In Italy in 1992 the entrapment in corruption of leaders of all the main political parties – the Craxi Socialists as well as the Mafia-connected Christian Democrats – spread like wildfire entangling the whole political class in a cataclysmic showdown of public outrage and disgust. Out of the wreckage emerged a few heroes who had taken on the corrupt and reviled Establishment, notably di Pietro, and what was hailed at the time as a new start in Italian politics. Is this about to be reproduced here? There are striking parallels in the process of catharsis: public disbelief at the scale of greed and immoral self-seeking, MPs in denial, an uncontrolled outpouring of public rage, enforced payback, mounting determination to prosecute the most heinous offenders, the liquidation of the old-style political class….and the birth of a new political order with clean hands (mani pulite). But there are differences here in the UK which may lead to a different conclusion.

Whilst in Italy in the 1980-90s the very function of political decision-making was seen to be tainted to its core, in Britain the hysteria has broken out over MPs’ allowances which, though some revelations are utterly shocking, are not on the same scale as tricking the country into an illegal war, subverting democracy through secret and possibly corrupt deals with corporate and other interests, using State power to control citizens’ fundamental freedoms, or using contacts within the governing machine to land lucrative jobs or contracts within the financial-industrial-military nexus. MPs’ expenses have got far more attention because they are much more easily understood and have been exposed at a time when millions of people are struggling to keep jobs and homes. Bit it is to be hoped that the enormous wave of anger, now it has been generated, will feed across into demanding that the same transparency and accountability shall apply to the real strategic issues of State, not merely the brazen misdemeanours of some MPs.
If so, the prospect could open of nothing less than a new political class arising from the ashes. there is certainly need for it, indeed also room for it. Britain over the last 30 years has become in essence a one-party State, with both the main parties as creatures of a single power bloc representing the banking and corporate interests. Both New Labour and the Tories have cravenly supported deregulation and privatisation, a flexible labour market (anti-union, rapid hire and fire, weakened labour conditions), the glorification of wealth and inequality, and an authoritarian civil order. As a result, half the electorate has been disenfranchised for perhaps half a century if the Tories win the next general election. The nation cries out for a pro-accountability, pro-public services, pro-equality, anti-war, anti-privatisation party. This could be its moment.
But it will require vigorous and determined leadership to turn the boiling, but still misdirected, anger into this transformation. The main avenue must be bursting open the channels of internal democracy within both Parliament and the Labour Party which have been so effectively nailed down by the ever tightening centralisation of power within No.10 and the party leadership. But this will not automatically happen, far from it. It is as well to remember that out of the massive upheaval of the French Revolution a French democracy did not arise, but Napoleon Bonaparte, and out of the wipe-out of the old Italian political class in the 1990s an effective ‘clean hands’ Italian democracy did not arise, but Silvio Berlusconi. If there was ever a time for the British social democratic Left to seize the moment, this is it.

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