Any display of
excessive generosity towards a decision-maker is always likely to look
suspicious, even if there is no obvious or immediate way in which his or her
decisions are likely to benefit the donor. In dealing with gifts and
hospitality in the context of business relationships with suppliers, the key
word that was always drummed into me was ‘reciprocity’. That is to say that no
gift or hospitality should be accepted if it was of a higher value than I would
be able to offer, and wherever possible, reciprocation should actually take
place. So, gifts such as calendars or desk diaries from suppliers or would-be
suppliers were acceptable, but bottles of whisky or cases of wine were not. And
if a supplier took me to lunch after a meeting, it was expected that I would
take him or her to lunch after the next. It’s low level stuff, and even then
can never completely erase a potential perception of buying favours, but it's a
clear enough rule, and it was always fairly easy to understand where the lines
were drawn.
It's that
reciprocity which is completely missing in the relationship between donors and
politicians. If Starmer were spending thousands of pounds on Christmas and
birthday gifts for Lord Alli, it might just about be possible to say that they
were simply very generous friends. There is, though, no suggestion that that
was the case – and if it had been, I’m sure it would have been wheeled out as a
defence by now. Whilst we’ve had a grudging decision that Labour ministers will
no longer accept gifts of clothing from donors, that is just a small part of
the freebies being accepted. It’s true, of course, that there’s nothing new in
this. Politicians (of all parties) have been accepting freebies such as
accommodation and tickets to events for years. But ‘everybody’s doing it’ is
acceptable as an excuse only until it isn’t. The expenses
scandal some years ago,
affecting politicians of multiple parties, shows how the line of acceptability
can and does move.
The line has moved
again, even if only slightly, with the decision to not accept gifts of clothing,
but Labour’s politicians still seem to be lining up to argue that ‘no rules
were broken’, and that the key thing is ‘transparency’, even if transparency
about the purpose of gifts was notably lacking in the cases of Rayner and
Reeves. Reeves came up with the line that she wasn’t into clothes or shopping,
so when a good friend offered to do the choosing and shopping on her behalf,
she readily accepted. It’s not a bad answer – to the wrong question. The issue
isn’t who did the physical work of choosing and shopping – she’s lucky to have
a friend who can be trusted to do that for her – but why the friend ended up
doing the paying as well. It’s a question which the answer neatly and
completely sidesteps. In any event, simply not breaking the rules cannot
absolve those receiving hospitality and gifts from considering for a moment
whether doing so is ethical or might be perceived to be a little dodgy. Getting
donors to pay for something else other than clothes may conform to Labour’s new
rule, but if the effect is to put the same amount of additional spending power
into the same pockets, it changes nothing; it merely relabels the same donation.
Donations have
always been an important part of political funding in the UK, and short of a
system of state funding of parties, they will continue to be so. Maybe it’s
just that there is more reporting and visibility, but there is certainly an
impression that the extent to which those donations and gifts are going into
individual pockets rather than just into party campaign funds seems to have
increased. As far as we can tell, there is no obvious quid pro quo for the
generosity of Lord Alli, but the question that the recipients should have been
asking themselves is a very simple one: ‘if I were not Leader of the Opposition
/ Deputy Leader / Shadow Chancellor, or even just MP, would I be getting this
hospitality or gift?’ There can only be one honest answer to that question, and
no amount of transparency or rigid conformity to ‘the rules’ can change that.
At some point, maybe not yet because the stench isn’t strong enough, the rules
will be changed. That reciprocity test would not be at all a bad place to
start.
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