No more tinkering – root and branch reform of how politicians are held to account is now essential

There is rightly huge public demand that Mandelson and those who saw fit to appoint him face meaningful accountability. 

But former Prime Minister, Gordon Brown’s intervention over the weekend that it must also lead to a rewiring of how political integrity is regulated and policed in the UK is absolutely spot on. We must take this moment to address the cancer at the heart of our politics where the public interest is too easily perverted by money, cosy networks and cronyism while the guardrails in place are desperately inadequate.

Despite promising to restore trust in politics, the government’s approach so far has been lacklustre at best. Rather than undertaking bold reforms recommended by reviews personally encouraged by Keir Starmer in opposition (both Gordon Brown’s A New Britain and Dominic Grieve’s Governance Project) and outlined by constitutional and governance experts, the government has consistently opted for tweaks to a system badly in need of an overhaul. 

Its response to the Mandelson scandal cannot afford to fall into the same category – with a few minor changes to the vetting or appointments processes. With just 14% of the public trusting politicians, and only 4% thinking they do what is best for their country, this has gone beyond tinkering.

In the immediate term the government must use the Hillsborough Law – currently before Parliament – to act ambitiously to:

• Ensure the new misconduct in public office offence is as robust as possible and remove the current serious loopholes 
• Put the Ethics and Integrity Commission and other standards regulators and their codes on a statutory footing, and provide the Commission with meaningful powers to conduct investigations into egregious cases such as the serial failures exposed by the Mandelson affair.
• Ensure ethics codes contain provisions that police the revolving door with the private sector properly and tackle the UK’s woeful management of conflicts of interest – with the UK meeting just 36% of OECD criteria on managing conflicts compared to an OECD average of 76%.

The government must also make other crucial and bold changes.

Take lobbying transparency: if ministers and special advisors had been forced to disclose meetings including informal communications, how much sooner could we have picked up Mandelson’s engagement with Epstein?

But the government has failed to respond for over 18 months to the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs (PACAC) recommendations on lobbying reform – recommendations made after conducting post-legislative scrutiny of the widely criticised 2014 Lobbying Act.

Recommendations accepted by the Rishi Sunak government to create a central transparency database with monthly release of data have been effectively binned by the current government. 

More transparency on its own will not be enough. The crisis in public trust is so deep, and the consequences of disengagement across the British public so serious, that the government must be looking at far more ambitious ways to give ordinary people a greater say in political decision-making. 

There is widespread and growing agreement from William Hague to Gordon Brown that the government needs to consider mechanisms for citizens juries or assemblies. These mechanisms are crucial to re-engaging an infuriated electorate.

There must also be policies that ensure fairer access to politicians and officials so that government policy making isn’t captured by a narrow group of businesses or private interests. It cannot be right that government tech policy for instance is largely set by engagement with Big Tech, and government financial policy by engagement with financial interest groups. 

As Nigel Boardman called for after the Greensill scandal, those who do not have privileged access and those most affected by policies must be brought into policy making – through more inclusive consultations, greater use of citizen participation mechanisms, and a focus on diversity of stakeholders. 

The task of restoring trust by root and branch political integrity reforms must now be treated as one of the most urgent priorities – not one that can be kicked a little further down the line as the government gets on with ‘delivering’. The threat to democracy of failing to act is frighteningly real.