...we get. Fellow Brits, just spare me the moral high-horsemanship, okay?
For those of you who've been busy on Mars this last few months, Britain is in outrage meltdown over the revelations of just how much MPs have been taking the piss out of the taxpayer. Nobody has been strung up from the nearest lampost yet, but then there was some good stuff on TV this week so we obviously had more important things to do.
We knew few MPs ever left Parliament poorer than they entered it, but the detail they fought through the courts to conceal from us has just underlined what a rotten, corrupt country this is.
This vast expenses scandal is, though, just decoy chaff. The sums that MPs have been pocketing are huge to most people struggling in the recession, but this is nothing compared to what many of them make out of directorships, jobs for the boys, freebies, lobbying, and even bungs. Cash for questions. Some members of the House of Lords take money from big business to shape the law of this land, so don't think it's just the Commons. While you're frothing over a few thousand fiddled for mortgages that don't exist, you'll be nicely distracted from the really big money that many politicians make behind the scenes.
The summary so far - a catalogue of what would result in prosecution for benefit fraud if a common oik did it.
The Mash, as always, sums up the situation perfectly.
They've milked the system. They've bent the rules so far - rules they made by themselves for themselves - that even journalists (no strangers to submitting creative "exes") are stunned by it. It's across all parties, but Labour, the party that pledged to clean up Tory sleaze in 1997, got down in the trough with the rest of them the moment Bliar oozed his way under the door of Number Ten, and outdid their predecessors. They've been mired in sleaze from day one.
If you have low blood pressure, I recommend listening to some of these disgusting bastards' whining excuses to hike it up a bit higher. Reading the following self-pitying and arrogant garbage should get you to a healthier 120/65 at least.
"I did nothing wrong." (Maybe not on paper, but you have the moral awareness of a dog turd.)
"I'll pay it back." (Yes, if I pay back damages for a burglary I commit, the police will forgive and forget.)
"I'm very upset. It's hurtful to think my constituents don't trust me, so I'm going to pay it all back." (Aw! You poor poppet! Thank you so much for handing back the cash you fiddled from us.)
"I was told to claim by the Fees Office." (So, you came into Parliament with no moral framework whatsoever, and only knew something was self-serving and corrupt when a newspaper pointed it out on its front page?)
We'd have known none of this - just nursed our natural cynical suspicions that all politicians are in it for themselves - if it hadn't been for two factors.
One is a heroic woman called Heather Brooke, who fought to get the expenses made public by using the Freedom of Information Act. It's funny to watch MPs - especially Labour MPs - getting upset about the public prying into their affairs when they've made us the most-spied upon population in the so-called free world.
The other is the Daily Telegraph, which got hold of an unredacted copy of the expenses that were due to be published in the summer after the courts forced the Commons to come clean. Had MPs had their way, all addresses would have removed from the report, and we'd never have known how many homes these parasites were claiming for - four in some cases.
The Speaker of the House of Commons, an embarrassment to the Parliamentary system in his own right, was under a cloud about his own fascinating expenses, but he led the MPs' bid to block publication, spending £200,000 of our taxes to try to stop us finding out what Scots and Welsh taxpayers are told as a matter of course by their own assemblies.
So we have a corrupt House of Commons. And we should now stop frothing about it. Because we, the voters, deserve the MPs and Lords we get.
British society is rotten, and so we generate putrescent representatives. We have no moral validity. We walk by on the other side. We take no responsibility for our actions. Students say they see nothing wrong with cheating - they don't even feel guilty. Workers think it's okay to steal from their employer. Bankers gamble with our money, bankrupt our country, and laugh about it.
And the British electorate voted three times for a Labour government that, arguably by the second general election and definitely by the third, had been exposed as a lying, pocket-lining, morally bankrupt sack of shits that plunged us into a vile and illegal war.
That was fine by most of us, apparently. We saved our real outrage for the moment it was proven beyond any doubt that they had their snouts deeper in a better trough than we did. We're making up our minds to vote out these tossers mainly out of resentment, not because of their complete absence of recognisable ethics and competence.
So serves us bloody well right. Our politicians won't get any cleaner or cleverer until we become better citizens.
