By David Osland

It’s impossible to devise statistical methodology to test the claim that the average Labour MP operates to higher ethical standards than the average Conservative MP. But at some level, all Labour Party members instinctively want to believe this is true.

We’re not under any misconception that Labour constitutes a beleaguered bastion of probity in an otherwise wicked world. We know too well that human frailty doesn’t give the left a miss.

The argument is instead that when it comes to our bad guys, the misdemeanours are less frequent, the malice less virulent, the cupidity less grasping, the sums of money at stake smaller.

All of this brings me to Jared O’Mara, the former Labour MP jailed for four years after being found guilty of fiddling expenses by tens of thousands of pounds to support a five gram a day cocaine addiction.

Friends of mine who know these things tell me a single gram at the weekend would be the norm for casual users in north London media circles, and two grams a day constitutes crazy rock star consumption levels.

So much white powder disappeared up O’Mara’s nose that he was in no fit state to take on basic constituency casework, let alone speak up for Sheffield Hallam in Parliament.

O’Mara was seen as a no-hoper when selected in 2017, and was only chosen at the last minute, and accorded only cursory scrutiny of his suitability for the job.

How much he was ever ‘a Corbynista’ is disputable, but he did have the backing of the left in the constituency at the time.

Just months after ousting Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, he was suspended from the Parliamentary Labour Party, after revelations of misogynistic, homophobic and racist online comments made prior to reaching Westminster.

There’s no point in protesting his innocence, or that misusing public money on the scale he did is anything other than a serious offence, or that plenty of Tory MPs are hoovering it up like nobody’s business as well.

For what it’s worth, custodial sentences are rarely appropriate for non-violent crimes. O’Mara is in need of rehabilitation, in the drug dependency rather than the political sense of the word.

The vast majority of Labour MPs, of course, have kept a spotless score sheet, often for decades. If Lord Acton was right to declare that all power corrupts, it’s not the case that a safe Labour seat corrupts absolutely.

But O’Mara is hardly the only one ever to have behaved criminally or otherwise wrongly. I would only have to turn to my bookshelves to pull out numerous examples from across the ages.

The last decade alone has seen multiple instances of senior Labour politicians utilising the services of commercial sex workers, or sexually harassing or bullying women staffers.

There has been nothing as egregious as attempting to dodge a £3.7m tax bill. But several have been caught out by hacks posing as lobbyists offering a measly few thousand quid by way of financial inducements, and multiple New Labourites were caught fraudulently flipping their homes.

The reasons for such repeated shortcomings are not complex to deduce.

Not all of us would succumb to the illicit augmentation of our bank balances if such a possibility were readily at hand. But the thought would cross a fair few minds, especially if there were a perception that ‘everybody else is doing it’.

Drink and drugs are more than recreational substances; they can be morally corrosive substances too.

Men in positions of influence are frequently convinced of their intrinsic sexual irresistibility, even more than most blokes most of the time.

Jealousy in romantic relationships can result in a kind of temporary derangement that sees us act in ways that don’t reflect our better selves.

Such failings may look minimal in the current political culture, in which offshore trusts in Gibraltar and £800,000 loans from distant cousins brokered by appointees to top public sector jobs are the stuff of the quotidian.

But Zahawi and Johnson are not ideal yardsticks of personal rectitude. One of the next Labour government’s big tasks will be restoring public confidence in a political system that has been severely damaged by 13 years of Tory rule.

Moreover, the labour movement has the legitimate expectation of the highest standards from its representatives, backed up by the right to remove obvious wrong ‘uns. That’s one of the points of mandatory reselection.

It’s also one of the potential drawbacks in blatant factional manipulation of selection contests, especially when Labour is looking forward to hundreds of new parliamentarians within two years.

What the leadership is doing is often justified as basic quality control, a means to weed out the obvious flakes, rather than crudely knifing anyone who has incurred its displeasure for such heinous offences as signing petitions seven years ago.

But it risks shoehorning in a cohort dependent on machine politics for their advancement, of the personality type that does not scruple at trampling on democracy to get where they want to go.

If Labour does come anywhere close to the 400 or even 500 seats that polls are now uniformly predicting, the law of large numbers alone suggests that at least a handful of the elected won’t be among the Calvinist elect.

They will be in government, not in opposition. That multiplies the dangers generated by Labour’s increased reliance on donations from major businesses, money that comes with expectations attached.

Stitch-ups probably will stop the next Jared O’Mara. But it will make repeat performances of the scandals of the New Labour era all but inevitable.

David Osland is a member of Hackney North & Stoke Newington CLP and a long-time left wing journalist and author. Follow him on Twitter at @David__Osland

Image: Jared O’Mara. Source; https://api20170418155059.azure-api.net/photo/RTJv500x.jpeg?crop=MCU_3:4&quality=80&download=true. Author: Chris McAndrew, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.