More on Scamalot
I REALLY like what Antoine Clarke has to say about this in the comments to Bunny Smedley’s original post. This is just an excerpt:
We may disagree in a slightly different manner than you suggested: the French Revolution was a tragedy for rather more of my relatives than it was an emancipation, if the family stories are anything to go by. The Commune was even worse, and I guess I’m lucky to exist in this time line, but that’s another story.
However, I wanted to draw attention to the mood of people confronted with the current government and opposition, which are spiteful, vicious, crushing liberty, hypocritical, remote from reality, narcissistic, shameless and ridiculous. The public is not I think envious, but enraged: it’s a Cromwellian reaction, I reckon, not a Bolchevik one.
In the case of the Labour party, these are supposed to be people who went into politics because they had a monopoly on caring for the poor. Well, OK, I never bought that line, but the MPs themselves were supposed to either believe it, or at least behave as if it were true. The mask has slipped. The people who voted New Labour in 1997 have been cheated or were the cheats.
Filed under: Life
I TOTALLY agree with Antoine (and started to write a similar comment when you posted Bunny’s original link, but couldn’t really get it across in any coherent way).
I haven’t seen anything to suggest that the fury the general public feels is class-based, or smacks of an ‘us vs them’ resentment - if some fool of a man wants to pay to have his moat cleaned, good luck to him. We are just furious that these clowns have seen taxpayers’ money as some kind of glorified expense account to shore up the kind of lavish lifestyles that most Brits would dream of having.
Jacq, why is it worse (or more worthy of comment) for an MP to spend a few hundred pounds getting his moat cleaned than it is for MPs in general to spend many billions pounds on public services that don’t work, or financial bail-outs that cause more problems than they solve? Why does the former provoke all this ‘anger’ whilst the latter provokes remarkably little fuss, all things considered?
I’ve done my best to argue the envy thing elsewhere, so I won’t try to do it again here - suffice to say, though, that the average British taxpayer seems much happier watching his elected representatives throw away really large sums of money than relatively tiny ones, and much happier when the money is totally wasted than in cases where it does, at least, make an individual or two a little bit happier.
Bunny, I don’t think that being angry about the MP getting his moat cleaned (or any of the wide variety of nonsensical expenses claims various MPs have submitted) means that I can’t also be angry about poorly-run public services. They’re two totally separate issues.
MPs should be able to claim whatever costs they incur as part of the job of being an MP. Nothing more than that. Having a clean moat does not increase this individual’s ability to be an effective MP, and so it is a completely inappropriate claim and an attempt to steal public funds for personal reasons.
I think motive is a bit issue here. Yes, public services may be ineffective, but it’s not as though MPs are wilfully funding services knowing that they will not work - they may be failing to run things well, but it’s not through want of trying. However, dodgy MPs ripping off the taxpayer have done so fully aware of what they were up to.
I don’t think they’re really trying to run things well - unless they’re complete nutters (also a possibility), it can’t fail to have passed their notice that everything they try to run turns to absolute shit. It’s a gravy train, not a real job, and it’s easy to spend other people’s money, be it on moats or unnecessary “services”.
I’d be really interested to know where these expense fiddlers stood when it came to the British Army having sufficient armor and other life-protecting gear in Iraq.
I think they do as good a job as they’re capable of doing - the problem is that the people in question are often terribly mediocre!
Bunny,
Anyone who takes a full-time job in politics and, after several years, states that the welfare state achieves its stated objectives is a liar or a fool.
It is one thing for people outside the legislature to hope/pray/believe. I don’t accept that anyone with the time an MP has to look at the objective outcomes of comprehensive schools can possibly believe that they work in the interests of the inmates.
Or NHS hospitals. Or the rehabilitation of criminal offenders. Or elderly care. Or the armed forces.
I’m not prepared to give any benefit of the doubt. It’s not as if there were NO sources of reasoned criticsm of the welfarist state.
The true reason for favouring the welfare state is power and budgets. Which are not so far off from the expenses scandal after all!