viernes, 7 de enero de 2011

It's not hard to feel a bit sorry for David Chaytor - The Guardian

Former Labour MP David Chaytor
The former Labour MP David Chaytor has been sentenced to 18 months in prison. Photograph: Toby Melville/Reuters

A lot of rough justice has been handed out in the scandal over MPs' expenses, and it's not hard to feel a bit sorry for David Chaytor as the ex-MP got an 18 month jail sentence for fraud. But justice it was – and it had to happen.

Why him and the clutch of others who may follow him? Why not others? Reading a summary of the offences described in court today, it seems that this could not have been administrative error, misjudgment or misunderstanding – all three got other MPs pilloried, often unfairly – but a serious assault on public money in excess of £20,000.

Chaytor should have known better. But so should all sorts of colleagues, past and present, who will not be spending the next few months in the slammer. And Chaytor, at 61, will carry the stigma for the rest of his life.

Ditto Michael Martin, the Speaker hypocritically ousted for a failure of leadership which clearly reflected what most MPs wanted him to do: defend the system. Lucky the financial sophisticates, MPs like David Cameron, who kept it simple by maxing out their allowances on a wholesome second mortgage.

In the 30 or so years I have spent around the Houses of Parliament, this is the worse thing to have befallen the British political class as a whole.

Governments and prime ministers come and go, but this was a blow to the entire system and public confidence in it. Decades may pass before it is forgotten.

Around Westminster, we all knew that MPs' expenses had become a bit lax and would occasionally write about some egregious example. The mileage rate for large cars stick in the mind – Scottish MPs were said to take advantage of it.

But we also knew why the system had arisen and that it was part of a wider culture – private sector (Fleet Street, for example), as well as public – that has since been tightened up. MPs were a special case because successive governments of both parties rarely found the courage to brave public wrath by raising backbench salaries at a time of wage restraint or cuts. Voters don't like it.

Tam Dalyell, the Labour ex-MP, recently told me how the Tory chief whip in 1964 – shortly after he was first elected, a relatively wealthy man – had told the cabinet that some Labour MPs lived in poverty and slept on the overnight train to save rent, while some Tories lived in genteel poverty.

Expenses were deployed to ease the strain and Margaret Thatcher fatally allowed mortgages, not merely rents, to be charged against the taxpayer. MPs in all parties have told me that the pre-Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (Ipsa) fees office would ring them and say: "You're not charging enough."

Here lay the fatal misunderstanding which allowed some MPs to regard their out-of-pocket expenses to be regarded as allowances, paid with no questions asked. The Daily Telegraph failed to provide context of that kind when it systematically worked its way through the leaked CDs, tarring the good with the bad and the slightly careless in the process.

The suspicion remains that the Tory hierarchy was happy to deploy public anger against older, non-Cameroon MPs who were "bed-blocking" safe seats, but not against court favourites. And I suspect Cameron's team reacted better than did Gordon Brown's because it had some prior notice.

Never mind – politics is a rough old business and, by the same token, some Tories still think the Guardian went after Jonathan Aitken and Neil Hamilton because they were Tories, not because they were engaged in misconduct.

Ditto Andy Coulson today. Ditto Vince Cable, for that matter. We are still awaiting the Telegraph's expose of what Tory cabinet members think of Nick Clegg's men.

The expenses regime has been cleaned up. Indeed, the hasty creation of Ipsa to police the new system has created a new problem – unfairness to MPs – which is only slowly being sorted out. The danger is that the job will soon only appeal to hair-shirted puritans with no kids or adult kids, or to those of wealthy independent means. It's already started to reshape the 2010 parliament.

For the record, MPs were unpaid until the radical Liberal chancellor David Lloyd George found them £400 a year in 1910, the annus mirabilis of progressive taxation when LG faced down the Lords. According to the National Archives ready-reckoner, that £400 is worth £22,824 today – so MPs on £65,738 have achieved a steady real-terms pay rise.

Ministers have done less well. Pitt the Younger got £5,000 a year as PM in 1800, a sum worth £160,000 today, but £292,000 in 1850, more stable times. The pay was increased to £10,000 in the 1930s when, according to the reckoner, it would be worth £396,000 in today's funny money.

Thanks to Brown's unilateral cut and his own 5% further cut, Cameron gets £142,000, including his MP's salary.

Investment bankers, busy upping their pay again as we speak, would not answer the phone for that sort of salary, but have suffered far less grief for their sins than MPs have. Who was the last British-based banker you can remember getting 18 months for fraud? And many of them are living off taxpayer largesse, too.

If that does not make you a little uncomfortable, consider the Telegraph's owners, the tax exile privacy freaks Dave and Fred Barclay. Then consider that the Telegraph's CDs have been deployed by the BNP to harry targeted MPs, merited or not. It's still going on.

Like I say, rough justice.

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