Clinton and Gonzales - 17 June 1994

I'm reading a story; it could come from any part of the country about a motor company, a factory whose fences are plastered with protest signs. One says, "2,400 not one less", which is the present number of the workforce and the one the workers say must stay untouched in spite of the company's urgent need it says to cut costs. It's a Japanese owned company, its employees have refused lay-offs or wage cuts, so the company's moving out, out of the country and there will be not one less employee but 2,400 less.

The same things happening not so far away to a razor company and the local Volkswagen factory wants to halve its workforce. Little lower down in the story, the picture becomes more lurid but still familiar, leading banker charged with tax evasion, head of the stock exchange in jail for fraud, a police force under investigation for corruption, kickbacks, stealing party funds, it sounds like a Frank Capra film of the 1930s.

Well, we're not in America at all. I've been reading about Spain but the Spanish story has a special interest now that in some European countries old democracies and new ones, the general conservative movement of the past 10, 15 years appears to be waning and parties of the left in our see-saw fashion are now being given their turn, so what's so interesting about Spain?

Well, I don't know how many listeners remember the arrival on the European political scene 12 years ago over the charming earnest handsome figure, Felipe González, the socialist prime minister elected in the rosy resurrection of Spanish democracy on a wave of idealism. Spaniards old enough – and there were millions of them to have remembered the placid but iron rule of the dictator Franco – rose to the promise of this young leader, the promise was of democratic socialism, a new welfare state with liberty and freedom for all. He kept his promises to what had seemed to be a permanently poor republic.

The death of Franco and the succession to the surprise of all of us of a constitutional king with democratic ideas brought companies from many countries running to invest in Spain, the economy blossomed, wages outran inflation. Felipe González was they said at the time Franklin Roosevelt reborn and the unfamiliar prosperity seemed just what the doctor ordered to finance Señor González's promises – free national medical care, a free university education for everybody, remarkable unemployment pay and something not even Roosevelt's New Deal thought of. Every business was compelled by the government to guarantee its employees a working contract for life, how beautiful can the welfare state get to be?

While the economy bloomed, the government's social spending of course flourished. 1991, was the year of jolt when the recession arrived and taxes seemed to dry up. And, in a socialist state, which always promises or aims at full employment, unemployment is 25%. This past week in regional elections, the socialist party of Felipe González lost the parliamentary majority it had held for 12 years.

In Spain, as in America, as in Britain, as in any country that chooses its leaders by popular election, there's an inflexible rule in politics. If you're in power when something bad happens, it's your fault. Ask any American student taking a course in political science or American modern history, ask him to identify and give marks to President Herbert Hoover and he would be an exceptional student if he gave Hoover an 'A' and found him to be a remarkable man. One man who gave him top marks was John Maynard Keynes. Mr Hoover was a world-class mining engineer, immediately after the First World War he did more than any single person on earth to organise the feeding of the starving populations of Eastern Europe. He attended the peace conference in Versailles and was not much listened to.

Keynes wrote about him there, he imported into the Councils of Paris precisely that atmosphere of reality, knowledge, magnanimity and disinterestedness, which if they had been found in other quarters also would have given us the good peace.

Hoover had been president only to the spring and summer of 1929, when came the Wall Street crash, the noisy harbinger of the Great Depression. Three years later Hoover was buried under the Roosevelt landslide and was commemorated in the miserable tar-paper shacks and shanty towns of the vast population of the unemployed, they were called "Hoovervilles".

This makes me wonder how it will be a year or two from now for Felipe González, will the Spanish after 12 years of dizzy and fruitful welfarism join the American's and the British and several other populations in deriding their present leaders, whether of the right or left, and simultaneously deploring politicians in general.

We've had here a glaring example of this disillusionment trend in the sad case of the Chicago politician Mr Dan Rostenkowski, we've talked about his power in Congress and the sudden undermining of it by his indictment by a grand jury on 17 counts of fraud, corruption, obstruction of justice, employing phantom workers at the government's expense. Mr Rostenkowski you may recall refused to cop a plea, he now says he is going to fight all the charges and he will be exonerated.

Well there's no point in our holding on to our hats in the lumbering process of American justice, Mr Rostenkowski will be lucky if he comes to trial this year maybe next. There's been a surprise and much speculation about his determination to face the whole bill of indictment. First there's the fact that many of the charges are on various small matters who mowed his lawn at government expense that happened years ago. In fact, some lawyers say that the statute of limitation has run out on about half the charges, but the most persuasive theory I believe to explain Mr Rostenkowski's refusal to plea bargain is that he's honestly outraged by the indictment that he believes he's done nothing wrong by his lights.

The key phrase is "by his lights". He's 66, he's been in Congress 35 years, he has studied so to speak under some of the most consummate and one or two of the most ruthless politicians. His great power springs from his being an early protégé of Mayor Daley, the towering boss of Chicago politics who could telephone any Democrat from the president down and ask him what he wanted. And if the president replied, "this is not to beyond imagination, I'd like to see that I get a majority in Cook County and carry your state," Mayor Daley would see to it. Cook County, which embraces Chicago, was not the first only the most famous county in the United States that called on the graveyards to make up the needed majority in an election.

Politics said the late speaker Tip O'Neill is always local and most of it is favours. Even to young and presumably purer Congressmen today, the very idea of indicting a Congressman for employing half a dozen friends or relatives to do secretarial work, maybe to help a fundraising supper, perhaps to mow a lawn. This said a young politician this weekend is prosecution mania. If it said, as it is said by some superior persons, that politicians live by their cronies, I think the proper answer is: how about you? It's surely the most automatic thing in human nature to see if you come to any sort of power not in politics only, in a school or hospital, opera, a company, a tennis club, if it's up to you to choose a deputy or an assistant, isn't a friend a safer choice than anybody?

There's another thing, which has to do with getting used to the high life. A politician's high life in this country is not what the wealthy Yuppie say has in mind; all politicians have to do a lot of rough slogging around their constituency, a lot of boring visits. In Congress, a committee chairman as responsible as Rostenkowski probably spends most of 16 hours a day at his job, he gets used to certain privileges and perks starting with free identified parking space and by way of relaxation trips to Caribbean Islands or a golf outing or a yachting cruise paid for by some admirer, preferably a lobbyist for some interest that is strong in the congressman's state. This has been taken for granted for generations, after all when you start to run a campaign, you solicit big bucks from the special interest in your state whether it's an oil tycoon or the head of the Carpenters Union.

Well, some of the charges against Mr Rostenkowski fall comfortably within the customs of the Congress, but things are about to change. The Senate has already passed a bill prohibiting junkets paid for by lobbyists, prohibiting paid speeches, prohibiting lunches, any meals paid for by a lobbyist, anyone with a special interest in your vote. You will notice that when the Senate corrects one extreme, trust it to go to the other, the House is now expected to get out a similar Bill.

What I thinks been happening in the last 10 years or so, is that we've been growing stricter about public ethics and looser more tolerant about private behaviour. If we'd known half of John Kennedy's private habits, he'd never in those days have run for anything. Today, it doesn't seem to matter.

About perks, ultimately the question of ethical behaviour of integrity I guess is no matter what the rules, up to the individual, the temptations are the same in all countries under all systems, old Keir Hardie, the Scot who practically founded the British Labour Party knew a thing or two when he cautioned party members going for the first time into parliament, "It's the brandy and cigars that corrupt".

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