Hairshirt time

Kerry McCarthy has an excellent piece about MPs' expenses, as does Paul from the Bickerstaffe Record.

A lot of MPs have been completely taking the piss with their expense claims, and they should, at the very least, not be MPs after the next election. There are others who haven't done anything wrong, and don't deserve the same punishment.

The reporting from the Daily Telegraph (and others) has deliberately aimed to mix up the two categories in order to score political points. Essentially any expenses claim can be reported in a way which makes it sound really bad, particularly if included in a list with some of the more outrageous examples. So, for example, Friday's headlines were about Gordon Brown's gardener, clearly implying that there was something dodgy going on, and buried in Sunday's editorial there was a weasel phrase about "There has never been any suggestion of any impropriety on the part of the Prime Minister or his brother." I think more concentration on the truly grotesque expenses, rather than trying to spread the blame between guilty and innocent alike, would have been more ethical.

Hopefully most Labour MPs would agree with Kerry when she writes that, "As I've said, the rules have changed and further change is needed. I don't have the solution. I don't think anyone does at this stage. But if we have to wear hairshirts for a while, or from now onwards, then so be it. Frankly, we - collectively speaking - deserve it."