Over at The Guardian, Nick Clegg highlights that expense abuses are just one symptom of a bankrupt political culture, and argues that Britain deserves real change. Here’s an excerpt:
Britain’s MPs are facing a summer of reckoning. All 700,000 pages of their expense claims are going to be published in July. It’s an investigative journalist’s dream – reams of fodder to mock and hound the political establishment.
Many of the revelations will be relatively minor, but taken together they are significant. Last year I began publishing my expense claims voluntarily. People wrote to me asking questions about individual domestic items. Quite right too – it’s their money I’m spending.
With this process under way, Westminster is now awash with rumours that some serious misdemeanours may also come to light. Whatever happens, the drip-drip effect will hit all political parties very hard; although many of the accusations will be unfair (most of what MPs claim is absorbed by staffing costs), the impression that we are milking the system will stick. …
Ignoring the growing resentment towards politicians is dangerous. I hear it in the public meetings I hold around the country: people want to give mainstream politicians a kicking. And if history teaches us one thing, it is that economic turmoil breeds political anger, frustration and extremism. And there are populists now poised to exploit the widespread feeling of powerlessness in this summer’s European elections.
Change is difficult when the two establishment parties have every reason to keep the system stitched up between them. As long as they believe that they’ll have a turn at the wheel, they have no interest in opening up our politics to real change, real democracy.
But we’ve got to do something different. And that should begin with urgent reform to the lamentable system of MPs’ pay and expenses. But then it must go much further. We must reform politics itself.
You can read the article in full HERE. And you can read about Nick’s plans for a complete overhaul of MPs’ expenses HERE.
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3 Comments
“Change is difficult when the two establishment parties have every reason to keep the system stitched up between them.”
Oh, please. Is Nick seriously suggesting that no Lib Dem MP is playing the system? Just because there are relatively so few of them doesn’t mean that they are up to exactly the same tricks as everyone else.
LFAT – we will see, won’t we?
Again on the ignominy of the many M.P.s that are salaciously, dipping their their tongues, into the public trough, with 70000 pages of soon to be published `expenses’, in his prudent reforming article in `The Guardian’.
Nick Clegg has provided this listless and rudderless Government, with an opportunity and the know-how for a timely review on behalf of the `Silent Majority’.
The `Silent Majority’ are owed the democratic inalienable right, to hold their M.P.s democratically accountable to the voter and tax payer.
The British Economy is poised to make a recovery but not yet awhile and it predicted,not until the end of 2009.
The worst economic `doomwatch’ screnario is that unemployment will rise to 3.2 M before it is reduced again.
This `Recession’ has been compared to one of the worst, since the hungry 1930`s.
Many thousands of beleaguered hard working British families, have been blighted,scarred and have suffered irrefutably, since `The Recession’ started last October, with the run and bale-out of Northern Rock.
Government owes something a lot more profound, than the daily media focus diet feed of public scandal and high expenses at the heart and pulse of Downing Street.
There are still 27,000 redundant Woolworths, former employees, whom had no job straight after last Christmas.
Some former Woollies employees, even had no direct benefits route to State support, in their hour of need.
Instead, we are bombarded with media scopes on how M.P.s are `milking the system’ with their expenses and how Government advisers are making personal Robespierre like,`off the wall, innuendos.
I agree that an immediate independent review of M.P.s expenses, would make more sense, and proposals by Mr Clegg adopted.
On the dire need for urgent review and reform of M.P..S expenses, Mr.Clegg has again scaled the moral battlements with simple common sense.
He has set out the imperative for change in how Britain is governed more fairly than any contemporary Leader.