The hypocrisy of expenses

(c) austinevan

“When institutions fail… the people who make the mistakes cannot and should not run off with entitlements and with additional discretionary payments. The anger that the public has is anger that I have as well.”

Gordon Brown’s moral outrage at self-serving individuals who have failed their institutions is perfectly in tune with public opinion. An expenses system that allows MPs to claim for everything from piles of manure to moat cleaning clearly needs urgent reforms.

There’s just one problem. The Prime Minister’s words are three months old and aimed at an altogether different – if not entirely unrelated – scandal.

The revelation that Sir Fred Goodwin had left RBS with a £703,000-a-year pension – rubber stamped by City minister Lord Myners, one of Gordon Brown’s closest advisers – prompted widespread condemnation from politicians of every hue.

Goodwin’s barefaced refusal to pay back the taxpayer was derided for being symptomatic of how the banking sector lives by Gordon Gecko’s aphorism that “greed is good.”

Unfortunately, as MPs have so graphically demonstrated, greed is not the sole domain of bankers.

At the same time that the ‘rewards for failure’ scandal was in the media spotlight, Parliament was fighting tooth and nail to prevent the publication of their expenses.

This tacit admission of impropriety, from the very institution that passed freedom of information laws in 2005, underlines how some ‘honourable members’ are willing to forsake the values they are meant to uphold for monetary reward.

The Speaker Michael Martin only exacerbated this lack of transparency by calling in the police to investigate the expenses leak, instead of focusing on its implications for faith in the parliamentary system.

Of course, senior members from the three main parties have begun repaying dubious claims. The Prime Minister has even apologised, albeit days after the story first broke. This is surely, however, too little too late.

The fact that MPs rejected reform until being caught with their hands in the till represents a failure of self-regulation. Without rigorous and independent scrutiny of all expenses it is clear that Parliament will never regain the public’s trust.

Some may argue that today’s politicians never had such trust in the first place. The drastic decline in turnout over the past few elections reflects growing disenchantment amongst UK voters. Yet perversely this scandal may help to puncture apathy in the lead up to next month’s European elections.

If voters do flock to the polling booths, Labour and the Conservatives unquestionably have the most to lose. Gordon Brown can at least console himself by pointing to one of the few pearls of wisdom he issued during the banking crisis: “Markets depend on morality in the end.”

MPs of all parties have been warned.