Volte-Farce

This summer the weather may not have been roasting, but I’m sure quite a few MPs must have been sweating like mad, wondering exactly what sort of punishment they would receive in light of the expenses scandal. This week they found out. Never one to miss an easy target, when the scandal first broke I joined every political commentator and amateur blogger in the country in condemning the MPs actions as morally decedent and calling for major parliamentary reforms. It may seem odd then that I actually intend to defend the MPs this week. While it sounds like I’m contradicting myself I assure you that I hope that is not the case.

The reason I am defending the MPs is that I think the punishment imposed is completely unjust and unreasonable. If you don’t know, Sir Thomas Legg, the man charged with deciding the punishment, has decided that the best way of doing this is retrospectively imposing arbitrary limits on what an MP is allowed to claim per week on certain things, like gardening for example. He’s wrong. Admittedly the problem was that the rules in place were so vague and malleable that is was quite easy for an MP to get away with claiming for something that was not so much an expense as a luxury, like a moat. This is a mistake that has been made and we cannot go back and try to correct that mistake, what we can do however is change the rules to make them less open to exploitation. I’m sure such a rule change is on its way and I welcome it, but to charge MPs for breaking rules that did not exist when they broke them is completely absurd.

It probably won’t support my argument to liken this to the Nuremburg trials, but that’s what I’m going to do. At the Nuremburg trial after the Second World War, lacking any actual international law under which to charge the Nazi War Criminals the United Nations created a set of human rights laws and charged the Nazis for breaking them. The problem of course being that the Nazis had broken the laws before they had even been created. As such they were not actually criminals until the laws were created, which was after the ‘crimes’ had taken place. In any normal circumstance the idea that you can be charged for breaking a law that did not exist when you committed the act would be absurd, I do not see how a special case makes it any less so.

This of course is not to say that I think the MPs were in the right when they abused the system, they should still be punished for what amounts to stealing from the taxpayer. This punishment however should not simply take the form of arbitrary limits imposed retrospectively on certain ‘expenses’. Many of the MPs who have been forced to pay back money were not actually corrupt in the same way that some others were; they were simply claiming what they saw they were entitled to. They may be been wrong in that gardening is not so much an expense as a luxury, but it was allowed under the old system and I doubt many MPs really had the time to go through their claims and decide what counted as an expense and what didn’t, that was the job of the parliamentary body charged with regulating the expenses. The real criminals here are the MPs who were actively exploiting the system for their own gain, having one partner claim one house as a second home and the other partner claim the other house as a second home for example. These are the corrupt ones who ought to be punished, not under arbitrary and false limits, but with the full weight of the law. What they have done amounts to theft and they should not just be forced simply to pay back the money but actually punished so as to make an example of them. They should be stripped of their parliamentary seat at the very least.

I suspect that the absurdity of Sir Legg’s punishment will pass by largely unnoticed, mainly because public opinion is so against the MPs on this issue that only a fool would dare to try to defend them. However I think what Sir Legg’s punishment represents is a worrying tendency to simply accept the punishments imposed on wrong doers without wondering whether the punishment itself is appropriate. We must not allow our righteous indignation at the conduct of some MPs to cloud our judgment; it is clear to me that the punishment is unjust and we cannot allow ourselves to accept unjust punishments even when the crime is so appalling. The laws and ruling made by those charged with administering them must be seen to be just or the very integrity of the system is flawed. Tempting thought it is to take our anger out on these MPs, we must ensure that we meet out punishment in such a way as to be fair and reasonable. We cannot allow ourselves to sink to the level of the criminal when we attempt to punish the criminal, or the punishment becomes a petty game of points scoring, rather that the administering of justice.

So this is not a volte-face, I still believe that the MPs are in the wrong and believe that they should be punished. However I think that the punishments imposed are wrong simply because they work on the laughable principle that rules can be backdated to punish people for crimes that were not crimes when they were committed. It is a cliché to say that two wrongs do not make a right and yet in this case the cliché rings very true. If we try to punish a criminal without retaining our own reference point of justice, we become little more than criminals ourselves.

Lessons from History

70 years ago this week German troops marched into Poland, starting the bloodiest and deadliest war in mankind’s history. In the years before that fateful early autumn day, Germany had battled through depression and anarchy to become a European superpower once more. In the eyes of many Germans the Treaty of Versailles signed in the aftermath of the First World War, ostensibly to punish Germany for the War, was preventing Germany from rebuilding an economy badly damaged by defeat and economic depression. Widespread resentment of their mistreatment at the end of a war which many Germans believed had not really been lost harboured extremism.

In the midst of this wounded state, a young Austrian recovered from a mustard gas attack in a field hospital. He had joined the 16th Bavarian Reserve Regiment at the start of the war and went on to receive the Iron Cross First Class; one of the highest decorations a german soldier can receive. After the war he remained in the army and moved to Munich, where he joined the German Workers Party (DAP) in 1919. The DAP was one of many extreme parties to appear following the creation of the democratic Weimar Republic following the War. Its founder, Anton Drexler was a fervent nationalist and an Anti-Semite, Anti-Marxist and anti-Capitalist to boot. He believed that the Weimar Republic was out of touch with the German people and wanted a return to the good old days of the Imperial Reich. Our young Austrian changed the name of the party to the National Socialist German Workers Party (or the Nazis) and swiftly moved up the party structure. Soon he became leader of the party and, through the power of his oratory, made the party one of the largest in Munich. The name of this enigmatic Austrian war hero? Adolf Hitler.

In 1923 Hitler let a failed coup against the Bavarian government. While the coup massively damaged the party’s reputation, the public spectacle of his trial only increased Hitler’s popularity. During his one year in prison he wrote Mein Kampf in which he outlined his extreme, nationalist ideology. When he was released, on the back of his increased popularity, Hitler wet about rebuilding the Party, determined to win power legitimately through the democratic system he so hated.

Over the next decade, due in part to Hitler’s oratory and his appeal to the good old days before the War when Germany had been a major European power, the Nazi’s power grew until they controlled the largest single section of the vote in the Reichstag. By 1933 Hitler was Chancellor of the Wiemar Republic. The centre-right parties in power had tried to compromise with Hitler, believing that they could keep the political extremist under control. However Hitler refused to compromise and forced President Hindenburg to appoint his Chancellor.

It did not take long for Hitler to introduce Bill to make him the effective dictator of Germany. By July 1933 Hitler’s Nazis were the only legal party. Through political culls instigated by the SA, all political opposition was removed; Hitler was the Absolute ruler of Germany. Over the next 4 years Hitler’s Germany grew in wealth and power, openly flaunting the Treaty of Versailles. Despite clear signs of aggression, other nations did nothing to stop the growth of Germany. They thought they could negotiate with Hitler, they were wrong.

In 1939 Nazi Germany invaded Poland. Over the course of the next 6 years, 6 million Jews were ‘evacuated’ to camps in the east, where they were either worked of gassed to death. All told the war cost the lives of 70 million people, the majority of whom were civilians. The war led to the creation of the Nuclear Bomb, two of which were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, killing thousands and damaging the area with deadly radiation for years. At the Nuremberg trial, the Nazi officers on trial said that they were only following orders.

This is not an excuse. The Nazis never received the vote of the majority of German citizens; they ruled Germany not by the consent of the German people, but by the apathy of those who saw that Nazis for the monstrous affront to freedom that they were and did nothing. When Hitler’s foreign policy was so obviously warmongering and anti-Semitic, the world stood by and did nothing, not because they agreed with Hitler, but because standing up against evil would have been too hard, oo politically risky. Instead they attempted to compromise with Germany.

Evil is not something that can be compromised with. It must be stood against with unwavering conviction. If we learn anything from the Second World War, we learn that apathy in the face of unremitting evil is almost as bad as evil itself. While the monsters who tortured and killed Jews in the camps are unforgivably evil, what is more disturbing to the refusal by Germans, who simply followed the crowd and did what was easy, to think for themselves and see past the propaganda, to discover the true evil of the Nazis and stand against it. The responsibility for the atrocities of the Holocaust lies, at least in part, with those army officers who ‘were simply following orders’, because simply following orders is not good enough. We are all responsible for our actions, it is our responsibility to stand up against injustice, not simply fall in and go along with what everyone else is doing.

As rational humans being we have a responsibility to ourselves to stand up for what we believe to be right, if we do not then we give sanction to those who would commit acts as monstrous as those committed in the holocaust. If we sanction these acts, can we really claim to be any better than those who commit them? History is littered with examples of evil, committed because of the unthinking consent of people who should have known better. Conformity may be safe and it may be easy, but as free thinking, rational being, we should seek to do what is right, not what is easy. Evil is almost never in the majority, evil is the insanity of a few, sanctioned by the apathy of everyone else. The insane we cannot stop; the apathy we can. The consequences if we do not are painted vividly in history; the events of 70 years ago are only one example.