The British public are, apparently, “united in revulsion over the disclosures on MPs' expenses”.
According to a Populus poll for The Times, 86 per cent of people agree that “all the parties are as bad as each other” in abusing the system of expenses and allowances, and 85 per cent agree that the way MPs have acted confirms “how self-serving and out of touch most are”.
Given the nature of the coverage that this story has received, it would have been stunning if the result were any different.
This is not to say that the electorate does not have reason to be disenchanted. When an MP charges the taxpayer £25,000 for security patrols, or £5,000 for gardening and £1,500 for swimming pool maintenance you can understand why their recession-struck constituents get cross.
Yet, the supposed level of public angst would only make sense if the electorate had had complete trust in their politicians. Judging from the coverage of the public’s response, you’d think we were uncovering infidelity for the first time having previously thought our elected officials to be unimpeachable moral paragons. In reality, of course, the British public’s trust in their politicians has been scraping along the floor for well over a decade, while its political scepticism has rarely been higher.
The national hand-wringing over recent days says as much about the nation as about its elected politicians. Flipping second-homes and charging for luxury items as some (not all) MPs have been doing is morally dubious (to put it kindly). And the fact that some MPs have not been able to admit this but have hidden behind the “it was all permitted within the rules” excuse makes it worse.
But what should we expect? According to the Times survey, 79 per cent of people agree that, even if allowed, “if MPs had any integrity they would never have claimed for the cost of many things they did claim for, such as furnishings, cleaners and trivial household items”.
Perhaps so, but that would leave most of us labelled as “people without integrity” – not least those who have been reporting this tidal wave of corruption. As Stephen Fry put it this week:
“Anyone can talk about snouts in troughs, but for journalists to do so is almost beyond belief. I know more journalists than I know politicians and I have never met a more venal and disgusting crowd of people when it comes to expense claims and allowances. I’ve cheated expenses, I’ve fiddled things. [To camera] You have. Of course you have. Let’s not confuse what politicians get really wrong, things like wars… with the rather tedious, bourgeois obsession with whether they have charged for their wisteria.”
Let he who is without expense fraud, cast the first stone.
The bottom line is that MPs do not earn very much – not as much as many journalists (see this tetchy exchange, for example!); not as much as they would have had they become lawyers, accountants or – heaven forbid – bankers; and certainly not as much as they should given the nature and weight of their work. If we want cleaner politics, we are going to have to pay our politicians more.
There is also a wider question at play here. We have freighted politics and politicians with far greater expectations than is sensible or reasonable. They themselves are not without fault – having consistently over-claimed what politics has the capacity to change – but they are not exclusively to blame for this.
At heart, the 20th century’s erosion of civil society and the slow drift away from the narrative of Christianity, in favour of the Enlightenment narrative that education, mobility and wealth (all of which subsequently fell under the political remit) would deliver utopia, has left us badly disenchanted and liable to throw our toys out of the pram when politics doesn’t deliver and politicians turn out to be as fallible and liable to corruption as the rest of us.
Yes, we should seek to make our political system as morally upright as possible and to hold our politicians properly to account (which will mean paying them properly too). But we should give up the air of the shocked, cheated spouse and ask ourselves how we would look if the unforgiving searchlight of moral rectitude were shone into every nook and cranny of our own expense forms.
Nick Spencer is Director of Studies at Theos.
