YET again, our politicians have failed to judge the degree of public anger on the subject of their expenses. While it is undoubtedly wrong for an MP to ring the House of Commons authorities with a query about his expenses, only for a newspaper to ring him on the same subject within the hour, the involvement of the police and the MPs bleating about a whistleblower once again misses the key point.
The inability of MPs to grasp the degree of public alienation over this issue was neatly encapsulated by Prime Minister Gordon Brown last week. His reaction to the latest revelations was to plead that he had been trying to reform the expenses system
. It is an insultingly facile response. Labour has been in government for 12 years, yet the Prime Minister's only intervention on the subject was his recent, ill-judged attempt to impose his will on the independent group tasked with coming up with a workable alternative to a discredited allowances system.
A system of government where only the rich can afford to be MPs would be wrong, but the current situation is even worse. The perception of pigs with their snouts in the trough is poisoning the body politic. And MPs have no-one but themselves to blame. The less-than-honourable members have systematically tried to stymie change, consistently voting in their own self-interest. It took the Freedom of Information legislation they passed to flush them out, and even then only under duress in the High Court.
Politicians are not ludicrously well paid and in many cases the sums involved are not huge. But it is the principle that matters, particularly in straitened economic times. Strange though it may seem, this is not about the money per se. It is the public subsidy of bath plugs and patio heaters, the little luxuries and commonplace indulgences courtesy of the taxpayer, which ordinary people find most repugnant. Nor is this a party political issue. The case of Caroline Spelman and her taxpayer-funded nanny is sufficient to suggest that the Tories will be the source of more embarrassing revelations. And SNP leader Alex Salmond faces questions about why he claimed £800 for food during a parliamentary summer recess, among other matters. Was he actually in London during the two months in question? If so for how many days? Salmond also claimed £1,391.50 for food for the parliamentary year 2007-08, even though he only voted in the Commons six times. This amounts to £231.92 on food for each flying visit to London. Did he really spend all this money on food, or was he milking his allowances to maximise his earnings? The Scottish public will be interested to know.
This is now an issue about the fading legitimacy of parliament. It has brought the reputation of politicians to an all-time low at a time when we need to be able to trust our political class. There is now a vacuum that fringe parties such as the BNP will work hard to exploit, and, if the far-right does well at the forthcoming Euro elections, there will be an all-too-clear explanation.
Yes, reform is urgently needed, but efforts to rush Sir Christopher Kelly's committee on standards in public life into producing a report to a timetable dictated by MPs' discomfort are ham-fisted and clumsy.When he reports, it is inconceivable that his recommendations will not include removing from MPs the power to set their own salary and expenses. Measures might include the Commons itself becoming the owner of modest London flats for the use of MPs, or barring ministers with grace-and-favour homes and London MPs from claiming the second-homes allowance.
In the interim, the Commons should take three very simple steps: publish all expenses now; require receipts for all future expenditure; and publish all MPs' future expense claims in detail. This would give us a system very much like that in operation at Holyrood. It's not perfect, as the hounding out of former Scottish Tory leader David McLetchie over his taxi receipts demonstrated, but it's at least a grown-up system that provides the basis for a sensible relationship of trust between the governed and the government. That must be the priority. The governed deserve no less. And they are rightly determined to settle for no less.
