DELUSIONS OF ADEQUACY

I was in the car this afternoon, driving home, when I heard Speaker Martin`s Statement to the House about the fiasco surrounding the exposure of MPs expenses. Now this has been rumbling on for days now and, in response to the understandable public anger, I had expected Martin to announce immediate and drastic changes to the expenses system so as to take the first step towards rebuilding public confidence in the parliamentary process.

Thus was my innocence exposed once more. For what we got was a mumbled, Ferguson-esque jumble of words from a prepared script which bleated on about maintaining the security of MPs personal details, about the fact that the Police had been called in to hunt down the whistleblower and about the fact that yet another committee of MPs would be meeting this evening to consider what, if anything, might be done. Nothing about immediate steps to stop the cheating of taxpayers` money; no hint of any regret, no leadership from the chair of the House and certainly no truck with any recalcitrant MPs who might want to question the wisdom of Martin`s do-nothing, self-serving, wholly inadequate response.

It seems that this bumbling oaf has still not grasped the fact that the game is up, that he and his fellow creative claimants actually do have to answer for their penchant for stretching the boundaries of their self-designed system beyond reasonable limits and that the taxpayers of this country look to Parliament for examples to be set, rather than for profits to be made at our expense. In all the bluster which comes from the Speaker`s chair, I hear nothing that even begins to put the interests of the voting taxpayers before those of maintaining the cosy club that the Westminster village has become. From where I`m sitting it appears that, in Martin`s case, adequacy truly is a delusion after all.