In defence of MPs not publishing their expenses

[ciphergoth]

(Copied from a comment I made elsewhere)

Gosh, but my MP is quick. I read about MPs moving to conceal their expenses again, and was moved to write to him. But I only got as far filling in my address in the letter on writetothem.com and thinking about what I wanted to write when I got the reply. It went like this:

Dear ciphergoth,

Thanks for writing. It says here I'm supposed to give some guff about costs of documenting these things, but you wouldn't buy that and I wouldn't want to insult you with it. If you promise not to tell anyone, I'll tell you the real reason.

We spend absolutely footling amounts of money compared to the money that we control as MPs. We could be twice as profligate as we are and it would make no difference to the national spend at all. In fact if that profligacy made us 0.1% more efficient at our jobs, it would totally be worth it, because if we can save 0.1% we've saved all our salaries and expenses many, many times. But the tabloids care because it's not hard to make a reasonable expense sound unreasonable, and it's always a story, a story that takes our time and attention away from the things that really matter.

We wouldn't mind being as accountable as everyone else, but we know we're not going to get treated fairly, and frankly we don't need the bother. We thought saying all this out loud wouldn't work, though, so frankly it seemed best for everyone's long term interests just to bury it while we were fucking up the big stuff.

Your loving MP, Keith.

What do you think?

(NB in case it isn't clear, my MP didn't really write the letter above)

Comments

[djm4]

Dear MP,

I have a lot of sympathy with this view, since I find the press griping about every last thing you had for lunch annoying too. However, if you don't publish your expenses, they'll just run with 'MPs spend huge amounts of our money on themselves and then cover it up,' which is also a good story.

Yes, the money is a footling amount. I don't agree that that makes it a candidate for concealment. If your instinct is to conceal even something as footling as your expenses, it doesn't bode well for how open you'll be in other areas of government. The presumption should always be that Government will happen openly and under full scrutiny unless there's a good reason why not. 'Because The Sun will distort the figures' is not a good enough reason, for me. You like the tabloids when they handily distort the figures about immigration, or single parent families. Live by the tabloid scare story: die by the tabloid scare story.

Especially since, if all MP's expenses are made public, any single expense will seem less remarkable. You will have a defence, not only of 'these expenses are within the limits allowed', but also in many cases '400 other MPs across different parties spent a similar amount on all of this'. No, the papers won't tend to report this, but after about five such stories where this turns out to be the case, the public will lose interest.