MPs' Expenses

I'm probably committing some kind of heresy when I say that I am more fascinated by the different reactions to this issue than I am by the issue itself. Even the normally refined group of people that I follow on Twitter are coming close to fisticuffs, and some are being very unpleasant about Stephen Fry. I've just watched a short film clip of Stephen being rather rude about journalists and their expenses - he doesn't say "people in glass houses" but that's his drift - and, more importantly, saying that we should be more worried about some of the other things that politicians get wrong.

In this he is voicing what I have been feeling for days. OK, so some MPs have been paid from the public purse for some things that are highly questionable, but the total cost to the taxpayer can only be tiny fraction of any one of the expensive and ill-conceived blunders that are so frequently in the news when we aren't worrying about MPs' expense claims. Some of those blunders cost livelihoods and even lives too, not just money.

Today, a fellow-cleric on Twitter suggested that it was offensive to someone on the minimum wage that an MP should be able to claim the cost of having his garden tidied. It seems to me that this is one of the more legitimate claims that could be made in connection with a second home. I would like my MP to be contributing to running the country, not trying to keep on top of two lots of gardening! I am also not sure whether it is people on the minimum wage who are making the most noise about this particular matter. This seems to me to be a very middle class furore.

In a couple of weeks' time, our Deanery will be having the usual meeting with Diocesan representatives to talk about the Diocesan budget, and how much parishes will be expected to pay next year towards it. Since the majority consists of the costs of supporting parish clergy, inevitably our terms of service always come under scrutiny. People who do, or have retired from, very well-paid professional jobs sometimes speak about clergy on stipends of C£22,000pa as if we are only in it for the money. If it happens to be mentioned that the Diocese pays our Council Tax and Water Rates, someone always says "I wish they paid mine!" Any attempt to point out that people earning £22,000 don't normally choose to live in houses the size of the average vicarage, just brings the inevitable question as to why we need such big houses anyway, and so on. Some clergy get so upset that they will not even go to the meetings. The obvious resentment towards MPs claiming even the quite legitimate expenses of having to have a home in London and one in the constituency seems to me to be of the same order as the attitude to clergy costs.

While some MPs' expenses obviously are a matter for legitimate concern, I feel that it is a great pity that they are all being treated in the same way. I feel that the media feeding frenzy is out of all proportion to the problem, and I am hoping that, very shortly, I will be able to turn on my TV or radio, or pick up a newspaper, and hear about the things that really make a difference to people living on the minimum wage.