As Maria Miller bids and overdue farewell to government, we are all left still questioning, how on earth did this happen again? The now former Culture Secretary was caught fiddling expenses to the tune of £90,000 but this is just the latest in a long list of greedy MPs expense claims. MPs expenses have been a hot topic since the ludicrous claims were first exposed by the Telegraph in 2009, and they still refuse to go away; there is no denying it, the system is rotten to the core.
Despite the fact that these people are elected to represent the common people, they see nothing wrong in abusing a system there to help carry out their role. These are the same MPs who complain (without real action I must add) about our easily-abused welfare system, yet are doing the same thing. To hark back to the infamous statistics, at one point Maria Miller tried to claim £3,184 in the month of March 2006. This included her second-home mortgage and £721 for crockery that month. That’s right, £721 worth of crockery. As students I’m sure we’ve all drunkenly dropped a plate or two after a late night takeaway, but I highly doubt we could rack up a £721 bill in a month for them!
The point I am trying to make is that regardless of whether or not the rotten system allowed the so-called ‘rotten parliament’ of 2005 to claim excessively, politicians’ moral codes should’ve kicked in and stopped them from claiming. These were and still are members of all the major parties, Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat, and no party came out smelling of roses. These MPs should set an example of behaviour to society, seeing how they are the ones legislating and telling us what to do.
The 2009 scandal led to the creation of the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority which was supposed to monitor MPs expenses rather than the former self-policing of expenses by MPs themselves. The old system was clearly never going to work, with a scarily large number of MPs willing to help one another to dig their grubby fingers into the hard-working taxpayers’ pockets. The new system seemed to be a breath of fresh air for everybody and one which seemed to work properly. Maria Miller may have just proved that assertion wrong.
The amazing thing is that many MPs, including Prime Minister David Cameron, came out to defend Miller. This you would think was political suicide, but few people seem to have batted an eyelid. This again simply highlights the greedy system of politics we have in the UK. Too often MPs just seem to prove they are out for themselves and that the three major parties are not that different at all. Too many want to help themselves, not help society. There are exceptions to the rule as always, but ours is undeniably a Parliament in need of radical overhaul. We need new MPs who are not career politicians, we need new regulatory bodies with real power, and we need to wake up and get active in elections to prove our discontent. The only way that anyone, especially the disenfranchised youth can make a change is to vote, rather than allowing the same selfish excuses for ‘people’s representatives’ to stay in power forever.
Jake Hookem