Of all the outrageous stories about expenses claimed by our MPs, from moat-cleaning to property empire-building, the most galling was the one about Alistair Darling charging us for the accountant who helped fill out his tax return.
Every year – usually the week before it’s due in, I’m ashamed to admit – I have a mad scramble to dig up all my receipts, track down my self-assessment form and hope the computer doesn’t crash while I’m filing a return that grows more complicated with every passing Budget. If I want the luxury of help, I have to pay for it. Yet the man who puts me through this misery – the man who in effect writes the tax laws – gets someone else to do it for him, and then charges the fee to you and me. The cheek!
So I was glad to see that HM Revenue & Customs has pointed out to Mr Darling and the 40-odd MPs who did the same, that “accountancy fees incurred in connection with the completion of a personal tax return are not deductible” and, indeed, never have been. So at least the taxman will be able to claim a small chunk of our money back to waste elsewhere.
It’s this “do as I say, not as I do” attitude that sums up why most of us are so angry. The amounts claimed are indeed “piddling”, as some detractors – mainly rich Labour-voting celebrities – have carped. And our MPs are by no means the worst – for real snout-in-the-trough industrial-scale corruption, you have to go to Europe.
But it does show the danger of letting people loose with money that isn’t their own. Take this little gem from one Bob Laxton MP, pilloried for claiming £750 to the cost of a £1,049 flat-screen TV. “I didn’t really have the time to run around and get deals on a TV,” he argued. Well guess what, Bob? Nor do the rest of us. The reason we make the time to shop around is because it’s our own cash we’re spending. If it was your money, then I would just sling the first £1,000 telly I found in the back of my car, too.
There’s talk of a ‘revolution’, with celebrity candidates coming forth in droves. But this is a pointless distraction. Britain is now in serious danger of losing its top-notch credit rating. We need to make big public-spending cuts fast. Now that we’ve seen how our MPs waste public money, the best way for them to redeem themselves is by using the powers we grant them to stop far bigger waste scandals.
I’m talking about the more than £40bn a year spent on quangos, ever-rising Olympic costs, and the government’s fondness for costly data bases that never seem to get off the ground. Get rid of a fraction of this waste, and who knows? We could be back to secure triple-A status by the end of next year. And we might just begin to think our MPs really are worth what we pay them.