Linen and Public come to mind

The scandal over MPs’ expenses runs and runs and no one has much to say about the way it is going. I suspect this is because it is so hard to disentangle issues. The atmosphere is too heady and fragile. It is far too easy to sound as if one condones things, when that isn’t what one intends at all. The archbishops have made a brave try and actually said some entirely sensible things; but they have had little thanks for their pains. I don’t imagine anyone else at the moment is likely to try, though sooner or later someone will have to, for unchecked, this kind of media and public preoccupation with MPs and their expenses really will do our public life serious harm.


I do not say this because I approve of what has happened over expenses, far from it. But because the supposed ‘court of public opinion’ is a very blunt, imprecise weapon to invoke if you would redress such issues, and therefore not terribly effective. If a burglar enters your house and you try to stop him by a trap which explodes and blows the whole house down (you included) .....well, you may have succeeded in stopping the thief, but I’m not at all clear that you would be happy with all the other consequences you had achieved.

Yet that, I think, is what we risk. There will be need sooner or later, and preferably sooner, to recover a sense of proportion about what is actually at issue, and how much it matters in the wider scheme of things. I’m not terribly impressed to discover that an MP has been cleaning his moat at public expense, nor very happy to hear about creative accounting over mortgages and home extensions. But my discontent must not arise because I haven’t got a moat, or indeed, even an house of my own. It must be objective. To find that MPs, even a lot of them, have made free with their expenses system is one thing. To assume on the basis of that discovery, that all MPs are rogues and vagabonds is quite illogical, and in fact implausible. Equally, it is entirely illogical to expect that MPs who propose to stand down at the next election are all malfeasants. There will, I do not doubt, be some who hope thereby to minimise embarrassment, but there will also be those who have genuine reasons for withdrawing from public life. Frankly, I wouldn’t blame some of them if they had simply grown fed up and decided to let you get on with it. I wouldn’t have an MP’s thankless job if you paid me. (On which topic, we actually don’t pay most of them very much. Nothing like the sort of salaries paid to those bankers who have caused us all such harm, though strangely we seem to have been very quick to forget that!)


Moreover, just how much public furore is appropriate? I am sure it is right for such issue be made public, and that the public both take the opportunity to express their disapproval and expect action to be taken to redress the ills. But just how weighty are these ills? Several thousand unborn children are legally killed each year in our supposedly civilised land; many because people don’t want them; some because they only might be disabled. Is not life more than gold or property? Yet I do not hear a media frenzy or public outcry at the death of those innocents. Just what are we talking about here? Is it on a par with the scandal of Robert Mgabwe in Africa? Is it as crucial as the cost and morality of nuclear weapons, or the strange arms trade from which we profit so much as a nation ? Is it perhaps the waste of millions of public money on computer ID systems which will never work? Or maybe it compares with the waste of life and resources in Iraq or Afghanistan?? Is it even anywhere near on a scale to be compared with the way government in half the nations of the world behave? Of course not. Get real.


It is not right. There is of course need to reform much about Parliament, let alone MPs’ expenses. But just at the moment I think there is another question that also deserves to be asked. Cui bono? Who benefits from so easily bringing our ancient democratic institutions into discredit? We shall, no doubt in time find out. I am not sure, when the fuss has died down, that you will like the answer.