Dorries and the MPs’ expenses debate

I’m sure nobody reading this, even those in the United States, has not heard of the scandals involving British MPs’ expenses. The scandals involve members of Parliament claiming things on parliamentary expenses (i.e. out of the public purse) which are obvious luxuries, such as a duck house for the member’s garden pond, for mortgages which have expired and for works done on properties which are neither in their constituencies nor in London, and “flipping” their registered first and second homes so as to maximise their expense claim potential. Many of these revelations have come from the Daily Telegraph, a right-leaning daily broadsheet (the only broadsheet left, in fact) which have used massive headlines more reminiscent of the Daily Mail than their usual ones. Towards the end of last week, the Bedfordshire Tory MP, Nadine Dorries, complained of a McCarthyite witch hunt and an “unbearable” atmosphere in which a suicide is considered a real possibility.

I hadn’t been aware of Dorries’s blog until after it got pulled down – by her service provider, in reponse to a letter from lawyers acting on behalf of the owners of the Daily Telegraph. The blog is still contained at Google’s cache at the time of writing (hat tip: Harry’s Place), and contains the claim, which may or may not be true, that the owners feel that the mainstream parties are not Euro-sceptic enough and that their intention in all of this was to “destabilise Parliament, with the hope that the winners will be UKIP and BNP”, and the result will be that:

Parliament will become full of racists, fantasists, and has-been celebrities. We will be rendered impotent and may never again regain the authority to withstand the pressure, opinion and whims of the overtly wealthy.

The closure of websites in response to legal complaints seems to be very common in the UK; George Monbiot wrote about their use by a Russian oligarch to silence one blog, taking several others down with it, last July; this piece by him gives an even more ridiculous example and some history of the laws. They can do this because web hosts have no stake in the content contained within their clients’ websites, and no means of checking its accuracy, yet are liable for it. It is easier to censor content by threatening the service providers than by actually suing the author for libel, particularly if the claims are true. The moral of the story is that, if you want to post anything controversial and not have it pulled, have your site hosted in the USA, unless the controversy involves encouraging people to go and fight for the Taliban when the American government is fighting against them. The action does rather smack of taking the cowards’ way out, when surely they could have put out a press release (or a Telegraph article) casting Dorries as some sort of conspiracy-obsessed moonbat.

I actually do not hold any torch for Nadine Dorries; her central argument is that the practice of claiming as much as possible on expenses is what MPs expected to have to do, because the political price of yet another pay increase is too much, so the allowances were in lieu of pay. However, MPs’ salary is currently £64,766, and ministers’ salaries are even higher. This, surely, takes away the excuse that they absolutely had to claim money for luxuries, and that a parliamentary salary isn’t enough to live on. It certainly takes away any excuse for claiming for luxuries at taxpayers’ expense, when normal people who claim expenses have to account for them down to the last penny. If you claim travel expenses, for example, your employer is likely to want the ticket, not a photocopy or even a receipt. An MP’s job is not secure, but neither are a lot of other jobs.

I have nothing against Parliamentary expenses per se, but they really should be for things an MP needs to function as an MP. In the case of MPs from outside London and its commutable area – this means the whole of Greater London plus outlying areas such as Potters Bar, Tilbury, Crawley and perhaps Guildford (and certainly Woking) – this should include a second home, which need be no more than a modest one- or two-bedroom flat (the second could function as an office). This, of course, assumes that an MP will not live in London but represent an outlying constituency, in which case a second home could be in the constituency (as long as he actually uses it to maintain contact with constituents).

However, the fear of a Parliament containing a lot more nuts, including racists, is a justifiable one. The rise of the BNP is somewhat overstated, as Nick Cohen points out in today’s Observer: it’s a tiny organisation, the racism below its surface is rather off-putting for most respectable white people, many of its activists are convicted criminals and its leader, Nick Griffin, has been caught on camera boasting to David Duke and his friends that their talk of identity and democracy is a cover for what they really stand for: racial purity. There is also the danger of an inflow of sanctimonious celebrities with no real policies, ready to jump on media-driven bandwagons like the recent Gurkha campaign.

However, to be fair, a government dominated by neither Labour nor the Tories would not be a bad thing at all – Labour are completely burned-out and discredited and the Tories are still the products of privilege they always were (witness the attitude of one Tory MP when he got found out). I do hope that the Liberal Democrats, Greens and other non-racist minor parties benefit from this scandal, as the sense of entitlement the two main parties have over parliament has been laid bare by this scandal.