ANY QUOTES USED MUST BE ATTRIBUTED TO MURNAGHAN, SKY NEWS

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Now last week saw a cabinet minister brought down by an expenses scandal and allegations of widespread inappropriate behaviour at Westminster, it’s all over the papers again today so how is this affecting public opinion about politicians as a whole?  Joining me to discuss some of the issues in a moment are the MPs Eric Joyce, the political commentator Polly Toynbee and Bob Stewart, also of course an MP.  I want to discuss the cause, the effects and perhaps what can be done about it all and Eric Joyce, the cause, you know something about this from personal experience, is it the subsidised drinks, the open all hours bars that has something to do with the inappropriate behaviour?    

ERIC JOYCE: Well it is a funny workplace.  I actually don’t know about all the different bars that are in there but the hours have changed. …

DM: That’s because you don’t remember them or you haven’t been to them?

ERIC JOYCE: Probably a combination of both but the hours have changed so much now I think there is much less of that than in the past but it is unusual to have a number of bars in a workplace, that’s a matter of fact and there is not that much to compare it with I suppose. 

DM: So we’ve got there that lingering damage, and perhaps that’s the major damage for the MPs expenses scandal and then all this about what seems to be going on, Polly is it just that MPs, there are too many of them, they don’t have an awful lot to do and they’ve got cheap drink in a lot of bars?

POLLY TOYNBEE: There are too many, 650 is ridiculous, we could do with 400 much more skilled with much better staff, working normal hours and not the ridiculous hours that they work and then you wouldn’t have the late night drinking and the late night votes but I think you have to put it into context.  If you take 650 people from say any large organisation and you put them all under such intense scrutiny, having them watched all the time, what sort of shenanigans do you think go on everywhere all the time?  It’s just that we see it with MPs because everybody is out to get the story so a lot of the stuff goes on in other workplaces too. 

DM: Even journalistic ones, they are hardly models of probity are they in some places, present company excepted.  

POLLY TOYNBEE: Even the journalists who come out so clean, so super clean, pointing fingers at politicians all the time, journalists are no better themselves. 

DM: Is that it, Bob, politicians are just a reflection of broader society and any kind of corporate set up.  In any big organisation you’ll know particularly some of the junior staff will go out and “enjoy themselves” after hours and perhaps indulge in a bit of inappropriate behaviour. 

BOB STEWART: I think Polly put it really well, the fact of the matter is – and the other thing of course is because they are Members of Parliament they are under scrutiny.  If you are on the terrace you must realise that on the terrace you are being watched by someone and if you misbehave it may well be reported and very quickly.  Of course, bad behaviour by Members of Parliament is on your programme, the good behaviour by the vast majority isn’t on your programme and there are huge numbers of those people.  To be honest, everyone’s human, they make a mistake sometimes.

DM: I think that is a very fair point and it is interesting, hearing Joey talking to some of the people in Aylesbury earlier, they believe – and this is widely held – that MPs are corrupt but there is corruption and corruption.  We all know properly corrupt countries don’t we and the UK doesn’t even feature on that. 

BOB STEWART: I’ve been to a few of them and our MPs by comparison are paragons of virtue.  The fact of the matter is the expenses scandal continues and we’ve had the Maria Miller business but she was tried under the old rules and what people don’t understand is that from 2010 the rules are totally changed, MPs are judged by an independent panel, not themselves.  She was actually referred back to the Standards Committee which actually doesn’t happen anymore because what was alleged to have been done was done prior to 2010. 

DM: So moving on to the effects, Eric have you found people you talk to in your soon to be old constituency, are they put off politics and politicians?  And some will say you are getting out of that cesspit, as some have called it. 

ERIC JOYCE: Well it has a cumulative effect and the expenses scandal had an impact that still lingers.  There is a lot of ambiguity around exactly what powers the Members of Parliament have.  We have been hearing MPs are small businesses, they’re not really, in actual fact IPSA is effectively the employer and I suspect if it was tested in court IPSA would be found to be the employer.  MPs are a bit like middle level line managers in the civil service, you get a right to draw on a resource and are paid directly from someone else and apart from that the HMRC doesn’t recognise MPs as an employer. 

DM: I can see that but we drew the analogy with the larger company and I can see the way it is structured, it’s in no way equivalent to that but nonetheless, could there be some kind of centralised HR department because we look at some of the things that have gone on over just the last few months and years and it all seems to be dealt with by the party, which has different rules and different attitudes and tends to want to quieten it all down.

ERIC JOYCE: I think in reality, IPSA the regulatory body would be regarded in law as the employer and if that were accepted by everybody then they could have an HR department that would manage staff and MPs would be the day to day managers.  At the moment there is talk about parties taking over some kind of a role, if MPs are the employer then they can’t be taking on a liability.  Either MPs are the employers or they’re not and I personally think it’s an [inaudible], I think it’s a fiction and I really don’t think we are in law the employer. 

DM: Polly, could there be another body that has greater powers to deal with the employment laws there? 

POLLY TOYNBEE: Are you talking about people being harassed, sexually harassed? 

DM: Well people who went and made a complaint, we’ve seen in the past they went and had a word with someone in the party and they talk to one of the whips and …

POLLY TOYNBEE: It’s traditionally been with the whips office but that’s not the right place because the whips are only interested in protecting the reputation of the party.  I think each party has to have its own helpline, I think it should be a woman on the whole in charge of it so that anybody who is under duress – this is a very male dominated place where there is a lot of sexual harassment going on quite a lot of the time and I’ve seen it in many other organisations too – each party has to have its own helpline for dealing with that.  You can’t expect people to report something that is going to be adverse to their own party.  Do you know the most odd thing of watching your film in Aylesbury, UKIP doing so well, how is it that UKIP are the beneficiaries?  At the last European elections 45% of them since then have fallen out, they have either been thrown out of the party or disappeared.  They are drawing £800,000 in expenses, Nigel Farage has his office in his home and his wife on the payroll for £30,000 and they are great gravy train enthusiasts and yet they contribute very little.  It’s bizarre.

DM: They are very open about that, Bob you are agreeing with that, but they say they don’t support the existence of the European Parliament so they don’t mind taking a bit of money from them. 

POLLY TOYNBEE: One of them has gone to prison for false accounting. 

BOB STEWART: The bounce coming to UKIP at the expense of the other parties does seem unfair and reflects the point that the public actually believe that UKIP are not like the rest of us, of course they are and actually they’re worse. 

DM: But it is a general malaise isn’t it?  You’re right, if you drill down into the specifics but people aren’t doing that, they thinking you elected lot – and this is perhaps one of the strengths of UKIP, not having any MPs, people think okay, you’re not tainted by what’s going on in that building just across the road from us here in Westminster. 

BOB STEWART: That’s exactly why they’ve got such a big bounce and quite frankly I just consider it to be somewhat unfair on the public.  The public will now write to me and say you’re mad, you’re mad but in fact it is unfair because people behave badly in small percentages and I am just thinking of all those Member of Parliament, I’m sure Polly will agree with me, actually both of you will agree with me that the vast majority of Members of Parliament are there for one reason, to do their very best, the vast majority and yet they are tainted by this.  Frankly I believe I am serving my country again, that’s the way I look at it.

POLLY TOYNBEE: I think that’s basically true, I think there are some wrong ‘uns as there are anywhere.  I think people don’t go into politics – what do you get out of forty years in politics?  If you are a minister for a very few years you are very lucky, if you get into the cabinet that’s a miracle but most of the time you are going to be working, they work all weekend in their constituencies, I think most of them are pretty decent and could probably earn more money elsewhere.  The bad ones really have to be rooted out and at the moment parliament has been marking its own homework and the expenses scandal really has lifted the lid on something that people are rightly shocked about but the idea that UKIP is suddenly going to be cleaner than the rest is just comical.  

BOB STEWART: Marking our homework, we are not going to be marking our own homework, we are not going to make everything independent. I agree with the idea that there should be somewhere people can complain to if they are being harassed in any way by their employer, however you define the employer.  MPs tend to be the employers one way or another.  

DM: Just to address that point that Bob and Polly have pointed out, some of the ironies of UKIP being seen as squeaky clean when it comes to all this because they are outside the Houses of Parliament.  What can MPs do though to send the message across that you’ve given me right here that we’re not corrupt, we are trying to do some good for the public, we do have a sense of conscience?  As you leave parliament, do you feel that your own experience, having crossed a few lines, is part of that process, is signalling I feel I have done the right thing here?

ERIC JOYCE: I’m not sure that people are going to see MPs as the good guys at any point in the foreseeable future, for years and years to come.  MPs just get on with their job and I think on the whole your own constituents generally speaking, the ones that re-elect you or otherwise, have got a pretty realistic perspective of what you get up to.  As far as the larger view of the public about politicians in general, I think people are pretty jaded about that and that’s the way it is.  Most MPs are mainly concerned about their own constituency.  

POLLY TOYNBEE: And it has been fore a long time.  There’s a wonderful Gallup poll taken in the middle of the last war, taken in about 1941, 1942 which showed that when people were asked do you think politicians put the country first or their own good or the good of the party first, they were utterly cynical, a great majority of people didn’t think they were acting in the country’s interest even during the war so let’s just put this into historical perspective.  People have always hated politicians, graffiti in ancient Rome hated politicians.  They love democracy but they hate the people who practice it and it’s weird.  

DM: Always important to end on a historical perspective.  Thank you very much for ending on that note. Polly, Eric and Bob thank you very much indeed, very good to see you.