Parliamentary standards under attack
Emma Crewe
Due to be published in the Journal of Legislative Studies, 2024
Below is an extract of the article. Download the full article here.
Abstract
Healthy democracies require ethical leadership and respect for rules, but since the 2000s we have witnessed serious attacks on standards in the UK Parliament. Two narratives about scandals will reveal cultural and social aspects that are often ignored by the public, journalists and parliamentary scholars. A slow development of conditions led to a scandal over misuse of expenses in 2009, while rule-breaking in Parliament during Prime Minister Johnson’s term in office emerged more suddenly, in part out of the rupture of Brexit. Making sense of these cases about standards, and the connections between them, requires a theoretical approach that goes beyond looking at the bad behaviour of individuals or rotten cultures within a malfunctioning system. In the gap between the two, you find relationships. I make an argument for a relational, cultural and historical approach within which people act in complex configurations of interdependence as both individuals and socialised actors.
Introduction
On 7 July 2022 Boris Johnson, the UK Prime Minister, was forced to resign his premiership. For the first time in the UK’s history a Prime Minister was found by the police to have broken the law. He “presided over a culture of casual law-breaking at 10 Downing Street in relation to Covid”, according to former Treasury Minister Jesse Norman,[1] he allegedly lied to parliament on many occasions, and he was referred to the Committee on Privileges in April 2022. The following year the Committee concluded he ‘committed a serious contempt of the House’ (House of Commons 2023, p. 6). In June 2023 he was given a preview of the Committee of Privileges and in response he resigned as an MP stating: ‘The Privileges Committee is there to protect the privileges of parliament. That is a very important job. They should not be using their powers – which have only been very recently designed – to mount what is plainly a political hitjob on someone they oppose.’ He would have been suspended for 90 days for deliberately misleading the House and the disrespect he showed the Committee, but he resigned before they published the report. If no action was taken, the Chair of the Committee Harriet Harman (MP) explained during debate on the report, it would have contaminated government and eroded the standards that are essential to democracy.[2] 354 MPs voted in favour of the finding of contempt, while 7 voted against.
Johnson’s contempt of parliament follows a long career of rule-breaking. The historian Seth Thévoz identified 18 rules that he broke and seemed to get away during his career until he resigned.[3] His wrongdoing in parliament has been even more comprehensively surveyed by Hannah White in her book Held in Contempt (2022). While tempting to portray this catalogue of rule breaking as merely the actions of a badly-behaved disruptor, Johnson’s disregard for rules is far more revealing if seen through a more complex sociological and historical lens. A configuration of various other politicians, officials, journalists and citizens were involved in Johnson’s rise and fall: to understand his rule-breaking in parliament and government, looking at the roles that they played is an important part of piecing together this history. After all, the final straw was a lie about an MP who was close to him. Johnson claimed he did not know about allegations of sexual misconduct against this MP when he appointed him as Deputy Chief Whip, with the result that various Ministers found themselves lying for him. Their resentment at having to damage their own reputations was partly what led to his downfall. The tendency in scholarship and reports on standards in parliaments is: (a) to focus on individualism (i.e., find the culprits and punish them or not); (b) to look at the whole/system/culture (e.g., to identify faults with it, reform and enforce the rules). I will argue that this dual approach to understanding and managing rule-breaking is incomplete. I will critique it, propose a different theory of human action and suggest that to understand rule-breaking you have to look at what rules mean in everyday practice and the interaction between all of those involved. In making this argument I need to go back to an earlier scandal – the misuse of allowances revealed in 2009 – in part because it helps to explain how and why Johnson became Prime Minister despite a reputation for lying. The reputation of MPs was hugely damaged by the exposure by the press of over-generous, and in a few cases fraudulent, claims for allowances. Some of the coverage damned all politicians as venal and lying, so a large proportion of the population adopted a profound cynicism towards all UK MPs. If lying had become the norm, then a Prime Minister who lies is no longer as shocking as it once was. This may be partly why Mr Johnson polled well with the public, especially with older Conservative supporters, despite his reputation for disregarding rules. But I will begin the story of rule-breaking with the 2009 expenses scandal for another reason too. This piece of history offers further evidence for my argument that explaining scandals in terms of flawed individuals is theoretically insufficient. Here too we need to look at wider relationships and processes to make sense of patterns of actual and perceived wrongdoing. So, this article is about politicians breaking laws, norms and rules in the House of Commons and what this tells us about researching standards in political institutions.
In making this argument I need to go back to an earlier scandal – the misuse of allowances revealed in 2009 – in part because it helps to explain how and why Johnson became Prime Minister despite a reputation for lying. The reputation of MPs was hugely damaged by the exposure by the press of over-generous, and in a few cases fraudulent, claims for allowances. Some of the coverage damned all politicians as venal and lying, so a large proportion of the population adopted a profound cynicism towards all UK MPs. If lying had become the norm, then a Prime Minister who lies is no longer as shocking as it once was. This may be partly why Mr Johnson polled well with the public, especially with older Conservative supporters, despite his reputation for disregarding rules. But I will begin the story of rule-breaking with the 2009 expenses scandal for another reason too. This piece of history offers further evidence for my argument that explaining scandals in terms of flawed individuals is theoretically insufficient. Here too we need to look at wider relationships and processes to make sense of patterns of actual and perceived wrongdoing. So, this article is about politicians breaking laws, norms and rules in the House of Commons and what this tells us about researching standards in political institutions.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/jun/06/boris-johnson-wins-no-confidence-vote-despite-unexpectedly-large-rebellion, 18 August 2022.
[2] https://parliamentlive.tv/Event/Index/3df2f5d0-f842-4ad5-bbb4-1706499f1e1f, accessed 22 June 2023.
[3] https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/boris-johnson-broke-rules-no-punishment/, accessed 28 April 2022.