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2 Integrity issues: a changing agenda Introduction A key premise of this book is that a step change occurred in the 1990s in the way the United Kingdom handled integrity issues. Values were re-examined and defined with greater precision. The structures underpinning these values were deliberately strengthened. New ethical institutions were created and political elites were obliged to address integrity issues in a more systematic and sustained way than ever before. In this chapter we show how these changes were the consequence of the country’s longer-term approach
13 Integrity issues and devolution The advent of devolution, which brought a new layer of governance to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland in the late 1990s, has generated somewhat different provisions for regulating standards across the three jurisdictions. In this chapter we explore the divergent integrity arrangements in the several parts of the United Kingdom and evaluate the effects of these institutional arrangements. The CSPL was set up before devolution occurred and its remit initially covered the whole of the United Kingdom. However, as the devolved
12 Integrity issues in local government: the rise and fall of the Standards Board for England Introduction Local government is one area of British politics where, rightly or wrongly, there has long been a suspicion that sub-standard behaviour and perhaps even outright corruption was common. Since the 1970s, often under the pressure of such scandal or crisis, central government has imposed significant new controls to improve ethics at local level. In this it has paralleled broader patterns of central control over local government in many other ways.1 The process
Integrity issues have become an important item on the British political agenda since the 1990s when ‘sleaze’ prompted John Major to set up the Committee on Standards in Public Life. The book analyses the range of ethical problems which confront the political system and the efforts to address them. It addresses the tightening of standards in response to misconduct in Parliament, in central and local government and in the devolved systems. It also addresses perennial ethical questions such as lobbying and party funding which continue to trouble the United Kingdom as they do other major democracies. The chief purpose of the book is to understand the regulatory dilemmas which face policy-makers as they struggle to produce new machinery and codes to tackle the risk of misconduct. Thus we examine, for example, the choice between self-regulation and independent regulation, decisions about the amount of transparency required of office-holders, and how to achieve proportionality in the balance between perceived problems and regulatory burdens. We also attempt to assess the impact of more than two decades of ethical engineering on the office holders and the public.
3 Building the United Kingdom’s integrity machinery: the role of the Committee on Standards in Public Life Introduction The previous chapter analysed the United Kingdom’s traditional approach to integrity issues, identifying in particular the reluctance of the political class from the 1920s to the 1990s to treat the subject of ethics and integrity systematically or to learn lessons from episodes of misconduct in public life. Eventually, this approach became untenable. The eruption of the cash-for-questions scandal demanded a new strategy which began in 1994 with
This book is a social history of northern soul. It examines the origins and development of this music scene, its clubs, publications and practices, by locating it in the shifting economic and social contexts of the English midlands and north in the 1970s. The popularity of northern soul emerged in a period when industrial working-class communities were beginning to be transformed by deindustrialisation and the rise of new political movements around the politics of race, gender and locality. The book makes a significant contribution to the historiography of youth culture, popular music and everyday life in post-war Britain. The authors draw on an expansive range of sources including magazines/fanzines, diaries, letters, and a comprehensive oral history project to produce a detailed, analytical and empathetic reading of an aspect of working-class culture that was created and consumed by thousands of young men and women in the 1970s. A range of voices appear throughout the book to highlight the complexity of the role of class, race and gender, locality and how such identities acted as forces for both unity and fragmentation on the dance floors of iconic clubs such as the Twisted Wheel (Manchester), the Torch (Stoke-on-Trent), the Catacombs (Wolverhampton) and the Casino (Wigan).
1 Introduction: regulating public ethics in the United Kingdom The scope of the book A major element of political life in the United Kingdom in the last twenty years has been the growing focus on integrity issues. Confidence in the probity of a country’s governing arrangements and personnel is a vital part of a healthy democracy and for the most part the British political system has been seen as relatively free from corruption. Yet since the so-called ‘cash-for-questions’ affair erupted over John Major’s government in the early 1990s a number of question marks
6 The House of Lords and reluctant reform Introduction In the last two chapters we explored the handling of integrity issues in the House of Commons and the changes made by the new arrangements for administering expenses through the IPSA. Although standards issues in the House of Lords have not generated the controversy that they have aroused in relation to the House of Commons, the regulation of conduct there has also been subject to critical scrutiny and substantial reform in recent years. Box 6.1 gives a timeline of changes to the House of Lords standards
integrity issues has come to the fore as a result of experiments in private/public cooperation. Thus the proposal to allow general practitioners to commission medical service has created the potential for a new and expanded sphere of decision-making with potential for conflict of interest if not outright corruption. The example of GP commissioning and private/public partnerships raises the question of whether the definition of ‘public life’ in the early years of the debate about standards in the UK was somewhat artificial. Not only is the public/private sector boundary
closer to the bottom of the TSMIT should be the focus both ‘from an exploitation perspective and in relation to integrity issues’. A Joint Standing Committee on Migration review of the 457 visa in 2007 also recommended the maintenance of a focus on skilled occupations for entry under the visa (JSCM 2007: xvii), while the Immigration Minister at the time, Senator Chris Evans, noted that low-skilled immigration was more likely to bring in immigrants from source countries with low levels of English who ‘are more capable of being exploited, less understanding of the