Why there is nothing worse than seeing the British public getting all high and mighty

And so the MPs expenses “scandal” had reared its ugly head yet again. And this time in the same week that we learnt that the bankers are paying themselves billions of pounds worth of bonuses again. Great.

At least this time though we’re finally seeing some sense in the form of the proposed reforms. As headline grabbing as the duck-houses and moat-cleaning escapades were they only scratched the surface and hardly told the whole story.

According to BBC News, 415 of the current 646 MPs (about two-thirds) claim a mortgage allowance of up to £24,000 per year. If they all claimed that full amount, it works out at about £10 million per year (or 6,049 duck-houses, if that’s your currency).

I don’t have a problem if the taxpayer is contributing towards the 5-year rent (a maximum Parliamentary term) of a London property. But paying for an (often already very wealthy) MPs mortgage of their private property from which they will personally financially benefit from in the long term seems a step too far. It’s the small items that look ridiculous and great for the papers, but it’s the seemingly mundane accumulation of mortgage payments which are far worse.

To be honest though, I was never overly bothered by the “scandal” in the first place. There are many civil servants who have a higher wage than the MPs. Yes it’s impossible to deny many of the MPs have been proven to be morally bankrupt in the way they’ve swindled the system. Tony McNulty is a case in point – claiming for a house his parents lived in 8 miles from his own home.

But it was a bloody stupid system. And can they really justify demanding money back again? Talk about changing the goalposts. It’d be like your boss telling you: “You know that week of holiday you had? Well it turns out we need it back – so to make up for it you’ve got to come back into the office and work overtime. On Christmas Day.”

In my opinion they should just have been given a higher wages and taken away all expenses completely. They had the chance to do this in the 1980s, but bungled the decision and chose not to. In all of this people seem to forget that the reason MPs are paid is to prevent only the very wealthy from becoming MPs in the first place. Otherwise all of our politicians would still be called Rupert Urquhart-Smythe or Tarquin Fillongley-Rogers.

The thing that outraged me the most was the apparent outrage of the population. There is nothing worse, in my opinion, than seeing the British public getting all high and mighty. If, as in the case of many of the MPs, they had received phone calls from the expenses office asking “why don’t you claim this on expenses?” then it’s certain that 95% of people would have done exactly that. Their “holier than thou” attitude makes you want to sob into your pillow.

At least they’re doing something worthwhile like running the country. But compare this to the city bankers who seem to have got off scot free. Now that the markets are picking up again they’ve decided to compensate themselves for all that stress with massive bonuses again. No-one’s seemed to clock that this might have had something to do with the monumental global-recession in the first place. At least Sarkozy and Obama are trying to stop them doing it in their respective countries.

What makes me laugh (in a sadistic kind of way) is that they seem to justify it by saying “well we all work 80 hour weeks”. So? Why do long hours in our society mean you are more ‘worthy’ of obscene amounts of money? I’m pretty sure nurses work incredibly long shifts. Making rich people richer for a living hardly seems to warrant a vast pay cheque.

What these people seem incapable to recognise is that when they screwed up it had catastrophic consequences for people all over the world. As usual it’s those at the bottom of the ladder that end up worse than anyone. And the only reason the banks are doing well again is because they’re just plugging the gaps in the market caused by the failures of some of their rivals.

Still things could be worse.

Since day one of the expense-gate I’ve said all along that people from outside Britain looking in are going to find our “scandal” hilarious. I mean come on guys, this isn’t a real scandal – we should be embarrassed. It doesn’t even compare to Blagojevich trying to sell Obama’s Senate seat. Or we might have this guy in charge.

Image this conversation:

Brit: “The corruption of politicians these days is just appalling – it’s the same for you Italians isn’t it?”

Italian: “Yes well, I mean given that our President is the self-proclaimed ‘most prosecuted man’ in our history after being involved in that case where he allegedly paid off a lawyer to lie in court, the recorded tapes of him and that prostitute, calling the first black American President ‘well tanned’ on a number of occasions, being allegedly linked to the Mafia, monopolising the media, supposedly dodging tax fraud and being accused of having sex with an 18 year old actress – things could be better. Is it the same for you in the UK?”

Brit: “Yeah well there was this one guy, right, and he bought this house for his ducks…”