This election proves Labour and Tory MPs are two sides of same coin

If this was really the first time the Labour leader had just considered the possibility that Westminster politics might just be rotten to the core is he really the man we want to trust with running the country for the next five years?

Where has he been hiding? For the rest of us living here in the real world the shameful betting revelations have been just the latest in a long line of scandals which have tarnished the reputations of those who stalk the corridors of power in London. Of course they are terrible. Of course they speak of almost unbelievable arrogance and immorality. Of course they should be condemned. But are they truly shocking? Hardly.

The truth is that there is no behaviour so beyond the pale as to be too dreadful for our UK politicians to contemplate.

We’ve had plenty of warnings. It’s not so very long ago that politicians of most parties were caught using public money to buy properties then sell them at a profit – THEIR profit. The resulting outcry was massive but hardly big enough to change their behaviour in the long term.

So huge is their sense of entitlement they simply refuse to be shamed into conforming to the same rules and morality by which the rest of us live our lives. They cannot be encouraged to do the right thing simply because they are incapable of recognising what that might be.

Since the MPs’ expenses farce the scandals have continued to come thick and fast. Not even a pandemic could stop them. In fact, if anything Covid encouraged even worse behaviour. It was bad enough that those enforcing lockdown regulations on the rest of us were able to ignore those rules themselves and party on through the crisis.

How much worse was it that those in government could siphon off eye-watering sums into the pockets of their friends for equipment that could not be relied upon to perform the most basic of functions?

We are so used to tolerating such intolerable behaviour that it now hardly registers. When the BBC talked to voters in Birmingham, home to the Gambling Commission’s HQ, about the latest betting scandal, it was surprising how little they were affected. “We’ve heard worse,” seemed to be a common response.

And yes, indeed we have heard worse. Up to 15 Conservative candidates are reportedly being looked at by the Gambling Commission, five for betting on the date of the election date. The Tory Secretary of State for Scotland Alister Jack has claimed he won £2000 on election bets but later said that was a joke.

Alister Jack said he won £2000 betting on the election, then claimed it was a joke

Jack doesn’t seem to have grasped the whole point of the scandal, claiming he hasn’t broken any rules and isn’t under investigation by the Gambling Commission, obviously unaware of the optics of a politician gambling on an event which he might reasonably be expected to have some advance inkling of.

It’s this arrogance that is the most troubling factor, as well as the common thread which binds these misbehaviours together; it’s as if these politicians cannot grasp the standard of behaviour the public have a right to expect from them.

It seems to me obvious that MPs should not benefit financially from their use of public money yet that’s exactly what they did without a second thought, leading to the MPs’ expenses scandal. It seems to me obvious that MPs should not seek to win money through betting on events which they can potentially influence, yet it seems that some of them did exactly that without their political radar sounding any alarms.

It’s not just Conservative politicians who are caught up in the current betting controversy. A Labour candidate was also confirmed to be under investigation by the gambling watchdog after he bet on himself to lose his seat in the upcoming General Election.

Even Scottish LibDem leader Alex Cole-Hamilton has admitted placing “flutters” on the outcome in some seats in the General Election, although he insists these were very different to the ones under investigation and were simply “showing confidence” in his friends.

READ MORE: Alister Jack should be barred from Lords over election bets, John Swinney says

During the final party leaders’ election debate on Wednesday, Starmer attempted to portray the betting controversy as evidence of his opponents showing the “wrong instinct” but the truth is that his own party have been caught up in financial scandals too. What is it about Westminster in particular that seems to encourage these controversies?

It’s hard to imagine how the attitude to MPs within the Westminster bubble puts them on a pedestal. Such is the adulation in which they are held it is easy to see how their heads can be turned.

During the expenses scandal it became apparent that there was a danger that parliamentarians identified with each other more than with their constituents.

A narrative began to emerge that they were underpaid and that the misuse of expenses was provoked by that. I remember serious suggestions that one way of tackling the scandal was to give MPs a pay rise.

Holyrood has not been impervious to financial scandals but I think it’s fair to say that the very different atmosphere of the Scottish Parliament has made it easier for politicians there to keep their feet on the ground and remain closer to the values of the voters.

If Starmer believes that the simple matter of a change of government at Westminster will clean it up he is deluded. Nothing has been fundamentally changed by previous scandals; nor will the culture be transformed by this one. The flaws are too fundamentally ingrained.

I’m not suggesting that Westminster politicians are more corrupt than those at Holyrood, nor that they are all out to line their own pockets.

There are politicians at Westminster working tirelessly for their own constituents and for what they perceive to be the best interests of their country.

But I do believe Westminster encourages politicians to believe too strongly in their own and their colleagues’ infallibility and power. You can see this in a string of financial scandals and in their willingness to overrule legislation on devolved issues passed by majorities in other parliaments.

Indeed all this is yet more evidence – if more was needed – of John Swinney’s recent assertion that independence is essential for Scotland to establish a new and better way of doing politics.

First Minister John Swinney  (Image: PA)

It is not – as the Unionist parties insist – a distraction from the big issues such as the cost of living crisis. It is the biggest issue of all: how can we better attune Scotland’s political culture with the values and beliefs of the people who live here?

This General Election – with its narrow focus on the relative merits and problems of the Conservative and Labour parties – is simply incapable of addressing that.

If the 2014 referendum did nothing else it certainly showed that Conservative and Labour are two sides of the same coin, willing to drop their differences to find common cause in their battle to stop independence.

For proof that this attitude persists look no further than this week’s story in this newspaper of Labour candidate Tauqeer Malik’s claim to a voter that his party helped the Tories win a key constituency in the 2019 general election rather than see the SNP achieve victory.

READ MORE: Anas Sarwar says Labour candidate lied with claim party 'helped Tories'

If you seriously believe Starmer will bow to demands to sack Malik you will be sadly disappointed.

He is not a rogue player within Labour. He has simply revealed Labour’s strategy of prioritising block independence above all other aims.

This General Election will not in itself bring about independence. No matter how much you wish that a majority of pro-independence MPs will somehow be regarded as a mandate for independence itself – and like thousands of you I wish that were the case – but I know that it is not. We have more work to do on that front.

But what this General Election could do is undermine the push for independence … because every vote for a pro-Union party cast in the mistaken belief that’s the only way to ditch the Tories will be used as evidence that support for independence is on the wane.

And that is a risk we cannot afford to take.