On the level

Thirty years ago, I helped to run local election campaigns for the Labour Party in Hackney, the London borough where I still live.  There were no large sums of money involved and the technology deployed was very basic, principally pencils and sheets of paper on which were printed names and addresses.  Mostly the campaign was legwork, going door-to-door in the early evenings and at the weekends, speaking to potential voters, identifying those whom you judged most likely to support your party, and then persuading these good citizens to come out on polling day and mark their ballot papers for your candidates.   Turnout in London local elections is generally below half of the eligible electorate.  Boroughs are divided up into around twenty wards, and in mine, which had three Councillors, to get elected you needed around 1,000 to 1,200 votes.  Local politics can be just as hotly contested as national politics, and during election campaigns many of the candidates and activists would work long hours, fuelled by coffee and adrenaline, having convinced themselves that if our candidates were to win, a giant step would be taken towards achieving a happy socialist future; conversely, if the opposing party were to win, it would constitute a major triumph for the malevolent forces of reaction.  My role, as I understood it, was to remain calm and focus attention on the mundane task of ensuring that just over one thousand residents, who had been identified as sympathetic to Labour, knew the date the election was taking place, the location of the polling station, and the names of our candidates.

In 1993, one of our three Labour Ward Councillors was arrested and charged with fraud.  His crime was relatively trivial, claiming a couple of hundred pounds of expenses for travel to meetings that he had not attended, but British judges take the view that elected officials who defraud the public of its own money should be made an example and deserve full punishment for the crime.  He pleaded guilty at his trial and was sentenced to six months in prison.  He was forced to resign his seat.  I was then tasked with managing a tricky by-election campaign to try to retain the seat at a time when the local party’s reputation had been badly damaged.  Nonetheless, turnout at by-elections is often even lower than at the routine scheduled elections, and I was able to secure 757 votes for Labour’s new candidate, which was sufficient to win the seat once again, thereby launching the political career of the MP who is now the Chair of the Parliamentary Standards Committee.  After one more election cycle, my paid work commitments made it difficult for me to continue in my voluntary campaign manager role, and I passed on my responsibilities to others. 

I have been thinking about the Councillor who went to prison over the past month, where the national news here has been dominated by tales of wrongdoing by the current Prime Minister, his family, and his staff.  It has been agreed by all sides that what took place at 10 Downing Street – the official residence of the Prime Minister and, co-incidentally, a royal gift to the first holder of that office, Robert Walpole, whose career was the subject of the well-crafted essay by David Hume to which I recently referred – during the periods of “lockdown” that have been imposed by the government during the course of the pandemic, was insensitive to public feeling and a matter of great regret.  It has not yet been determined by the police whether any of these activities were criminal, and not yet determined by Conservative MPs whether the ensuing scandal should prove terminal for the career of the Prime Minister.  In this essay, I have no intention of making public my views on the specifics of this case, but prefer instead to focus on the more general question of what standards of behaviour we should demand from elected politicians in a democracy. 

Those who consider themselves political realists, by which they tend to mean that they understand and take full account of the messy, compromised, and imperfect reality of day-to-day politics, will often point to Niccolò Machiavelli’s book The Prince (written around 1513) as the classic text that describes what a leader needs to do to hold on to power and govern effectively.  Machiavelli argues that it is better for leaders to be feared than to be loved, and that the pieties of personal morality should be ignored in favour of cold calculations of risk and advantage.  Machiavelli’s prince considers himself subject only to the laws of history, which teach that the strong and ruthless have the best chance of holding onto power.  It is an interesting and perceptive book – although less read than quoted, in my experience – but it must be remembered that the leaders to whom it was addressed – the Medici in Florence in the first instance, and then by extension a miscellany of Italian autocrats governing city-states – were almost always unelected: they were men who had gained power by inheritance, by marriage, or by force; and, therefore, men who cared about public opinion only in so far as popular support was necessary to supplement mercenary troops in fighting endless wars against neighbours and rivals, to maintain themselves in power.  Machiavelli wrote a much longer book about republican government, which discusses the importance of virtuous citizens for a strong state; but, in The Prince, he is not at all concerned with the accountability of rulers to those over whom they rule.

The situation of elected leaders, who hold office for a limited period only, is very different from that of an hereditary monarch or a usurpative prince.  The relationship between the ruler and the ruled is quite different: the people are no longer subjects of their leaders, but rather citizens who chose leaders from among their own.  Once elected, leaders are considered servants of the people, and not the other way around; as Walt Whitman observed in Leaves of Grass (1855), the democratic manners of the American people meant the President’s taking off his hat to them, not they to him.  The mandate to govern comes from those who voted leaders into office in the past and who might vote them out of office in the future.  There is no entitlement to gain office, nor to remain in office.  Whereas tyranny can be characterised as the rule of man and is thus subject to the vicissitudes of the character and temperament of the current leader, by contrast, democracy is the rule of law and elected leaders are themselves subject to the same rules as all other members of society.  No-one is above the law, for the law is above all.

My favourite illustration of what happens when this principle breaks down comes from the writings of contemporary America’s greatest moral philosopher.  In his song The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll, Bob Dylan describes a pointless murder that took place in Baltimore in 1963.  The killer, William Zanzinger enjoys multiple privilege – maleness, whiteness, and wealth – by comparison with his victim, Hattie Carroll, who is a poor, black woman.  Additionally, and importantly, Zanzinger has political connections – high office relations in the politics of Maryland.   The song laments Hattie Carroll’s untimely and unnecessary death, and William Zanzinger’s cold indifference to his action.  It is a tragic crime, but those of us who philosophise and who hope for a better society, are told very clearly by Dylan that the murder should not be the primary cause for our tears.  What matters more than the injustice of the crime is the injustice of a legal system that exempts the privileged from the due consequences of their actions.

The song’s final verse describes the trial:  In the courtroom of honor, the judge pounded his gavel, / To show that all’s equal and that the courts are on the Level / And that the strings in the books ain’t pulled and Persuaded, / And that even the nobles get properly handled / Once that the cops have chased after and caught ’em, / And that the ladder of law has no top and no bottom.  This is democratic justice, a society in which the ladder of law has no top and no bottom.  This is what equality before the law means.  Yet, this is not what transpires in this instance, for despite all that the court stands for the judge fails in his act of sentencing, when he: Stared at the person who killed for no reason, / Who just happened to be feelin’ that way without warnin’. / And he spoke through his cloak, most deep and distinguished, / And handed out strongly, for penalty and repentance, / William Zanzinger with a six-month sentence.   This, Dylan tells us, is the moment for our tears: when those who are politically powerful evade the due process of law and escape without penalty for their crimes. 

When my local Councillor went to prison for his fraudulent expense claims, I remember thinking that his prison sentence was harsh.  If he had been an ordinary citizen, he probably would have received a fine and a suspended sentence.  In those days, elected Councillors were unpaid and he did not have a job.  He spent a great deal of time on Council business which probably reduced his chance of finding paid work.  It is easy to see how he might have rationalised his fake expense claims, to ease his financial position, while he was using his time and energy to represent the interests of local citizens.  Now, however, I understand that the harshness of the sentence was indeed just.  If elected representatives think they will be treated softly by the police and the judges, then there is no incentive for them to follow the rules.  They are, because of their role, constantly targeted by the lobbying industry, funded by those whose interests might be materially affected by changes to government policies.  They are subject to temptation, in the form of inducements or bribes, by virtue of the role they wield in determining the details of new legislation, in the allocation of public contracts, and in the balance of the distribution of taxes and benefits.  They have been chosen as representatives of the public to oversee the good functioning of the public sector and to set the rules by which the private sector conducts itself.  For which reasons, it follows that the penalty for any form of infringement of the rules must be high, to provide sufficient incentive for them not to yield to temptation. 

It was a disgrace that William Zanzinger was sentenced only to six months in prison for manslaughter (in the real case, the original charge of murder was reduced to manslaughter and assault); whereas a sentence of six months for the Hackney Councillor who cheated the public out of a couple of hundred pounds seems wholly justified.  The sentence should match the crime, but also the standing of the criminal.   The higher someone rises in politics, the higher the standard to which they must be held; and, by corollary, the further their potential fall into disgrace, once that the cops have chased after and caught ’em.