I’d like to go back to a politician being ‘a man of the people’ as opposed to a specific career choice…

It still bugs me that there is all this fuss over what will actually amount to an extremely small percentage (less than 1%) of cost of parliament.

It annoys me that it takes this sort of exposure to wake the electorate up to the fact that they should take an interest in who they elect.

As regards to your manifesto I agree with item one, am not convinced by item two (could it be done efficiently, security risks etc.), agree with item three, disagree with item four (reasons below) and obviously agree with item five.

I don’t agree with item four as I don’t think it is necessary. If criminal charges are brought then they’d be out of the running anyway. However, if the party is stupid enough to field them as a candidate again if they’re tarnished then it would strengthen democracy to see them actually held to account and be voted out. I also don’t really agree with people being barred from standing for election, seems a fundamental freedom/right for them to be ridiculed and pilloried.

Oh, and I’ll opt for tyranny and brutality when you’re in…in fact, I can think of some folks right now who I could happily brutalise!

I assume this means I can use your blog for my tendentious drivel?

Seems fine to me. That’s what I use it for, after all

It’s also a fair point about “what did other MPs know”, but you also have to consider that even if some MPs did know about other claims (and I don’t think many would have volunteered that they had bought £16,000 bookshelves or had a moat cleaned), being a whistleblower is – in pretty much any profession – career suicide.

And that’s another problem which needs to be addressed…

I have to say I’ve found the whole expenses saga rather tedious, not so much because of the MPs’ behaviour but their supporters. There seems to be a remarkable lack of (self) awareness, and instead an instinctive desire to have a pop at the other side.

Twitter, as always, showed that its strengths and weaknesses lie not so much in the service, but in the people that use it. My favourite tweet (for the humour) was from a Tory who commented that we might be just as guilty, but at least our abuse for moats, tennis courts and porticos “had class”. But that has been swamped by the sniping and some of it defied logic. Many seem convinced that claiming for moat cleaning was, morally, significantly worse than claiming for an already paid-off mortgage. One that particularly annoyed me was a complaint that Andrew Mackay resigned rather than being sacked. This, apparently, shows the Conservatives are incapable of governing. But I be prepared to bet that if he had been sacked, the same person would claim the fact he didn’t have shame enough to resign would show the Conservatives are incapable of governing.

Some, perhaps many, MPs will have to go. I know there’s a school of thought that expenses really don’t matter, it’s no biggy and everyone does it. But this is a bit different to a few quid on a taxi receipt. Some cases will prove to be fraud, but some of the others, even if legal, will show a lack of judgment so severe we have to ask ourselves if we want that person exercising their judgment on our behalf.

And the other question I’ve not seen anyone ask is this: what were all the other MPs doing?

A few have been highlighted as models of probity, claiming little and in some cases having a track record of voluntarily publishing their claims. But did they know what their colleagues were doing? And if they did, why didn’t they say anything?

In many ways I’ve started being far more troubled by this than anything else. One of the key factors behind my loss of political ambition was the realisation that, for most, politics is a career rather than a calling. And this is a perfect example of why that creates problems. Like any career, MPs were trying to maximise their income. And like any career, no-one wanted to damage their promotion prospects by rocking the boat.

Simply fixing the expenses system won’t do anything to tackle that broader problem.