In the 20 years I have been writing a national newspaper column I have never witnessed such outrage as about the great scandal of MPs' expenses that The Daily Telegraph has exposed over the past week. But anger is not the sole point. The scandal has not merely upset voters profoundly. It has turned on a light in the minds of millions about the use of public money. For years we have been told that the suffocatingly high levels of taxation and spending we are made to endure are somehow necessary for the good of the country, and we should be almost grateful to pay them. Now we have had, en masse, a revelatory moment that has shown us a prime example of just how our hard-earned money is squandered, and what very amoral people do the squandering.
So let us hope that, come a general election more keenly awaited than almost any in modern times, we shall see a shattering of that orthodoxy, and an admission that the voters do not exist simply to be bled white. Let us hope, too, that those who govern us have learned sufficient humility to have an expenses system that reimburses them fairly but not lavishly: though the two main obstacles to that appear to be an entirely discredited Speaker incapable of understanding his responsibilities to those who elect the House of Commons, and an entirely discredited Prime Minister whose points of connection with the public are about as plentiful as those between a brothel and a convent. However, there is one more overarching reality that must be properly recognised.
The public perceives that, in these shocking instances of peculation exposed by us, there still appears to be one law for the governing class, and another for the rest of us. Most of us are financially honest, and so concerned by the effect it would have on us to be shown as anything else, that we do not dream either of misrepresenting our expenses or of keeping from the taxman details of income we have had or profits we have made. I have a bank account that pays less interest a year than will buy a round of drinks, and my accountant sternly warns me of the need to put this trifling sum on my tax return. Each time I have a VAT inspection the departure of a contented investigating officer, once every scrap of paper for the past several years has been trawled through and pored over, is a cause of almost demented relief. I know these proprieties and feelings are shared by millions of people. They are not, however, shared by some who purport to be our governors.
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