What is the definition of an opportunist? Someone who has no fixed principles but jumps at every opportunity to make themselves look good.
This is a week of opportunism in politics, and it is still only Tuesday.
On Sunday Danny Alexander went on the Andrew Marr Show to announce his new principled opposition to tax evasion. He wants to make it a crime to aid and abet any individual who is trying to hide their true tax position from HMRC. This comes in the wake of the HSBC scandal which broke last week. A Tory peer and former minister was at the helm of HSBC when it was using its Swiss arm to assist British tax-payers to “skim” their tax liability. It came as no surprise to anybody that bankers and accountants were advising and assisting rich people to avoid and evade tax. But it seems to have surprised Danny Alexander. What DID come as news to me, and to most of the innocent public, is that assisting a criminal was not a criminal offence. We all know what would have happened to us if we had tried to assist or cover up someone who tried to claim housing benefit illegally, or claimed other benefits illegally.
But it is one law for the rich, and one law for the rest of us. So now Danny Alexander wants to make it illegal for accountants and bankers to aid felons. Big deal. When you have been in power for nearly five years, and you and your coalition partners have been vocally denouncing aggressive tax avoidance, the rest of us expect you to have actually done something about it.
Yesterday another scandal broke. Jack Straw and Malcolm Rifkind have been caught in an undercover scam, offering their services for hire. Rifkind can get you introductions to ambassadors. Straw can help you get what you want, and charges only £5000 per day for his services.
So what does the courageous Miliband have to say on the subject? He wants to table a parliamentary debate proposing that MP’s should be banned from holding directorships and acting as consultants while in office.
The horse has bolted, and here comes Miliband to the rescue with his barn-door closing strategy.
As I have argued elsewhere on this site, genuine democracy, workers’ democracy, requires our representatives to work for the common good, not to line their own pockets. Pay them the national average wage. If that is not enough for them, then good: they can work their little hearts out making the national average wage enough to live on comfortably.
So let’s ignore these publicity-grabbing politicians and move towards a genuine democracy, a workers’ democracy, where the people’s representatives genuinely represent the people.