Your MP Is Probably A Dick. Do Something About That.

I read today on mySociety’s blog about a plan to block the publication of MP’s expenses. They link to two newspaper reports, saying in the Facebook group (although this text has since been replaced) “when the Daily Mail and the Guardian are in full throated agreement, you know something dodgy is happening.” (A couple of hours ago when I started writing this, that group had eighteen members; now it has 119.) According to The Times, too*,

A document from the committee led by Michael Martin, the Commons Speaker, said: ‘It has been argued that it would be excessively burdensome for Members to have provided receipts for all transactions and that additional costs incurred ... would be likely disproportionate.’

Which seems almost reasonable except that a reader quickly wrote in to point out that

As a self-employed person I am instructed by my local tax office to keep, log and report all expenses, down to a sandwich or coffee, for five years. Failure to do so will mean I cannot claim these expenses against legitimate business expenses and hence mitigate my tax bill.

MPs don’t just claim the top 28% back from public funds, remember, they get this stuff for free, entirely from taxes. Now I’m not against that, obviously; they have as much right to an expense account as everyone else. (That means they also have as much obligation to let the people paying for it know what they use it for as everyone else. I’m sure we can all think of at least a couple of examples where MPs have been caught abusing this system and their carreers have been damaged as a result. That’s what this would stop.) If they want the self-employed to log these things in exchange for a small fraction of this money, it seems reasonable to suppose they’d be willing to do it themselves for the full amount. But then, it would seem reasonable that if MPs were willing to ban smoking in all workplaces including bars (which again, I support) that they would include in that ban the bars in the Houses of Parliament. It should be a clue that they’re not fit to govern when they enforce rules and then refuse to live by them. It is especially so given that MPs are the people whom it is most important are subject to scrutiny: we entrust them with great power and it’s only fair that we can watch to see what they do with it.

Here is the actual proposal:

This Order amends the entries for the House of Commons and the House of Lords in Part 1 of Schedule 1 to the Freedom of Information Act 2000 ("the Act").  In respect of Members of Parliament it removes most expenditure information held by either House of Parliament from the scope of the Act.

It strikes me as either lazy and stupid or just massively dishonest. The whole premise of democracy rests somewhat on transparency and openness: if the people aren’t given all the information, how are they supposed to make a decision? Worse, if they’re drip-fed information by the government, then they’ll only know things that make the government look good, and that will just serve to keep the same government in power forever.

It’s vitally important that such things are opposed, because systems naturally fall into that rut anyway. For example, the recent Political Parties and Elections Bill Committee discussed making it more difficult for large, well-funded parties to pour endless money into local elections relatively free of scrutiny by working around the rules. That such a bill is needed is a clue that the system is naturally rigged in favour of whoever is in power. That we’ve only ever had two parties in power, or even with a reasonable shot at government. And apparently the discussion was largely controlled by the chairs, who were all Labour and Conservative members, who primarily selected trivial amendments tabled by Labour and Conservative members, and apparently the way these committees work is that rather than continuing until you reach an agreement or have discussed every idea, you talk until four o’clock then call it a day. That’s not democracy; that’s cricket! It even ends up being abused in the same way as the rules of cricket. The upshot is that the rules to stop big parties abusing their positions end up being controlled by big parties, and the people with the power to change that are the people it’s protecting. The only way around it is for the public to be aware and determined, until it stops being viable for MPs to behave that way. After all, they win nothing if they protect the system and immediately get voted out of it. But we’re a very long way from that at the moment.

And now, some MPs are planning on voting themselves out of having to publish details of their expenses. They say this is because it is too time-consuming and expensive to do so (although presumably it would be cheaper in the long run not to give them carte-blanche to buy any expensive telly they’d like), and they cite as an example details already logged, collated and scheduled for publication, which apparently cost the taxpayer £500,000. That being the case, why are the new proposals so carefully timed and retrospectively acting so as to block the publication of those details? They’re effectively free: we’ve paid for them already. There’s no means to an end in blocking them: the only plausible end is simply keeping your spending a secret, and at that, keeping it a secret from the people who end up footing the bill. This, at the same time as they’re trying to design an invasive and frankly rather stupid database containing details of emails, phone calls, internet activity and text messages for everyone in the country whether or not there is even the slightest suggestion that they may have done anything wrong, which they are presumably going to leave on a train or something. The hypocricy that they show in fighting for their own rights and privacy while trampling everyone else’s is staggering. And we only really have one means of recourse:

MPs have the power to keep their expenses secret if they win the vote, but they do not have the power to keep their voting secret. Not only the results of this vote will be published, but also a full list of MPs who backed it, opposed it, and didn’t vote (which, let’s not forget, is a cowardly way of looking like you object while actually helping the bill to pass). Pester yours to vote the right way. Then, after the vote (whether it passes or not), see how they voted. And bear that in mind when you decide if you want to sack them at the next opportunity.

*Actual quote is on page 45 of the Revised Green Book and audit of members’ allowances (link is to PDF). It’s one of those long, massively boring documents that we employ journalists to read for us and never usually know if they do or not. Openness and transparency at their best, isn’t it? This paragraph, by the way, immediately follows one which notes that the committee set up to decide these things reccomended againts exactly this.