I read about this in one of the free rags on my way home but don’t tend to trust those, but having now read it in the Telegraph it does in fact seem that the great answer to the problem of this terrible system which caused all of the trouble is…. a quango! of unelected unaccountable “independent regulators”! Independent regulators having worked so well in so many other fields, and wasn’t the fees office supposed to be independent? How can a government appointed regulator be any more independent than some nameless civil servants?
The speaker is to be made purely ceremonial destroying yet more of our history and tradition. Giving up more of parliament’s sovereignty and handing over more power to unelected unaccountable placemen. Who after all is going to hold this new body to account, the MPs who depend on it to have their expenses approved? And who’s going to appoint these regulators, the MPs who they’re meant to be regulating? How can this in anyway be an improvement? Burning our Money sums it up rather well, as this body can’t report to the government as then it’s not independent and the government was put in place to resolve issues with every other alternative. Unless of course we just get rid of parliament and perhaps hand our legislature over to Brussels?
What on earth is wrong with MPs accepting responsibility for their own actions, reporting their full expenses to the electorate they represent to audit as they see fit? The expenses system absolutely needs reform but hiving it off to another quango isn’t the answer. Transparency, accountability to the electorate and acceptance of individual responsibility for their actions by our representatives is. After all no-one (as far as we know) held a gun to any of their heads and forced them to make bogus claims. Let them be subject to the law as are the rest of us and let legal proceedings deal with those that have broken the law, and let the threat of that and full public audit of their accounts in future serve to keep them honest. Reduce and simplify what expenses are still needed (and I do accept that as in all jobs some expenses are required), but beyond that parliament should accept its responsibilities both individually and collectively.
The one thing that has been worse for the reputation and dignity of parliament than the fraud and the troughing has been the almost unending buck-passing and claiming of incompetence (or as they’d put it “honest mistakes”). If they can’t manage to submit receipts properly then how can they possibly oversee public spending, and if they won’t accept responsibility for their own actions how can we trust them to hold anyone else to account?
Reading Daniel Hannan’s piece on the matter the thing that really gets me is this from Gordon Brown:
“Other public bodies, he asserted, were now subject to external regulation.”
Does he not get that Parliament is meant to be the external regulator, the only other forces that should ever be supreme above Parliament are the law of the land, the electorate and the monarch in whose government he serves, Meanwhile I await the imminent announcement of “off-gov” with an increasing sense of rage and despair.
Update commentary along similar lines from Dizzy Thinks and Guido
Update the 2nd and more of the same from Iain Dale and LPUK
