“Politics’ is the prism through which power is refracted. Its assertion doesn’t begin at ballot boxes, but in corporate boardrooms, public schools and private members’ bars. ”
Image: Boris Johnson and Dominic Rabb, via Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
The recent outbreak of related scandals involving our elected representatives appears to have shone an unwelcome light on the chronic levels of ‘sleaze’ to be found in the halls of power. Yet while lobby journalists have been enraptured by this notion of politicians receiving undue influence from private interests at the expense of democratic popular consent, the underlying causes and wider consequences of this misconduct remains largely obscured.
Let’s begin by tackling the easiest layer of obfuscation to remove. There is a marked semantic difference between describing the acts committed as ‘sleaze’ – a euphemistic expression that only gestures towards an indeterminate and individual miscreancy – as opposed to the more precise ‘corruption’, a term signifying concerted professional dishonesty and exploitation of power for personal or political gain.
The observable efforts to supplant ‘corruption’ with ’sleaze’ is very telling of a desire among the political class to prevent a lucid grasp of what is actually occurring here: namely that the existence of endemic corruption belies a system that is wholly permissive of such acts, to the extent that it cannot reasonably function on its own terms without it.
But sifting through terminology is far from enough to comprehend what’s really happening here. These breaches of ‘parliamentary standards’ – and the reaction to them – reveal far more about how political power is constituted in government, in Parliament, the wider British state and beyond.
To gain a full understanding we should observe the ways in which the focus on ‘sleaze’ and ‘corruption’ centres the actions of politicians as individuals in lieu of any structural analysis. This serves to absolve the political system as a whole by only condemning the individual moral failings of the actors within it.
This is indicative of a wider tendency – by no means the sole preserve of the political right – to individualise politics and achieve systemic absolution by portraying politicians not as ideologues whose purpose is to advance a certain political project, but as a neutral public representative, whose only variable attributes are those of competency and morality.
We have seen much of this lately: witness also the response to the murder of David Amess, in which MPs’ supposed duty as public servants was repeatedly reconstituted by the popular press (and by MPs themselves). Missing from these passive eulogies, of course, was Amess’ track record of This, again, served to neutralise the political agency of the House of Commons, reducing its scope to the perfunctory administration of a settled ideological will.
So there is a disavowal, across the aisles of the Commons, of the true meaning of what we call ‘politics’.
Discussion of scandal and sleaze is used as a device which re-frames politics as something concerned primarily with politicians ability to play within the rules that the state itself has set. As such, politicians are judged not on their ideological positions, but on their ability to carry out rudimentary functions defined by the boundaries of possibility as mediated by the existing composition of the state.
The ultimate consequence here is the suppression of any notion of class struggle within Westminster, and by extension the wider state and society as a whole.
Political corruption is indicative of the reality that capital and its outriders are the ultimate guarantors of parliamentary affairs – and that this influence on the behaviour, conduct and actions of MPs far outweighs that of the electorate.
So the biggest obfuscation involved in this concept of ‘sleaze’ is that there exists any other possible formulation of Parliament in which this balance of power could be redressed.
This framing of politics as the supremacy of competence and ‘moral standing’ speaks the silence that deafens Westminster, hiding its political truth in plain sight. It belies the notion that Parliament is not a site of political conflict at all: it is the place in which the broad political consensus of the capitalist state celebrates and expresses itself. Rather than it being ‘the place where politics happens’, as so many lobby hacks and politicos giddily claim, it is in reality the only place in which politics doesn’t happen.
In this context, the conduct of the individual personalities who carry out the duties of the government scarcely matters, for the workings of the state and the processes of capital are inextricable. If politicians function – directly or indirectly, willingly or unwittingly – solely as advocates of capital, then corruption is merely a perverse expression of this core function: the inherent inhumanity of profit-before-people that haunts all government action taken to its logical conclusion.
This whole ‘sleaze’ affair is thus only a symptom of the wider sickness of British politics: the intolerable level of influence that capital has over ostensibly-democratic government affairs, the complicity of the political class, and the undemocratic powers to which they are ultimately beholden. The suggestion that this affair starts and ends with badly behaved, ‘sleazy’ MPs reveals none of this.
This considered, it would appear that many accidental truths were contained within Laura Kuenssberg’s blithe dismissal of this affair as ‘a proper Westminster village story’ that’s ‘really important if you care about how MPs’ actions and behaviour is monitored.’. The implication here is that to anybody else, it’s little more than insider gossip that’s of scant concern or consequence to the voting public.
In truth, the material consequences of Westminster anti-politics can be found in remote corners of the state, dissipated to the provinces and the underclasses. As Felix Bazalgette writes, ‘[the] many different terms for corruption don’t only represent the shuffling around of tokens between elites, but are signs of actual harm done to real people – deteriorating public services, terrible jobs, expensive, unhealthy housing, more illness and earlier deaths.’
‘Politics’ is the prism through which power is refracted. Its assertion doesn’t begin at ballot boxes, but in corporate boardrooms, public schools and private members’ bars. Its consequences don’t end in the House of Commons, but in the stomachs of starving children, the pockets of destitute workers, the desperation of drowned and displaced peoples. There are incalculable scandals borne from our political system, but ‘sleaze’ occupies a lowly place among them.
If the crisis engulfing the Tory government from multiple scandals is to mean anything, it must result in a true reckoning with the whole political system.
