Parliament of whores

The story on Members of Parliament fiddling their expense reports and diddling the British ratepayers keeps on coming. And it’s costing MPs more than embarrassment—they’re starting to lose their jobs.

Shahid Malik tried brazening it out by insisting that expensing (among other things) a $3K flat-screen TV is perfectly legit. But by Friday he’d handed in his resignation as junior justice minister. Malik is the first, but probably not the only one headed down that path.

The WSJ comments that this is an aberration from the usual Parliamentary scandal, which has tended to be of a sexual nature. You know—murdering your gay lover, sleeping with call girls who are also servicing the Soviet naval attaché, that sort of peccadillo. Money—just not the done thing, you know…

The pushing of the padding envelope has been going on for many years. But surfacing amidst a serious recession, when Brits have lost their sense of job security and watched banks being nationalized while executive management remained both exempt from accountability and in possession of golden parachutes—well, the electorate is not amused.

The rules that enabled all the fiddling were enacted to basically increase MPs’ compensation without passing a raise in salaries, which was unpopular to the point of being a serious career-limiting move. Salaries remained static, but Members could expense all sorts of things—without having to justify individual purchases to their constituency. They were permitted allowances, and the total expenditures might be made public, but not that they were for flat-screen TVs, horse manure or multiple-residences.

(The WSJ has helpfully compiled a list of who’s charged the taxpayers for what. Talk about ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous.)

By contrast, in the US, Congressional money scandals usually revolve around accepting freebies and quid-pro-quos from lobbyists. That’s because their allowed expenses are carefully circumscribed, and they by law must reveal all their outgoings. Having the same sense of grandiose entitlement as their British confrères, they make up the “difference” between what they get and what they think they deserve by cozying up with special interests.

What’s interesting to me is that in the midst of swirling revelations of venality both large and small, Parliament expressed its own outrage. Not that they were revealed as emulating small-time pickpockets, or that their injured self-justifications didn’t wash with the British public.

No, the real crime in their view wasn’t that they were screwing their constituents. It was that the story got leaked to said constituents. They were outraged—utterly outraged—that their privacy was compromised in this fashion, and have called on the Metropolitan Police (Scotland Yard) to investigate and prosecute the true criminals to the fullest extent.

That’s pretty much a pay-no-attention-to-the-man-behind-the-curtains ploy to divert the public's attention from the fact that they’ve been picking up the tab for MPs’ dog food, home renovations, phantom mortgage interest payments and bankrolling their sibs for years.

I’ve got to say, it makes a nice change from our domestic venality, but it is nonetheless discouraging to find that, no matter how much you pay pols, it’s never enough to salve their egos.