MPs and Expenses

So some MPs are already getting a bit sniffy about the prospects of being asked to dip less heavily into their taxpayer funded trough.

Sir Christopher Kelly is going to suggest that MPs living within 60 minutes of Westminster receive no second home allowance and that MPs will have to stop employing their family as researchers and secretaries. These perfectly sensible suggestions seem to have upset one or two MPs like Roger Gale, Conservative MP for Thanet and Sir Stuart Bell, Labour MP for somewhere or other.

It is interesting to note that MPs, like investment bankers, don't seem to get it. There is a genuine anger about the gravy train that MPs have been travelling on and when people are losing jobs complaints about having to commute to work, getting home late and not seeing ones family (unless of course you employ them) just won't wash. You can't ask for massive sacrifices from the public sector and keep your little trinkets. You can't say, as George Osbourne did, "We are all in this together" and keep your nice little allowances, pay rises and pension schemes. All political parties are asking us, the tax payers, to suffer for the good of the nation. Well perhaps the MPs shoud listen to their own rhetoric and set an example.

But no. It appears to be 'do as we say, not as we do' when it comes to parliament.