rowland manthorpe dot com

I’ve written before about the death of honour, noting both its ghostly remnants and its usurpation by accountability. In the wake of the parliamentary expenses scandal, Nick Robinson’s blog offers a perfect example both of trends:

… for the past 20 years or so MPs have behaved in precisely the way that they have legally prevented other groups from behaving. Trade unionists, doctors, the police and many many others used to argue that they could be trusted to manage their own affairs. Few would argue that now.

Yet the House of Commons has run itself as if Members of Parliament can and should be assumed to be honourable and, by implication, better than those they govern.

Robinson suggests that, henceforth:

Honour in politics is something that, as in the rest of life, will have to earned, proved and upheld and not merely assumed.

But honour that has to be interrogated is not honour at all, as Montaigne knew only too well. It is accountability.

Accountability is different from honour in that it expects nothing from its subjects. Or rather, it expects only wrongdoing. This really is the death knell for the idea of “honourable members”, because it denies MPs autonomy, the right to make their own decisions.

Ironic, really, that politicians should be forced to suffer, as a result of their own sins, the loss of self-government that the rest of us have been putting up with for years.