Notes on a Scandal

After the best part of a week the story keeps going, keeps growing and growing. At first I didn't pay it too much attention thinking that it was largely hype and bluster from a newspaper looking for a boost in circulation and that there consequences would be small. Now however, I am forced to sit up and take note as it becomes clear that MPs have been embarrassed to the point at which it might become politically dangerous for their careers and at which they are all terribly sorry for their lapses of concentration, ethics, accounting.

While some MPs have clearly acted with self-interest and used the expenses system for egregious gain (particularly those who appear to have been using their second home allowance to moonlight as property developers) it is important to realise that it is a minority rather than the majority of polititians who have transgressed.

Yet a recuring remark made by commentators is that we need to return to the golden age where MPs were upstanding men of honour and integrity. There seems to be a subtext that all of this is not in line with the traditions of 'British' democracy and 'wouldn't have happened in the olden days' which exposes some sort of imperial-era delusion that the British style of democracy is the best in the world.

However, as far as I can see the fiddling of expenses, and more especially the fact that they are not actually published fits quite naturally with the semi-transparent nature of British democracy. After all we have a unelected Head of State, an unelected, semi-feudal, semi-old boys club second Chamber (House of Lords) that seems to be stuck mid-way through the reform process with no agreed end-plan; an unwritten constitution and elections that can be called whenever the Governing party thinks it has the best chance of winning.