Sharpe's Opinion
Monday, 11th May, 2009
Andrew Rawnsley: Worse than the Expenses is the Lack of Remorse
Andrew Rawnsley in yesterday’s Guardian:
MPs look enviously at consultants, lawyers, company executives, those they consider to be their peer group. They feel underpaid in comparison. I might have sympathised if they had ever had the guts to make the case for higher parliamentary salaries to the public. They instead exploited the slackly constructed and sloppily policed expenses regime and used it as a clandestine scheme for giving themselves tax-free top-ups to their salaries. Sheer greed then kicked in as the most opportunistic and rapacious of their number stretched the rules to the limit and sometimes well beyond it. The second home and additional costs allowances have been manipulated to the point where you need a very powerful microscope to distinguish some of the scams from fraud.
[…]
The MP who claimed for horse manure? Well, why not when so many other parliamentarians simply don’t give a shit.
Rawnsley’s article is the best I’ve seen on the expenses issue so far. It’s hard not to be incandescently angry about all this.
It’s curious, though, that the person coming out of all this best is David Cameron – who not only has relatively modest expense claims but also floated the idea almost immediately that all MPs expense claims should be published on the internet as soon as they are approved. This is a far better idea that having a unaccountable private ‘independent’ oversight agency review these as the Government is proposing.
Let the taxpayers be the overseers.
Comments
True – but no one had access to the actual receipts until The Telegraph bought them. This was all going to come out in July anyway (possibly with some names and addresses redacted) but without the receipts there was no detail, just speculation – which is why the blogs were carrying it but the papers weren’t.
Didn’t the story unfold because of FOI requests? So whoever was making those requests was indeed following up the story; they were just trying to base the story on fact rather than surmise – which is what we expect of a good press.
No, it’s not all thanks to FoI, there was a leak. There’s been rumours for a while that a disc containing all the un-redacted receipts of MPs expense claims has been quietly on offer to journalists. The Telegraph bought the disc and the story, and have evidently spent a while researching and preparing it. That’s why the Speaker is incandescent with rage – disgustingly enough, he’s more interested in how the story came out than he is by the behaviour of these MPs.
Yes, but the fuss started months ago when FOI requests were lodged asking for this information, Parliament refused to give it, the applicants appealed to the Commissioner who ordered Parliament to release it, Parliament applied to the Courts to over-rule the Commissioner, failed, and were collating the documents for release in a more limited form in July.
So the root cause of the whole story, surely, is the FOI requests, amplified by Parliament’s desperate attempt to keep the whole lot under wraps. The leak was just the last step in the chain.
(looks like I chose the wrong week to quit calling you Shirley)
One thing that hasn’t been commented on is why didn’t the whistle-blowers in the press get onto this story sooner? It’s rather like the Damien McBride affair, where all the journos seem absolutely shocked that this thing has been going on…when to most of them it either was or should have been quite common knowledge.
How the expenses scheme worked was publicly available and I gather there has always been plenty of Parliamentary gossip (and the odd story in the press) about who was getting away with what. But the papers chose not to make a fuss.
It was only when the expenses were leaked and, perhaps as important, open season had been declared on the government that they all became morally outraged. There’s a pattern of complicity emerging here and it’s not a pretty one.
Gaw
May 11, 2009 at 8:57 pm