Archive for January 11th, 2008
11th January 2008
The £103,000 question
No politician is perfect. We’re human beings who, by definition, make mistakes and misjudgements, have bad days and have fits of forgetfulness like everyone else. As such, even Cabinet Ministers should be forgiven for the occasional demonstration of human imperfection. But Peter Hain’s defence - if it can be so described - that his campaign was in a state of chaos simply won’t wash. Seventeen separate donations, some of which were re-routed through a think-tank which nobody has ever heard of and which has never produced any reports, many of which were personally solicited by Peter Hain, coming to a grand total of £103,000 cannot be explained away as ‘administrative error’ or temporary amnesia. We should take at face value the claim that nobody set out to conceal the truth. But there is a continuum which begins with ordinary incompetence, which when people get away with it, soon becomes complacency, then arrogance, and finally a wilful disregard to the rules and total disdain for the public right to know.
Peter Hain should have known that when politics and money collide, it is politics that usually comes off worst. That’s why we introduced rules about transparency. When money changes hands between businessmen and politicians, we need to see the hands to check there are no strings.
Now that we know some of Hain’s backers we see revealed the political journey which he has made. To accept money from Isaac Kaye, a man, who according to the Guardian, bankrolled the pro-apartheid National Party in South Africa and was caught up in a “cash-for-influence” political scandal there as a result, who was found guilty in the US of breaching workers’ rights by banning trade unions, and, most despicably of all, whose company was charged by the Serious Fraud Office of deliberately defrauding the NHS in England of millions and is now under investigation for the same in Wales as announced by Edwina Hart this week, is simply unacceptable from an elected representative. Let’s not beat about the bush here: money defrauded from the NHS is money that should have been used saving lives not feathering Mr Kaye and his other directors’ nests. That the Secretary of State for Wales should think it fit to accept a penny from a man such as this is to betray every principle that the Labour Party and Mr Hain himself once held dear. It is a hypocrisy on grand scale - no wonder there was no rush to register it.
The Prime Minister has a simple choice now - does he want a future for honest politics in this country or does he want a future for Mr Hain, as it’s patently clear he cannot have both.