Retrospective Thoughts – Question Time

I caught up on Question Time yesterday evening. Margaret Beckett was given a well-deserved rough ride, yet showed no contrition, which, to his credit, Ming did. What struck me as it did when watching Shahid Malik’s reaction, is the sheer inability or unwillingness of MPs to recognise the root of the problem.

Firstly, Beckett played the “it was a mistake” card. That went down like a bowl of cold sick. After all, this is entirely unbelievable – one simply does not make mistakes of this magnitude, any more than one forgets that one has paid off one’s mortgage. Then she shifted to the “proles are too stupid to understand” attack, which went down just as well. MPs incur costs associated with travel and living away from the House, she asserted. Yup, we realise this, so do plenty of others who do not cream thousands of pounds from the taxpayer. Going back a few years, I lived in Bristol and worked in London. I received a free travel pass as a consequence of my terms of employment. That travel pass was a taxable benefit in kind. My employer did not provide a pad in London. If I wanted to minimise my travelling, I could at my own expense, have bought or rented a second home – I would have had to fit and furnish it at my own cost; after all, I chose to accept employment in London for the benefits it brought me – benefits that reverberate in my current employment. That’s how it works in the real world where we are bound by laws and codes of conduct that MPs impose upon us via legislation yet have exempted themselves from. So, we do understand. We understand all too well. We are not stupid, much as those MPs attempting to defend the indefensible would like us to believe.

It is not unusual for the political classes to adopt a patronising air of superiority when faced with dissent and assume that the great unwashed are too simple to understand. However, we work in business and commerce, we have to make expense claims and we understand – or not at our peril – the system under which we have to operate. Failure to do so will cost us our jobs and possibly our liberty. Fraud, after all, is a criminal offence. As Steve Easterbrook pointed out during the discussion, expenses should not be profitable for either claimant or employer. The system that MPs use is doing just that. I mean, £18,000 for bookshelves and nearly £9,000 for a television are (quite apart from flagrant piss-taking) not expenses, they are personal luxury items and no amount of protesting about the rules or the ignorance on the part of the electorate will disguise this fact; and the electorate, alerted to the abuse, realises this even if the terminally contemptuous MPs cannot or will not.

When challenged about an election, Beckett dribbled out the canard that it would be a distraction at the moment and that they needed to sort out the economy. This is risible for two reasons; firstly, they are up to their necks in causing this, so are the last people to be “sorting it out” and secondly, in a year’s time they have to go to the country no matter what the contemporaneous political situation – and, finally, we are not in the least distracted. Quite the opposite indeed, much to the chagrin of those gorging at the taxpayer’s expense.