Quality | 2010.02.14
We should watch bankers as closely as we do politicians | Jackie Ashley
Equality of scrutiny is needed – a bright lamp shining on tax havens and in boardrooms, as well as legislatures
Who\'s above the law? Not MPs accused of expenses fiddling, it seems. Today a trio of big-hitters – Alan Johnson, William Hague and Ken Clarke – flung derision on the idea that MPs being charged by the Crown Prosecution Service should be protected by parliament\'s ancient rights. Though their case still has to be argued, it looks as if they have very little support at the top of politics.
This is as it should be. The 1689 Bill of Rights is indeed one of our founding constitutional documents, but its clause on protecting MPs from criminal prosecution was meant for their debates and voting procedures, not for arguments over the personal misuse of public money. Scrutiny of politics is being changed for ever by public anger over the expenses row , and before that by freedom of information law and websites as a way of scrutinising an MP\'s voting and speaking record.
Politics, certainly at Westminster, becomes harder. Individuals may feel aggrieved, and there is a real problem about how to persuade more talented, successful people to enter the bearpit. But there can be no going back, no return to the closing of the club doors on the people in the street.
MPs\' expenses, though an issue that has particularly angered voters, are less important than some of the other targets of the new scrutiny. As the Chilcot inquiry continues, I become more interested. We have had earlier investigations into the circumstances surrounding the Iraq war, but this has been meticulous and public. It will change how Britain behaves in the world. Never again will the same mistakes be made.
Below the level of the big setpiece acts of national self-analysis, we now have regular Commons select committee inquiries being televised live. If, as I hope, the committee system is changed to create all-purpose specialist committees, it\'s going to become more important still. Would-be MPs, don\'t despair. Once parliament has sorted out the expenses system, it too has its chance to play its part in a more open investigation of mistakes and misbehaviour.
But the popular revolution that has upended parliamentary life is only part of the picture. Science is coming under more scrutiny than ever before. The embarrassing mistakes by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have taken it to the edge of public ridicule and put its boss under an unforgiving spotlight. At the University of East Anglia, the former director of its climatic research institute, Phil Jones, whose leaked emails caused a storm before the Copenhagen summit, has revealed he came close to suicide and still gets death threats from climate change deniers.
In business, Toyota\'s Japanese boss, Akio Toyoda , was finally winkled out and forced to apologise for engineering faults that have led to the withdrawal of 4.5 million cars and a crashing stock price. Nearer home, BAE Systems ended up with a comparatively small fine after a long investigation – led by this newspaper – into corruption and kickbacks in Middle East contracts. Add the apologies made by various leading bankers to parliament and Congress after the financial crash, and you could argue we are living through the birth pangs of a new age of accountability.
But it isn\'t quite so. It isn\'t quite fair. It isn\'t quite equal. Politicians have a harsher light shone on them than almost anyone in the commercial world. Scientists like Phil Jones, who may be naive about the media, are unprepared for the vilification that follows. And in business, the hounding of Fred Goodwin was a very rare thing. The vast majority of overpaid and culpable casino bankers avoid answering public questions, keep away from TV studios, and are quietly pocketing their next fat bonuses.
So is it one law for the rich, and another for the rest? Yes, but more pertinently, it is one law for public life and another for business. This is illogical. We live in a system of market capitalism where power has increasingly gone to corporations and the private sector, and in which politicians scrabble for leverage. (Look at the titanic struggle shaping up between the Obama administration and Wall Street over banking regulation.) If scrutiny is a social good, that applies at least as much to the workings of financial institutions and corporate life.
Today\'s scrutiny culture is, overall, a good thing. That goes for climate change too. Though I strongly believe that mankind is producing a radical change in the earth\'s systems, because so many reputable scientists using different ways of measuring have come to that conclusion, it cannot be wrong that mistakes in their work are revealed and challenged. Science advances because of this system of review and probing. It\'s no different, really, from believing that MPs should be scrutinised just as hard when they stand for things you believe in.
But there is a danger that big money, including the shady finances behind the climate change deniers, manages to hide from proper scrutiny, leaving only elected politicians and publicly funded experts out in the daylight. We need equality of scrutiny, a bright lamp shining on tax havens and in boardrooms, as well as legislatures.
In theory, that is provided by company law and the scrutiny of shareholders. But the owners of companies, the shareholders, stopped behaving like active owners a long time ago. Most people with shares have them through their pensions, and are probably unaware of what they own. Boards have become freer to go their own way; and managers have floated free of boards.
The Toyota apology is not a real comparison with the others because it was driven by a market collapse so sudden and catastrophic the company had no alternative. Will the relatives of those killed in malfunctioning cars ever get an inquiry into exactly which managers, engineers and cost-controllers were to blame, as bereaved families of servicemen are getting through the Iraq inquiry? Will we get names, dates and full details from BAE, as we would if we were discussing corrupt MPs?
In our culture the very idea seems outlandish. Yet if we have learned one thing in the past year it\'s surely that the actions of boards and managers can affect our lives as much, or more, than those of legislatures and ministers. The right wants a skewed, unbalanced world, in which anything that happens in the public sector can be exposed to merciless examination, but private sector life continues behind a dark velvet curtain. That isn\'t civilised. That isn\'t safe. Nobody, we learn, is above the law. But nobody with power should be above scrutiny, either.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]ans-bankers-parliament-finance
