Thoughts from London

They sell their honours, we our honour
You can’t trust politicians, can you! Pack your bags and leave the country hoping that nobody will pinch the family silver or some passing asylum seeker would not break into the bar and pass out in the shrubbery.
Return a month later and what do you find. It’s the bloody politicians who have been at it, not Eastern Europeans bolting with your mobile phone from your restaurant table.

True, they have not been at their usual games, accusing each other of failed promises, who did what to whom and whether Tony Blair will hand over power before time or hang on until the last day like dear old Chandi who seems to have now lost some of security heavies and the armed corps on wheels.

This time around it is not just one or two dubious politicians who have been caught with their pants down. I don’t mean literally of course, unless you were a Scot all kiltered-up – or is it down.

This time it has been like a collective striptease where all three major political parties appear to have been well and truly caught without even a fig leaf for cover.

In the old days the striped suits at that exclusive Mayfair club would have spluttered into their port and suffered apoplexy at the thought of Her Majesty’s Government and Opposition cheating over such sacred institutions as a peerage and a seat in the House of Lords or a knighthood that would have promptly turned the recipient into a Sir Humphrey Appleby with a stiff upper lip.

But today, by gad sir, all sorts of blighters who have never stepped on the grass at Eton and Harrow or got beyond the gates of Oxford and Cambridge are sitting in the hallowed seats where the great and the good of the British Empire once sat.

Such is the way of political corruption and the give and take of this business that those with a couple of pounds to spare who dropped the ruddy notes in the party collection box of a Sunday could be elevated to the House of Lords or have themselves tapped on the shoulder at Buckingham Palace with a sword that has seen better days and told to rise like Sir Galahad.

At least in the days of yore men of gallantry who fought on the side of the sovereign -- and if he was too rotund, somewhere near enough -- would be awarded a well-deserved knighthood.

When Britannia ruled the waves those who were knighted had at least lost a leg at Waterloo. Today you get one for losing a suitcase at Waterloo Station.

So it has come to this. What a sorry pass. Every blighter who could turn out a horrendously hot curry powder or a chicken tikka masala is awarded a knighthood or is kicked into the Lords like being kicked into touch. Well actually he has been touched for a million or two smackers for the good of the party, in it.

Okay, so what’s new you might justifiably ask, especially if you are living in Sri Lanka where political shenanigans are provided as a daily diet for the delectation of a public that could hardly afford two egg hoppers leave alone chicken tikka.Surely Colombo is like a continuous political circus where front liners swing from party to party like chimpanzees in a fast disappearing Indonesian rain forest.

And what of those political jugglers, yes those who do those tremendous balancing acts with free market policies and socialist chinthanas and produce a chimera as fascinating as a cabal of Cabraals.

Just as I was leaving Colombo they were advertising some Chinese circus that was to hit town. You could bet all the tea in China to pirated DVDs at some posh Colombo supermarket that we could produce political con artistes who could make 10% commissions disappear into secret bank accounts faster than you could say Suppiah Tamilselvan.

What happened over here, now the subject of investigations by committees of the House of Commons and the police, is that rich party supporters have been giving -- or made to give -- money to their respective parties as “loans.”

This circumvents a 2001 rule introduced by the Blair government itself. The Political Parties Elections and Referendums Act require donations above £5000 to be declared.

However it does not require donors to declare any loans that they might make if they charge an unspecified commercial interest rate. Well if the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats could do it why not Labour.
Why not indeed! So it has emerged that 12 donors lent Labour almost £14 million last year. What went on before will hopefully surface later.

Curiously enough four of the donors had their names put up for peerages. Fortunately for Britain there are still checks and balances. Their nominations were blocked by the House of Lords Appointments Commission that approves new peerages.

What kicked off the whole row over “honours for sale” was that Downing Street had failed to disclose to the Lords Commission that three of its current nominees for peerages had made secret donations to party funds and some of Mr. Blair’s projects.

But it is not only peerages that have been up for grabs. Other honours such as knighthoods seem to have been liberally dispersed. Arise Sir Saffron of Curry Lane! Now parliamentary bodies and the police are falling over each other to question party officials and possibly even Prime Minister Blair himself, that man who promised to make politics whiter than white.
Could you imagine that happening in Colombo? Any policeman who has the courage to question the president or prime minister -- for that matter, any minister -- could perhaps expect a nice holiday in the Jaffna peninsula. No reason for politicians and business types in Sri Lanka to worry over such trifles. Our political leaders, ministers and assorted other busy bodies have been giving away such things for years.

True, we might not have peerages to give or, for that matter, knighthoods though we do have many hoods that operate in the night, breaking up hotels and nightclubs and thrashing whoever gets in their way.
Why only a couple of months ago somebody was offering me an editorship for a pittance and I had not even a ministerial relative. Well not one I would like to admit in public anyway.

For decades now some in our business community have been donating money to all parties. You know like betting on all the horses in a race. Somebody is bound to win. As a donor you then ask for your pound of flesh -- a lucrative contract here, a couple of directorships there, one for your in-laws and another for your out-laws.

Why not a few acres of prime state land that is not theirs to give anyway, to build a nice golf course for the rich and the flighty or a 1,000 perches elsewhere for an Indian investor in return for several fists full of dollars.
Why, the possibilities are enormous. Naturally when nobody really knows who contributed to which party and how much, which party leader lined his or her pockets with political donations, what belongs to the State and the people could be given away as freely as Chinese takeaways.

Well if you give me a buth curry and five pounds when I’m down and out in London then I’ll give you a few contracts when I hold the serving spoon. It is as simple as that. And we do so openly and without the slightest sense of shame or remorse. Well, they sell their honours. We sell our honour.

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