Please Clean My Moat

As I was saying, yesterday was a bad news day. The headline news was all associated with the Daily Telegraph revelations about MPs expenses. Not only is the matter scandalous but it was made worse by MPs first rushing to bluster out their justifications and when this failed, pulling out their cheque books, offering to pay back various sums they have claimed over the last six years or so. Even the antics of the Speaker and others in trying to suppress the information over many months serves only to emphasise their collective guilt. But it was bound to come out eventually. As Sir Humphrey Appleby - that defender of democracy - told us, "Never try to keep secret something that people can find out by other means." Even now after a disastrous week for parliament too many members still do not seem to see just how bad things have become. I am starting to reach the conclusion that the whole of our society is in crisis. Fundamentally it is a crisis of greed; a consequence of the increasing gulf between the wealth of the very rich and the rest of society.

On Question Time last night, the audience heckled the politicians almost continuously and more than I have ever seen before on this programme - and the politicians deserved it. Menzies Campbell sought to justify his expenditure of £10,000, including the use of a designer to tart up his flat in London, on the basis that MPs were badly paid and if he had remained a barrister he would be earning far more. This is humbug. We cannot pay MPs or anybody else on the basis of what they could have earned in an entirely different profession. As leader of the Lib-Dems at the time, it may have been justified to allow his expenditure. But he defended having made an admission of guilt. Similarly, Margaret Beckett tried to justify her multiple claims on the basis that pay was poor - and was even less convincing.

Our MPs are paid at about average rate for MPs in countries in Europe. Maybe they should be paid a little more, but not massive amounts more. Expenses wholly incurred doing their jobs should be paid but surely that does not involve property dealing, tax evasion, moat cleaning, mole strangling, wisteria trimming, mending the tennis courts, grass cutting etc.?

The collection of old Tory grandees collecting their hand-outs as revealed on Wednesday made me and others start to believe that not only were David Cameron's attempts at reform of the party largely cosmetic but also that the 1832 reform of parliament had never happened and we were looking at established, comfortable members from the old rotten boroughs.

I feel that the electorate will take their revenge on all MPs with dodgy expenses - of whatever party - when they come to seek re-election. There is a disgust with the behaviour of Honourable Members that will not easily be expunged. I hope only that a functioning democracy can survive.