A lot has been said and written about the expenses scandal in parliament, not least in the last few days since the announcement that three MPs and a Lord face prosecution. The alleged abuse of the expenses system by some members of parliament and the Lords has produced predictable public outrage, and this handful of politicians who face charges have assumed the role of pantomime villains. As a critical/radical Criminologist I'm duty bound to avoid the temptation to simply join in with the blanket condemnation of those that society wants to label as 'criminals'. In this case I'm doubly reluctant as one of the accused MPs, David Chaytor, has played a significant and positive role in my life.
In the mid 1980s I was just another working class bloke on a dodgy Manchester Council estate - unemployed, with nothing but yet another dead end unskilled manual job to look forward to if I was lucky. One day, on the way back from signing on, I walked past the Manchester College of Adult Education and saw a poster advertising enrolment for courses. I wandered in, all set to bolt out again if it looked a bit dodgy. One of the tutors saw me loitering and came over – a handsome, well dressed, friendly bloke who sat me down, gave me a coffee and asked all the right questions. Half an hour later I left the college having signed up for pretty much every non-vocational course they offered from current affairs and American politics to Trade Union history. That was the first time I met David Chaytor, but over the next few months he and a handful of other Adult Education tutors changed my life. I found out that I had a brain, and that education didn't have to be about memorising pointless stuff to try to pass exams. I came back the following September to complete an Access to HE course, then I went to University. A BSc, an MA and a PhD later and I'm a senior lecturer in Criminology. I'm not unique – my bunch of secondary school failures that completed the Access course together produced another academic, a solicitor, a couple of social workers, a probation officer and a teacher that I know of. Quite frankly I have no idea how my life would have developed if I hadn't had that conversation with David Chaytor all those years ago in that long gone college, but I look back on it as a turning point in my life, and I'll always be grateful to Chaytor and those other tutors. Times change, the College closed due to Tory cuts, many of us moved on to bigger and better things, including David Chaytor – as a Labour councillor, as a PPC that made major inroads into Tory majorities and finally as the man who took Bury North in 1997, unseating a Government Minister in the process. Now things have changed again – now he's one of the villains of the piece.
As a Criminologist I'm interested in the ways that societies construct criminal identities, and why. We like our bad guys to be unquestionably bad, we like the distinction between the good and the bad to be clear, unequivocal and permanent and we shy away from the complex and fragmented factors that underlie the causes of offending behaviour. Psychologically the alternative is difficult to deal with – the possibility that 'normal', 'ordinary', 'good' people can do 'bad' things under the right (or should that be the wrong) circumstances is one that we'd rather not think about. So we create bad guys straight from central casting. Chaytor is no exception – in the public imagination he is now being reconstructed as cynical, venal, greedy. In the process the other David Chaytor - the decent bloke with a passion for teaching and an enviable track record of helping working class people into education - is being written out of history. I've come a long way in the last few years, but I'm still enough of a working class bloke to struggle to put in to words just how sad that makes me feel.
