Luke Akehurst talks a lot of sense on MPs allowances:
They also need to take a good long look at their consciences and ask if the tax payer really ought to be paying for 88p bath plugs or £700 stereos. Whatever the rules say, I’d feel queasy and morally sullied if I claimed for either. The question they should ask themselves is “this will end up in the public domain by one means or another, how would a reasonable elector in my constituency view this use of their tax money?”
The media needs to decide whether outing the late-night TV viewing of an MP’s spouse, and labelling all MPs as chiseling crooks on the basis that they employ staff, send out mailings and travel to and live part of the week in their seats is really going to enhance British democracy.
Luke is right, of course, that priorities are mangled in the press simply because human nature enjoys a bit of prurient ‘schadenfreude’ more than the doughy substance of a G20 summit. Jacqui Smith has been nailed to the cross, unfairly in the sense of the degree of malpractice, but, because of her own job, and, to a lesser degree, this government’s own illiberal and authoritarian approach to pornography evidenced in part of the recent Criminal Justices Bill, this was just too good a strike to pass up for delicious irony.
Jacqui may feel hard done by, but in the whole raft of her expense claims she has been incredibly stupid not to realise the view members of the public would take at such behaviour, legal or not. I do believe, though, that Governments should stop tampering with MPs pay awards just to ‘show an example’ because if the awards are fair, denying or cutting them leads to those feeling hard done by making up the money exactly in this way.
Gordon Brown should not have stepped in personally to stop prisoners having a 3% pay increase. Given that prisoners pay has deliberately been kept at artificially low rates for decades, how do you think the citizens being denied the vote feel about this abuse of power?
Luke is, of course, assuming that MPs care about their constituents and see themselves as a representative of ‘the people’. NEWSFLASH: they don’t.