Daily View: MPs' expenses

Clare Spencer | 09:35 UK time, Friday, 5 February 2010

Sir Thomas Legg Commentators respond to Sir Thomas Legg's report on MPs expenses which recommended that 389 MPs should repay £1.3m.

Joe Dyke at Total Politics asks what the point of Sir Legg's report is:

"For all its demands it makes of MPs, the Legg report published today is basically a cost-neutral exercise. By a strange coincidence , the cost of the investigation (£1.16 million) is almost exactly the same amount it is claiming MPs owe the state (£1.12 million)."

Mike Smithson in the blog Political Betting tries to predict the effect of the expenses scandal on the election. He looks back at the Europe elections, which he says were a success for smaller parties and concludes this won't be the same because of the first-past-the-post-system in the general elections:

"So my guess is that in spite of the expenses scandal the overall shares going to UKIP/GRN/BNP will not be that much greater than 2005. The big difference is that the best known figure in each of these parties is in with a fighting chance in Buckingham, Brighton Pavillion and Barking respectively - so one or more could see an MP elected for the first time. I've got money on Farage and Lucas."

In the Times Martin Bell, who was voted in as an MP as part of a protest against "sleaze", expressed shock that over half of MPs are involved in the expenses scandal:

"Having been elected to Parliament on an issue of trust back in 1997, I am reminded by the Legg report how much worse things are now than they were then. I wish to admire MPs. I want them to be men and women of competence and integrity. The Parliament of 2005 showed shortages of both. As far as I am concerned it cannot pass into history soon enough. It will be unmourned by all but its inmates.
I have long argued that the corruptions of politics are not occasional and particular but widespread and endemic; but I had never believed them to be practised on quite this scale."

Gaby Hinsliff at the Guardian has noticed one glaring omission - the public:

"The trouble with public inquiries is they don't live up to the name: the public is elbowed aside, confined to the spectators' gallery (and told not to interrupt). That jars with a culture in which grand expertise is mistrusted, the layman invested with increasing credibility and we can grill ministers ourselves on Mumsnet rather than watching the great and good do it for us."

Richard Littlejohn in the Daily Mail is cynical about the disagreement between two judges over what had to be paid back:

"Confused? You're supposed to be.
There are four separate bodies nominally responsible for sorting out this mess. Every time Parliament appoints someone to produce the definitive report, it appoints someone else to say the opposite."

Finally, the Independent editorial leaves us with this image:

"It is a rare thing in this day in age to see two knights fighting it out. But that is, nonetheless, what happened yesterday. And, still more bizarrely, they were trading blows over the honour of lowly members of parliament."

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