:: Kishwar Desai

British hall of shame full of clean moats, horse manure

Kishwar Desai

May.16 : Returning to Old Blighty this time was an onerous task. From media reports it appears that the country is in some sort of time warp, with Parliament on course to self-destruct.

When I had left, the country was moaning and groaning about Prime Minister Gordon Brown and his lack of leadership.

And now, three weeks later, it’s still the same refrain. It is like watching an excruciatingly slow car crash. Even loyal papers such as the Guardian are blatantly requesting Labour MPs to rebel against him.

The latest scandal over MPs’ expenses, in which all parties have been named and shamed for ripping-off public funds, has been running for weeks without any resolution. The only action taken was a bizarre lecture by the Prime Minister on YouTube on what all parties could do to retrieve the situation.

Media pundits have pronounced that it’s not a very good idea to go on YouTube to tell parliamentarians what the Prime Minister could have said to their faces.

But his tired demeanour, lacklustre performance and inability to deal with the drip-drip effect of non-stop leaks over MPs expenses by the Daily Telegraph has made the media circus shriek even louder.

All policy announcements have been drowned out. Whilst very little is known of the Prime Minister’s mysterious ways, his game plan may be that if everyone in Parliament begins to look like a crook, the British public might love him once again as a prudent, dour, honest Scotsman.

The only "expenses" allegation against him so far has been his arrangement over his home cleaning, reportedly made through his brother. When questioned about this discrepancy, the charming Mr Brown almost bit-off the reporter’s head. Certainly not a way to regain popularity.

The Labour Party has sunk even lower in the polls — and even the temporary bounce Mr Brown had received post the Group of Twenty (G-20) summit has completely disappeared. The only positive side to this is that all parties are suffering equally. The expense scandal has eclipsed everything and everybody.

The tip of this murky iceberg became visible over a month ago when the home secretary’s husband "claimed" money for his Sky TV bill which, unfortunately, included two pornographic films. There was also, astonishingly, a claim for a 99p bathplug, among other things.

Of course, Jacqui Smith, the minister, and her husband apologised and said they had "misclaimed".

This is a new polite word added to our lexicon, to be used instead of "I made false claims". (Remember Hillary Clinton’s judicious use of "I misspoke" instead of "I lied"?) Nonetheless she is now known as Jacqui "Bathplug" Smith.

However, the tussle whether or not to reveal the MPs’ expenses has been going on for a while.

The MPs receive a salary of £64,766 — and over and above, they also receive financial assistance to run their offices, their constituency homes, and, wherever applicable, their London homes.

The reason they were given a generous expense allowance was obviously to avoid the more awkward route of raising their salaries — which most governments chicken out of because it automatically stirs a media blitz of anger.

The main criteria for the MPs’ expenses is that they must be essential for their work. It is this loophole that has been exploited by the MPs who put in all their bills, fairly indiscriminately, to grab the maximum they could. For a country that prides itself on a fairly incorruptible political system (and compared to countries such as India, the UK is actually, much more rule-abiding and honest) the revelation that the MPs have been pocketing tax payers’ hard-earned money for completely irrelevant expenses (such as horse manure!) has come as very rude shock. To make matters worse, in the last one week there has been an avalanche of embarrassing claims — dug out in great detail by the Daily Telegraph, as the government was going to publish the figures much later in the year.

Of course there was, as has now become apparent, a very good reason for the delay. While the Conservatives may have been lampooned for charging the tax payer for getting their moats cleaned, and the garden around a "helipad" trimmed (these were actual claims!), Labour Party MPs have been no less reticent in helping themselves liberally to cash. The most common allegation seemed to have been on spending on home décor and on "flipping" the designation between their main home and their second home in order to maximise the payment they would receive. This was particularly applicable to mortgage repayments on which the MPs receive financial help.

Therefore, this would have been an ideal time for Mr Brown to show tough leadership. Instead it was the leader of the Opposition, a furious David Cameron, who received a standing ovation from the country for daring to chastise his MPs and forcing them to payback whatever was thought to have been unfairly claimed.

So while thousands of pounds have been returned to the country’s exchequer by chastened Tories, suddenly Labour Party MPs (albeit much more reluctantly) began to return their stash of loot as well. One minister actually signed a cheque for over £40,000. The story promises to run and run and is no doubt going to drag government ratings even lower. However, this is a time when the power of the media is clearly visible. The Daily Telegraph may have been accused by many, including the Speaker of the Commons, of chequebook journalism, but the methodology of how they received the information has become immaterial. The important thing is that this story is impacting the behaviour of parliamentarians and the fear that they may lose their constituencies is now very real in the face of enormous public anger. The fear is making them put all their expense online, pronto.

Now there is a growing chorus among MPs who feel that they are being unfairly maligned, overall, and that the image of parliamentarians is taking a beating.

Therefore, the situation demands some kind of symbolic gesture to restore the dignity of Parliament. At the same time, the fact that Michael Martin, the Speaker of the Commons, had been trying to block the publication of the MPs’ expenses no longer looks good in the eyes of the public.

It may just be that he is either reined in or been asked to step down, as there are now rumblings against him. Even though he may have been doing it to protect the privacy of the MPs by and large, the brutal fact is that most of his fellow politicians know only how to save one skin — their own.

The writer can be contacted at kishwardesai@yahoo.com