News 9th October 2024

How damaging is ‘giftgate’? | Ben Worthy & Michele Crepaz

by Guest

Ben Worthy and Michele Crepaz dig into the Labour gifts row, saying that while Starmer may not have broken any rules the story creates difficulties for the PM. They suggest that reforms to the ethics system need to be visible to shift public perceptions.

Keir Starmer is in trouble over lobbying. Following a drumbeat of stories over his seeming love of freebies, questions and scrutiny are swirling around clothing bought, glasses worn and flats borrowed. All of these gifts have been declared and made transparent, and so are within the rules. But that is not the problem, or the point.

It was already known that Starmer accepted more freebies than any other MP and accepted £82,000 of them in the last parliament (of which a third came from Labour Party donor Lord Alli). You can see an interactive list here. Questions spread to cover other ministers and MPs over clothing and hospitality and a whole range of gifts totalling £700,000. Analysis by Tortoise found that ‘The shadow cabinet has accepted more than £220,000 worth of free tickets and gifts for themselves or staff over the course of the last parliament’ including ‘Glastonbury, the Proms, the British Grand Prix, Cricket, Wimbledon’. For those feeling cynical, the level of freebies appears to have increased in line with Labour’s chances of winning. Stamer has now paid back more than £6000 worth of gifts and hospitality, which has been taken as a signal that something was wrong.

How damaging is it? The scandal has set off a wave of headlines and dominated discussion at the Labour conference and has, according to their own resignation letter, convinced one Labour MP to leave the party. YouGov found that a significant proportion of voters are aware of it to some degree, with 11% watching very closely and 23% fairly closely.

They also disapprove of what they see, as 64% think it is ‘somewhat’ or ‘completely unacceptable’ for MPs to accept gifted tickets to football matches and concerts, and 75% think it is rarely or never acceptable for the Prime Minister to accept gifts from businesses or organisations. Voters see this through the lens of the PM, and MPs, earning too much.

Unlike the MPs expenses’ scandal, there was no secrecy. Labour ministers reassured those watching that the transparency of the system acts as a safeguard. Angela Rayner spoke of how ‘people can look it up and see what people have had donations for, and the transparency is really important’ and another minister praised the fact that it can be seen what ‘donations were for, who they were from, and that’s there for the public to see’. But, like with the expenses scandal, the problem is about the gap between what the rules say and what voters think.

The first difficulty for Labour is that the ‘gift’ scandal reinforces what the public already believes.  Voters in this poll were already most likely to choose ‘dishonest’ when asked to describe the government before the gift coverage, with phrases such as ‘only interested in themselves’, and ‘the same as the rest…’ felt by 31%, including 22% of Labour voters. This fits with a wider and longer decline of public trust in politicians since 2019. Nat Cen found that ‘trust and confidence in government are as low as they have ever been’ with fewer voters believing politicians would put nation before self-interest, or tell the truth in a tight spot.

This is then layered atop a further problem for the Prime Minister personally. Since the days of Boris Johnson, Keir Starmer has taken the moral high ground on questions of integrity. In January 2024 he sympathised with voters, and said they were ‘right to be anti-Westminster, right to be angry about what politics has become’. In the same speech he then promised to ‘clean up politics’:

No more VIP fast lanes. No more kickbacks for colleagues. No more revolving doors between government and the companies they regulate. I will restore standards in public life with a total crackdown on cronyism.

He then warned politicians to ‘spare me the self-serving excuses, they just won’t wash’. None of what Starmer has done involves kickbacks, cronyism or some of the vast questions around Covid-era contracts. But it sits uneasily with his having previously taken the moral high ground, and the SNP have called for an investigation. Like most politicians in the UK, Starmer has never been seen as particularly trustworthy, and the revelations will only worsen this.

So, can the government seize back control of the integrity agenda? After all, Starmer has promised a series of changes that will mean ‘setting the highest of standards in public life’. The Labour manifesto pledged a new ethics and integrity commission, strengthening the power of the Independent Adviser on Ministerial Interests and limiting MPs’ second jobs.

So far, there has been some moves towards change. Since the scandal, the Prime Minister and other senior ministers have committed to not accepting donations for clothes, and to closing a loophole that meant that ministers faced less scrutiny of interests and hospitality than MPs. MPs have limited second jobs in the Commons, and the promised Commons Modernisation Committee, which has now been established, has begun considering possible further limits, including potentially limiting MPs also working for the media.

The details on the biggest change, the new ethics and integrity commission, will be a matter of, as Cabinet Office minister Pat McFadden has said, ‘show not tell’. This means, presumably, that we’ll only know what it looks when the government announces it.

But for change to happen, as one scholar pointed out, a policy needs to be ‘visible’ and ‘traceable’. So far, the lobbying changes haven’t done enough, and aren’t seen enough by the public, to bring changed behaviour or altered public perceptions. There are lots of unanswered questions about how far proposed changes will go, and if they’ll be enough. Public views are deeply set, and deeply negative, and it will take radical, high-profile changes to both change the system, and be seen to change it.

The danger is that Starmer will be seen as tinkering, until the next lobbying scandal comes along, and reinforces, even more strongly, what the public already thinks.

By Dr Ben Worthy, Lecturer in Politics, Birkbeck, University of London, and Dr Michele Crepaz, Vice Chancellor Illuminate Fellow, School of History, Anthropology, Philosophy and Politics, Queen’s University Belfast.