Politicians complain they do not receive sufficient respect from the Press or the public, and I am sometimes tempted to sympathise. Heaven knows, we all want to encourage better people to stand for public office. To achieve that, we have to treat them decently.
But every time we consider the conduct of some members of the House of Commons, and especially of its Speaker, John Bercow, it is plain why MPs earn such contempt.
The latest scandal has been caused by censorship of the names of 51 MPs’ landlords from published parliamentary expenses claims. The MPs have successfully persuaded the expenses regulator, with Bercow’s support, that revelation of their identities and housing arrangements ‘could place their personal security at risk’.
Censorship: Commons Speaker John Bercow has allowed details of 51 MPs' housing expenses to be kept secret for 'security reasons'For a moment, this story seems merely comic. It conjures up visions of Al Qaeda terrorists trailing Lib Dem backbenchers home or crazed women stalking handsome Tory junior ministers they accuse of having done them wrong.
Come off it. No one could recognise 51 MPs in an identity parade, far less take the trouble to rough them up for voting the wrong way in the last Commons division.
In reality, of course, personal security has nothing to do with redaction of these names from the expenses report. That argument is a lie, a fraud, a cheat on the electorate.
Some MPs are merely terrified the media will discover the details of their taxpayer-funded fiddles and mutual backscratches.
Some rent out London properties they already own, pocketing the cash, and claim from the public purse up to £20,000 a year to take another flat. Others let flats to each other. It is known that Labour MP Iain MacKenzie rents from colleague Linda Riordan, who herself claims for another property. Plenty of others do likewise.
The Speaker, who in 2009 was obliged to repay several thousand pounds of overclaimed housing expenses, has compounded the stench at Westminster by insisting all members of the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority, whose contracts expire in January, must reapply for their jobs.
Named and shamed: John Bercow's panel for considering applications to the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority includes Peter Atkinson, who was implicated in the last expenses scandalThe IPSA members themselves are in no doubt this process is designed to squash or get rid of them. Scrutiny of applications would be overseen by a panel appointed by Bercow, which includes the former MP for Hexham, Peter Atkinson, who was named and shamed in the last expenses scandal.
Yet Bercow wants Atkinson involved in picking new standards overseers. The Speaker’s crass interventions have prompted four of the five IPSA members to protest by downing tools. They say they will not seek reappointment.
The sums of money involved in this squalid business of renting each other’s properties are not very large or very important, in the grand scheme of public expenditure.
It deserves to be emphasised that a majority of MPs behave honestly, honourably and openly about expenses. But a seedy and significant minority do not. They seem incapable of understanding why the public is infuriated by their behaviour.
Part of the trouble is their exaggerated sense of entitlement. They are paid a salary of £65,000 — and think this inadequate. Yet it is way above median earnings, and should enable them to support themselves decently, if not extravagantly.
They also make disproportionately small contributions to a final salary pension scheme more generous than any other in the public sector.
Honesty and integrity: Sir George Young would have been a much better candidate for the Speaker's chairBut they also want a 50 per cent increase in their £400-a-week housing allowance, to ensure that they can afford a decent residence within ‘a short walking distance of Westminster’, and avoid the indignity of taking public transport home after late-night sittings.
This is all potty. Politicians, even the highest, often speak eloquently about their commitment to public service. But they are willing to fight tooth-and-nail to secure private sector pay rates for performing it.
Some critics of Parliament make a big mistake by urging that being an MP should be acknowledged as a full-time job. There is not a shred of evidence that we were worse governed in the past, when almost every member had some other source of income. Many distinguished barristers had a second life in the Commons.
One of the things that has gone wrong with politics is that so many men and women today ascend to office, and even to Downing Street, having followed a career path from parliamentary researcher to special adviser to election as an MP without the slightest contact with what the rest of us call real life.
More... MPs demand MORE expenses so they can afford to live in Westminster... because they don't want to get the night bus Former defence minister 'rents £1,600 a month London flat from footballer Frank Lampard on the taxpayer... while letting out his own home in the capital'Many MPs see the sort of money their friends and contemporaries earn in business or the professions, and have the cheek to say: ‘That’s how we deserve to be paid to live.’
No, sir. No, madam — or Ms, if you insist. If you want to devote your life to the manic ego trip that is politics, you need to recognise that you do not automatically qualify for an upper-middle-class lifestyle — which is what MPs are really demanding. Many lack the ability to achieve this in any other trade, so why should the taxpayer give it to them?
The Commons demeaned itself when it chose John Bercow as its Speaker, rejecting the candidacy of Sir George Young, a figure of unimpeachable honesty and integrity.
Bercow has become an object of mockery and a shop steward for some of Westminster’s least reputable inhabitants and practices.
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It seems reasonable to compare the behaviour of some MPs with that of bankers. Though they make far less money, the politicians are equally blind to how the rest of society sees their behaviour and demands.
It is quite wrong of IPSA to have acceded to the demands of the 51 for their landlords’ names to be expunged from the published expenses record. That decision must not stand.
In Trollope’s Victorian political novel Phineas Finn, the young Irish MP has to make do with a garret until he secures junior government office. No one seriously expects modern MPs to accept such a hairshirt regime. But it will do them no harm to live in Lambeth or even Lewisham rather than in Lord North Street, SW1.
After the 2009 expenses scandal, Britain’s politicians declared solemnly that the sty would be cleansed; that nothing similar would be allowed to happen again. But three years on, pig slurry is still seeping under the doors of Westminster.
Rather than commit themselves to cleaning up the mess, some of our elected representatives are labouring only to conceal their wrongdoing.
Any system that allows them to do this is failing, and must be reformed.