Article published on the World Issues website in May 2009 looking at the revelations around the expense claims of Members of Parliament in the UK:
At the end of a devastating week of tawdry disclosures of the excesses of Members of the British Parliament at the expense of their own electorates, the most-culpable can be seen in every newspaper’s column-inches, verbally rocking back-and-forth, whilst chanting the above mantra.
The lack of moral-conception exhibited by some of our elected representatives this week has dealt their ilk such a public-relations blow, that it will take them years, maybe even decades, to live it down. Yet they still fail to grasp the fury of an electorate, many of whom are already suffering the effects of austerity measures that may have to remain in place for years to come; a fury not only regarding the types of revelation, but also the length of time, and the depth to which, these MPs’ snouts have been pushed into the House of Commons trough.
Their attempts at convincing themselves of lack of wrong-doing sound as hollow to their paymasters as similar claims made sixty years ago, emanating from some of the accused in the courts of Nuremberg, that they had “only been following orders”. To some readers, that may sound an excessive comparison, but I doubt that it will to the voter who has recently lost his job as a direct result of the lack of scrutiny of the conduct of certain bankers, exercised by government departments controlled by ministers who were apparently more focussed on how large their new flat-screen TV should be in their second home.
Neither, I doubt, will it upset pensioners, whose index-linked pension has been virtually frozen by the forced reduction in the Retail Price Index as an aid towards bailing-out said bankers, and who now find it difficult to afford basic foodstuffs, while their Member of Parliament gleefully, in addition to his annual salary of £65,000, takes £100 per week, tax-free, from the public purse for the purchase of food alone. Read the full article