‘All on the make’

(I’m told I may need to give a bit of context: Conway is the Tory MP who employed his son to do approximately nothing and was suspended by his fellow MPs; ‘the Speaker’ is the bloke in the silly gown who sits in the middle of the House of Commons and says ‘order, order’ in a pathetically weak way. He was elected as a Labour MP; he’s called Michael Martin, MP for Glasgow North East. Guardian ‘Leader’ of 26/2/08: “his personal expenses, which are large, probably excessive, have been badly managed and are not as public as they should be. He has certainly pushed his luck. But at no point does he seem to have broken any rules. The amount of money wasted is shocking.” One example: his wife claimed £4k in taxi fares in a year).

I was out ‘canvassing’ on Saturday. Not sure what the word means. What I do know is most people are remarkably alright about being pestered. One does one’s best; smile, engage. I’m less pushy about finding out what people vote than the Labour Party would like. But even so, I’m surprised by how reasonable nearly everyone is.

This Saturday parts of two conversations stuck with me. They were about politicians being on the make. Both were with people that I think were basically Labour supporters; ‘were’ as in had been. There are of course quite a lot of ex-Labour voters around at the moment, both because of long term disaffection with Labour in Hull, a.k.a. ‘the Council’; and because of rather more recent but pretty entrenched disaffection with ‘the Government’.

And now there’s this. We didn’t talk names, it wasn’t just Derek Conway and ‘the Speaker’. It’s happened before of course. And so recently there was all the stuff about money for various Labour internal campaigns. But Conway and ‘the Speaker’; they seem worse - they and/or their families were personally benefitting, and very handsomely. The taxi bill reminded me of Cherie’s hairdressing bill in the election campaign. So, these two people didn’t say very much really; they weren’t nasty, they sort of said ‘I’m not saying you (that’s me) are necessarily like that’; they were almost sad, regretful, but not about what the politicians had done, but rather about how they were feeling about it.

I don’t think they wanted to be disaffected, they didn’t want to dis-believe in the best intentions of other (frail) human beings. I think they were disappointed to be feeling this way as grown up’s, middle aged, not posh, not pretentious people.... people who had expected more and found themselves.... well, again, disappointed. It is not about legality. And I think there’s a special sting here for Labour. Conway, he’s a Tory; we know what they are like; they’ve been ensuring their own continued well-being at the expense of others for generations. But a trade unionist, a working man... we expect so much more because they ought to know how much of a betrayal having your nose in the trough is for people who come from the same place.

Don’t give up hope. Not everyone falls in love with the money.