John Major did not beat about the bush. In a speech this week to an Institute for Government conference marking the 30th anniversary of the Nolan report on standards in public life, the former prime minister went straight to the heart of the matter. “For many decades,” he said, “Britain enjoyed a global reputation for being free of corruption and bad practice. That is less true today. It is in our national interest to regain that reputation.”
That is indisputably true. But it is not just the global reputation that matters. It is also, at least as significantly, the domestic one. Trust in British public life has diminished, is diminishing and urgently needs to be rebuilt. Confidence in politics and government to change lives is draining away. As Sir John said, the trend needs to be reversed before the damage is “beyond salvage”. That point may, indeed, have been reached already.
This is an issue that transcends political parties. So there is no enduring virtue in pointing out that the Nolan committee had to be set up by Sir John precisely because of the Conservative sleaze scandals of the 1990s, the decade of David Mellor and Jonathan Aitken. Or in pointing out that most of the reputational damage highlighted in his speech was committed in more recent Tory years, under the shameful premiership of Boris Johnson in particular.
All of that is true. But Labour governments have not been without sins of their own – some of them serious – either in the past or more recently. It does public life no favours at all to turn this into a partisan issue. Both major parties (and smaller parties too) like to pretend that they alone are virtuous and that all blame rests with the others. But that is not true.
There is a real danger that the Starmer government and the Labour party are giving way to this self-deceit. Since they, they tell themselves, are good people trying to do good things, the system is safe and trust will be restored. That is not true either. It is the system that is at risk, and which needs to be rebuilt and safeguarded. The clock is ticking.
The Nolan report’s seven principles for public life – selflessness, integrity, objectivity, accountability, openness, honesty and leadership – provide a rock on which to rebuild. But, as Sir John’s speech underlines, the increasingly extensive network of ethical supervision, advice and enforcement within parliament and government is complex, fragmented, uneven and sometimes ineffective.
Labour’s 2024 manifesto promised some reforms, including the creation of an independent ethics and integrity commission across government. Yet the manifesto remained unclear on key points. These included whether the enforcement processes would be statutory, and whether the commission would replace the network of existing machinery or be grafted on to them in some way.
A year on from Labour’s election victory, the plan is still no clearer. The government seems to be stalling on the commission and is considering a more “principles-based” approach to regulation. Sir John thinks “stiffening up” Nolan is the key. But both approaches risk reinventing an only slightly better version of the “good chaps” system of regulation that broke down so badly under Mr Johnson. That is simply not good enough. Merely tweaking the system risks leaving it a scandal away from a fresh outbreak of public contempt for politics that can only help Nigel Farage.
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