civic culture has been taken over by corporate sponsorship, destroying the governing ideal of disinterested public service by the doctrine that everything that is given has its political price. The result is that the citizen has turned into the consumer, public service has become a branch of advertising and all three main political parties behave like courtesans, only too willing to sell themselves to any gentleman who is loaded as long as he appears
respectable.
We have effectively gone backwards in time to a discredited political culture. British politics in the 18th and early 19th centuries was corrupt. MPs were enmeshed with networks of producer interests, nepotism raged and peerages were dished out as rewards for services rendered. The Victorians cleaned up and set standards of public life that lasted until the 1960s.
Then decline set in. Harold Wilson produced his infamous "lavender" honours list of some distinctly dishonourable types. Under Margaret Thatcher and John Major, MPs started taking money from lobbying firms, accountability dwindled and corruption or incompetence by ministers and public bodies became routine. Now we're back to the producer interests, patronage and peerages for cash that the Victorians cleaned away.
Why has this happened? It's said the core problem is that the parties need so much money they have no choice but to cosy up to millionaires. Every time a big donor is discovered lurking in the bushes, there are renewed calls for state funding. Get real. Political parties in Germany, France and Italy have state funding. Yet these countries are mired in political scandal. Former chancellor Helmut Kohl channelled illegal donations to his party and the French president, Jacques Chirac, is up
to his neck in corruption charges.
As the political analyst Michael Pinto-Duschinsky argues, public subsidy has, if anything, stepped up the hunt for additional private funds. In three weeks, British party funding will be tightened as the Neill/Nolan reforms come into effect. Yet as the tip of the iceberg is cleaned up, big business increasingly uses its money to buy influence in more submerged ways. At party conferences, you can hardly move for the business stands, and you can dine out the entire week on the receptions
and parties.
This has been encouraged by our politicians. Thatcherism promoted business as an alternative to state provision. Civic culture gave way to consumer choice. Not that state control and civic health go together; after all, the Victorians, who invented political integrity, were also philanthropists who created a vibrant non-state civil society. But there's a crucial difference between philanthropy and sponsorship. The first is altruistic; the second self-interested.
It's the difference between Peter Lampl, the businessman who has set up scholarships for poor children to go to an independent school in Liverpool because he was so appalled at the waste of talent among disadvantaged children, and city academy schools, which are attracting corporate sponsors with precious little commitment to education but for whom funding a school is good for business.
Neither Labour nor the Tories have acknowledged the gap between the corporate culture and civic values. One expects no more of the Tories, who were always the party of land and money. But Labour was rooted in ethical ideals. And that's why new Labour's encouragement of the cash nexus in politics is such a betrayal.
It's about more than the need to fund the party. It arises from the ideological vacuum at the heart of new Labour. Because there is no big idea, money and self-interest have filled the gap. Of course, old Labour's anti-business animus was stupid. But the uncritical belief that only goodness and wisdom reside in the corporate world made Blair vulnerable to any passing barrow boy with a shrewd eye for branding posing as a heroic entrepreneur.
But with no big idea, branding is all this government has got. The rhetoric is terrific, but the reality is filthy hospitals, a busted train network, appalling education standards and demoralised police. So with the voter having mutated into consumer, the brand has to be ruthlessly marketed by sophisticated techniques of voter manipulation through advertising and public relations, just like any other product that falls to pieces as soon as you get it home. That's why Alastair
Campbell and the pollster Philip Gould are so crucial to Blair, as indeed was Mandelson.
The branding has to convey radicalism and newness to distinguish Labour from the too-close-for-comfort Tories. That's why the hereditary peers went to the scaffold. But look at the result. Noblesse oblige, reviled as anachronistic and undemocratic, has given way to peers on the make. Like Thatcher, Blair uses patronage to circumvent a government machine he believes threatens his project. Hence the increasing cronyism of the Lords and the emasculation of civil service neutrality. The
result is a corrupted public realm of which the Hinduja affair is but an emblem.
Melanie Phillips
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