Change them now

Whether Jacqui Smith actually broke the rules of the Standards and Privileges Committee is, I think, beside the point – they seem to be almost endlessly interpretable, no-one ever seems to actually BREAK them, and no-one is ever held to account for their interesting interpretations of the rules.

What does count is that she is perceived to be fleecing the taxpayer, and her behaviour is seen as unacceptable – this is what Tony Blair meant when he talked about ‘whiter than white’ and ‘we are not the masters. The people are the masters. We are the servants of the people. . . What the electorate gives, the electorate can take away.’ 
Quite right we can take it away. We can vote you out (whatever party you belong to).  As an aside, this goes back to the question I was asking here – are our MPs accountable enough?

To return to Jacqui Smith though – the rules are set by the MPs themselves; the information released is decided by MPs and officers of the House of Commons and any media enquiries are usually met with a defiant, ‘We abide by the decisions of the Fees Office’.  The Fees Office, as Guido points out frequently, takes MPs at their word that, for example, their constituency home is their secondary residence despite the fact that their spouse and children live there.

Once again we’re seeing just how corrosive the effect of breaking voters’ trust is.  I am utterly fed up of seeing politicians scraping every single benefit they can from the taxpayer.  It’s certainly not all of them, it’s not all the time, but it’s demeaning to our democracy that some of them seem to pay more attention to their expenses claims than to what they were elected to do – and Jacqui Smith is certainly one of those who needs to spend a lot more time thinking about the policies she is supposedly responsible for.

I’ve argued before for fewer MPs, higher salaries, proper expense-auditing and receipting, and that MPs should no longer be allowed to argue that they should be responsible for their own salaries, expenses policies and most of all auditing.  It’s time to restore trust in politicians by cleaning up this system. I absolutely agree that MPs need a second home, that they need a sufficient number of competent staff, and that they need to travel around and meet people from all walks of life.  But it’s not good enough that obfuscation and ‘but the Fees Office authorised it’ allow MPs to get away with what would often be considered sackable offences in most work-places.

The MPs I have discussed this with tend to find the current system complicated, messy, unclear and slightly demeaning.  I’d like to see simple, transparent rules that everyone understands and which leave no wiggle-room for the relatively small number of MPs who want to exploit the system. 

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