Politicians need to wake up to public anger on expenses

By Shamik Das

The lurid revelations over the weekend about the Home Secretary’s latest expenses bungle raise serious questions not just about her or even the Government but of the political class as a whole.

Trust in our elected politicians has never been lower, nor anger at their indiscretions greater. It’s one thing to make genuine mistakes during the good times; quite another to actively be “on the fiddle” – as many people will see it – during the worst economic downturn this nation’s ever seen.

A poll in this morning’s Telegraph confirms the level of public distrust in our elected representatives: more than three-fifths (61 per cent) of those polled are less trustful of MPs than they were before the current expenses row blew up and nearly half (46 per cent) of respondents believe the system of allowances for second homes is wrong in principle and should be scrapped.

The grestest indicator of public loathing, however, is the two-thirds who think MPs’ salaries and expenses to be too generous by half – a proportion bound to increase when next a poll is published following the announcement this afternoon of a 2.33 per cent rise in their basic wage to a staggering £64,766, though the freeze on Ministerial pay will most certainly be welcomed.

And it isn’t just the perceived financial impropriety that so appals taxpayers as the fact that many MPs simply do not believe what they are doing to be wrong. So out of touch with their constituents are they – especially in these recessionary times – that they actually believe the taxpayer should pick up the tab for bath plugs or pay-per-view films.

For the Home Secretary to state that she inadvertently signed off the expenses claim for Raw Meat 3 and By Special Request – not to mention two, yes two screenings of Ocean’s Thirteen – simply will not wash. This is the modern-day Home Secretary of the United Kingdom we’re talking about, not some Colonial satrap in 19th-century India; it would be nice to think she’d have the common sense to check line-by-line the contents of what she’s signing for.

We’re forever being told that politicians aren’t in it for the money, that they genuinely care about what they’re doing and believe what they’re doing to be right, and while the vast majority of MPs undoubtedly go into politics for all the right reasons, forsaking greater financial renumeration in the private sector, it is the alarming ease with which they forget where they’ve come from and how their constituents live that is the most depressing aspect of this sorry affair.

Cover-ups add to the degree of public anger, with many callers to phone-in shows and the like outraged by the attempts of certain MPs to suppress these embarrassing facts, be they bawdy backbenchers getting down and dirty in Commons work rooms or Tory blue-rinsers billing the taxpayer for their childcare; as so often in the past it’s the botched concealment of damning evidence as much as the offence itself which lead to our rulers’ downfalls.

The sight of MPs going to court to prevent newspapers from revealing the truth is contemptible, lowering them to the level of washed-up celebrities and diminishing not only themselves but the their offices.

Journalists often receive a kicking for the sensationalist, hypocritical nature of some of their reporting, yet it is they the public must thank for exposing these scandals, and with the government now mired in sleaze from top to bottom, bearing all the hallmarks of the dog days of the Major administration, it is the Fourth Estate who now stand head and shoulders above the establishment as the guardians of probity and propriety.