Sleaze, Ethics and Codes

2003 was marked by the continuing efforts of the ethics regulators—the Electoral Commission, the Committee on Standards in Public Life and the Parliamentary Commissioner on Standards—to deal with the problems in public life which often attract the label ‘sleaze&’, and by a number of transient news stories. Allegations involving the wives of the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition, as well as a number of MPs appearing to misunderstand the rules governing allowances, contrasted with the less-reported but continuing work on the more serious issues of party funding, the parliamentary inquiry process and the activities of special advisers. This last work may be more important in terms of addressing the continuing decline of trust in public life in general, and specifically in the current government, which has focused on the way information has been presented and used by the government to explain and justify its participation in the Iraq invasion

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