New Little Red Book in France

[Uncle Monty]

I think I've subjected you all to far more than my tuppence worth on this, mangerton, but I do think the idea of a "free press" needs unpacking. The old thing about power requiring responsibility, and freedom needing not to be abused. It's not always the sensible thing to hit a credulous and often intellectually lazy public with a lot of uncontextualised "truths". But it sells papers.

[Lateralthinking1]

Eine Alpen, Mangerton, I hope you manage to survive the cull.

Uncle Monty - You will realise that the sentiments expressed weren't about you. I always enjoy reading your considered comments and often agree with them. There is a point about press irresponsibility. Don't we all know it. I just don't feel that the MPs expenses are an example of it.

I don't want to cast myself as a saint in the public eye. I'm not. I was though the kind of fool who, on being given virtual carte blanche four times a year to charge the taxpayer for a lunch, would buy a couple of sandwiches and the cheapest coffee anyone could find. This was to keep the costs down. I then often undercharged even for that on the basis that I would have had to buy lunch anyway. The average claim was just over £3. I felt better for doing so. It is a question of attitude. Either you need to be advised by officials to do such things - many, though far from all, would be incapable of doing such things themselves - or a sense of decency means that it is instinctive. I was on an average salary too - in fact less than the average at the very end.

My apologies for encouraging the discussion to divert. I will always speak up about this when it seems appropriate. In fact, there is a lot that could be said to make the eyes pop and I haven't decided yet whether it is worth pursuing further in other contexts. I feel so strongly about it all that I may not be able to stop myself if I can bear to put myself through it all in that way. Most close to me are advising me to move on from it as quickly as I can but it has affected them too and that particularly angers me.

Anyway, the more important point. I don't want people to feel that they are treading on eggshells. I hope that the original debate can continue with people feeling able to say whatever they want to say. Lat.

[Uncle Monty]

I have never worked in a public-sector job where expenses were an issue, but my wife has, and has sometimes been shocked at the liberty-taking over expenses. Some people apparently believe, genuinely, that claiming the maximum allowable is the correct thing to do.

I'm not one to stick up for MPs willy-nilly, and more to the point, neither is Ken Livingstone, who explained today that when he became an MP, the officials took him on one side and told him that since Thatcher had declined to raise MPs's actual salaries, the generous expenses were a quid pro quo. They didn't even regard the fact that he didn't have a second home as any reason not to claim for one! Ken, to his credit, took a dim view of this, and didn't do it, but I don't have any trouble seeing that if this was the prevailing climate, where MPs were actually being advised to bring their salary up to the "proper" level by expenses, it wouldn't be surprising if many of them went along with it, and I think that alone makes them something of a special case.

I don't approve of troughing, and certainly not fraud, but I don't think the MPs' case is as cut & dried as has been made out. But if the system can be cleaned up and made transparent, so much the better.

Please don't hesitate to discuss the relevance of your situation in the current climate, by the way. If nothing else, we will all be able to see where what is actually happening in the real world deviates from the airy, impersonal rhetoric of officialdom and government!

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

i have been perhaps, and hopefully , unlucky in my exposure to a lot of public services in recent years so i will not comment on them because i know it is a one sided view that i hold .... but when i have chatted with people in the 'front line' nurses, doctors, teachers etc they are scathing about Whitehall ... in common with all other readers of the press i also see monumentally bad decisions and execution costing many billions in waste ...

we also have the development of a managerial ideology and greed culture in both the City, wider business, and the public sector .... the issue is systemic rather than political in the party sense [and in such terms calls for profound changes] but the MP's expenses is in large part the result of Prime Ministers fear of public and press reaction to increasing politicians salaries .... for Thatcher it would be off message, for Blair and Brown a gift to the Murdoch & Rothermere rags and the expenses fiddle was the quid pro quo as mentioned above .... this is a prime example of how we take nationally important decisions in the management of our affairs .... unless we can find institutional arrangements with authority and integrity to decide such issues, and not just another commission comprised of the usual establishment we will continue to endure the stench .... and suppose we did and a decision was reached to increase MPs salaries by say £40k what would our reaction be? [i believe something of this order would be a likely outcome of an independent review] are we as Joe Citizen capable of being open minded and understanding about such matters ... i believe we are on the whole and with a normal human imperfection, ... we are part of the system, i believe Stephane Hessel is asking us to remind our elites of that fact and to re/assert our values in the process of 'crying out' ....

Lateralthinking i am sorry to hear your news, i have been self employed since 1975 and have had several periods of penury and great uncertainty which were utterly dreadful experiences for me, periods in which one certainly finds out what one is made of whether one wants to or no .... good luck!

the party politics in the discussions above, or rather the discussions of party politics above, does not encourage me to seek answers in that direction ... i have no faith in any of them to see outside their mental blinkers, their careerism and greed, and for me the continued presence of Coulson in No 10 is now a litmus test for the integrity of the entire government and Cameron in particular .... if he remains we are most definitely not all in this together and Cameron has a masked agenda and personality .... [Coulson knows all the dirt, like Mr FBI Hoover he has the files that News International used to scare MPs and the Met Police]

[Lateralthinking1]

Calum - Thank you. I do tend to agree with you on many points, including most of the above. One of the messages that those who haven't worked in the public sector are often not allowed to hear very audibly is that there is a two-tier system. The papers encourage them to think of all civil servants and local government officers as one when the vast majority know that it has never been a case of everybody being in it together. I won't bore you with the figures, for example about small pensions. Many don't believe them but from my experience they are perfectly true.

I have a more robust - and sadly unreal - view of politicians' salaries. I think that an ordinary MP should be paid the average hourly wage to bring him or her into line with the rest of the country. Well, almost. They work long hours so that would bump them up a bit, then I'd add one standard annual amount for office expenses and a further amount for travelling expenses based not on the individual but the constituency represented. These could be reviewed annually.

It used to be said that they all had to be paid a reasonable amount as without this Parliament would be full of toffs. Look at the current situation! Higher pay could lead to the less well-off running for office but I doubt it given that all main candidates are supported by big party machines and even if this were true it would be the wrong kind of less well-off person. In what was my trade union, we have been campaigning for some time to get our rather good leader to honour his pledge to keep his salary down. As soon as most get a bit of power, the greed instinct needs very careful monitoring - Lat.

[Uncle Monty]

Braving a tirade from the wife along the lines of " . . . and if I see you anywhere near that ******* computer today. . .", I would just add to the point about MPs' salaries the worry that if the salaries are not high enough to attract professionals and others who actually know something, they just won't come into politics at all, and you'll be left with toffs and know-nothing careerists.

Don't say it. . .

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

Braving a tirade from the wife along the lines of " . . . and if I see you anywhere near that ******* computer today. . .",

Oh, you get that too...

[french frank]

"But to me it seems that very few of the MPs were actually fraudulent, and most were simply acting under advice from the office."

Ah. The Nuremberg defence. So that's all right then.

Not strictly, is it, because genocide is indisputably an international crime against humanity, and there's no suggestion that anyone argued that it was legally allowable.

"Most of the sums involved were utterly trivial in government terms."

So you're saying it's OK to steal trivial (in govt terms) sums, then?

Well, if a Cheeky Girl can get a caution for shoplifting...

I take it as a given (a 'given', not something that it right) that very rich people have a completely different attitude to money compared with poor people. But it's like tax avoidance: who would query it if the tax office said a £25 expense was allowable, and then opt not to claim it on the grounds that you could afford to pay, and it was virtuous to pay as much tax as possible to help the less well-off?

The Telegraph made no distinction between fraudsters like Chaytor (who actually falsified documents to get his claims through) and the majority who claimed what they were allowed to claim. And it did it, as Uncle said, drip-feeding the information to sell papers.

On from the question of salaries, how do you attract the 'right' people to stand for parliament? I remember once canvassing someone in a local election who turned out to be one of the higher placed council officers. He said the trouble was that the people who would make the best councilors would never stand for election. (And, if they did, he added, they wouldn't get elected.) I think there's a lot of justice in that - but where does that leave democracy?

[french frank]

Don't say it. . .

Don't say what - I agree with your wife?

[mangerton]

Not strictly, is it, because genocide is indisputably an international crime against humanity, and there's no suggestion that anyone argued that it was legally allowable.

Well, if a Cheeky Girl can get a caution for shoplifting...

ff, yes of course you're quite right. My "Nuremberg" remark was rather tongue in cheek. I don't know whether a caution for shoplifting was appropriate or not, though it seems a bit lenient. Perhaps medical treatment might have been more appropriate.

But as I said, Mr Chaytor cold-bloodedly sat down and wrote a false contract. It was by no means a spur of the moment thing, and that's why I'd throw the book at thim. He abused public trust.

As you point out, it is difficult to get the "right" people to stand for public office. I think it was Arthur C Clarke who wrote in one of his sci-fi novels that in his mythical civilisation anyone who sought high office was automatically barred from holding it.

I think he was on to something.

[Uncle Monty]

Don't say what - I agree with your wife?

You probably realise -- it's hard to tell -- that I was doing a double-take on what I'd said, namely that without decent remuneration for MPs we WOULD BE left with only toffs and yobboes. But come to think of it. . . :cool2:

Arthur C. Clarke's conclusion is probably a bit sweeping, but it has often occurred to me that to get into high office you have to be, at least for a time, the sort of person no one would want to see in it. I know it's terribly English, but I find naked ambition very unappealing, and surface glibness. But I suppose you would have to have that self-centred drive, and given the damn fool questions hurled at you all the time, you'd have to develop a carapace of glibness.

You're right, it's a problem!

[amateur51]

Stéphane Hessel's pamphlet, published in France as Indignez-Vous!, is now available in UK in English as Time For Outrage!:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Time-Outrage-St%C3%A9phane-Hessel/dp/0704372223/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1298245831&sr=8-1

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

they seem to have been reading it in the Arabian world ....

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

I'll be in London tomorrow for the demo against job cuts in public services (brought about by the incompetence and greed of the then privately-owned banks).

[amateur51]

I'll be in London tomorrow for the demo against job cuts in public services (brought about by the incompetence and greed of the then privately-owned banks).

Are you implying that your presence might be a lightning rod for public discontent, EA?

Cometh the hour, cometh the man!

Have a great day out - I hope that the weather's kind for you all on this important occasion