Pound Force create a flowery pound sign in MP Alan Davis's garden in protest
Unknown to most – I’m sure – University of Huddersfield’s Harold Wilson lecture of 2009 was given by Lord David Steel and when expenses were brought up during his question time with students he pointed out that when he first became an MP, in the mid 1960s, MPs were paid pittance and expected to make the bulk of their living outside of their duties of the job. Today we’ve not only got to the point where to be an MP holds a substantial pay packet – being anywhere between the basic salary of £64,766 to a whopping £197,689 for the Prime Minister in 2009 – but furthermore, the MPs have claimed expenses of larger amounts than many people earn in a year.
However, the question that I put to you about the expenses scandal is this – Who is to blame?
Numerous papers would suggest that the MPs are at fault, and with claims such as Douglas Hogg’s of £2,115, for clearing the moat on his estate, and Sir Gerald Kaufman’s of £1,800, for an antique rug imported from New York, who could blame them? But, as a student who has studied politics and a self-defined pragmatist, I would suggest that the root problem of this scandal is that of the Civil Service and the Speaker of the House of the time Michael Martin. I suggest this purely because these are the people who approved every claim, either by not checking the validity of the claims, or by looking the other way as, for example, MPs ‘flipped’ their second home addresses to refurbish multiple houses at the tax payers’ expense.
However, I would like to suggest another side to this debate, one that has had very little air-time, if any at all, and that is if you had the chance to claim on expenses, would you? Travel expenses for petrol in any job or trip tends to overpay the driver by measuring a price per mile travelled, and yet that does not hit the papers as scandal. Now I am by no means excusing the actions of MPs, but I am suggesting that the MPs were in a system where it was not only easy to claim, but a common norm to claim for these things, therefore I would suggest that the system is a massive contributor to the scandal, coupled with a good number of horrifically immoral choices from certain MPs.
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