Parliament’s non-disclosure · Issue 871

Wendy Woodhead, discusses how our reluctant Parliament has now been forced to declare its expenses, yet they don’t mind sharing their personal gossip for the world to hear

It has not been the best of times lately for the Government with public trust and support at an all time low. This week it got even worse when MPs lost their battle in the Commons against the disclosures of expenses for second homes.

Arguing that it was an intrusion of privacy lives and that publishing addresses posed a security risk, their excuses seemed to cut no ice with presiding judges. Mostly because addresses can be accessed via many legal routes already, such as local libraries and town halls.

The government has access to our details – which, considering the clumsiness of civil servants is most definitely a threat to our security – so why should they deny us access to theirs?

When we already know that MPs can claim up to £23,000 a year for costs towards running a second home, it begs the question: Why they should be averse to disclosing exactly what they spent taxpayers’ money on?

Taking this futile case to court has wasted £33,500 of taxpayers’ money already, surely only furthering the case for a breakdown of expenses to be made public – a typical governmental catch-22.

The ruling demands receipt-by-receipt expenditures of 14 MPs including Gordon Brown, David Cameron, Menzies Campbell, Tony Blair and John Prescott.

While the disclosures have their opponents they also has their advocates. Nick Clegg published his own expenses last week revealing that he spent the maximum for last year’s expenditures on renovating and keeping his Sheffield domicile.

The Lib Dem leader stated the importance for the public to have “complete confidence in the expenses system.”

But as we have already seen Nick Clegg considers himself quite a public figure, no less for his revelations in GQ magazine about his bedroom antics, so I would expect him to be on board.

Increasingly, in the recent years of our terrorised times, paranoid politics has accounted for numerous breaches of our civil liberties, yet ministers now want to keep schtum to maintain their security.

It seems only fair that the MPs should come under the same kind of disclosures they expect other citizens to when filling out the most mundane and innocuous of forms.

In an age where everything is means-tested we jump through a maze of hoops when applying for benefits, loans, even tax rebate, yet the government do not seem to want to be subject to these circus tricks they make the electorate enact.

Although the Commons criticised the Information Tribunal’s demand as “unlawfully intrusive” they seem to be blissfully unaware that information is the buzzword of the age – and they should know, they invented it.

Having brought in the Freedom of Information Act they now don’t seem to be able to deal with the consequences.

As the Commons tried desperately to keep their spending habits out of the public eye their efforts seem anomalous with the onslaught of ministerial biographies ushered to the top of the headlines last week, not to mention the general direction society is going.

The public are not asking for a foray into the personal lives of MPs, only the right to make sure they are not misusing taxpayers’ money.

Yet it does seem increasingly as though the exposure of the cabinet’s sordid personal histories – thrust upon us through sensational headlines, newspaper and radio serialisations – is more preferable to them than exposing the facts and figures which the country is genuinely interested in and which arevital to imbue more trust into a sceptical nation.

The London Mayoral Election saw a number of candidates’ personal details spill out into the public domain and news coverage of this demonstrated exactly what politics has boiled down to.

The race to the top of the best sellers last week means that I heard more about how the Blairs found love on the Number 74 bus than I did about the controversial commissioning of two aircraft carriers, or the number of days terrorist suspects can be detained and plenty more key political discussions which took place.

The MPs’ recent defeat in the High Court seems to me an issue not just about personal expenses, but one which exposes the fault line at the heart of a government who compromise public trust by demanding everything and giving nothing.

Scandalous exposes are juicy, but irrelevant details of ministers’ lives are not politics. It seems as though we are allowing ourselves to be pacified by these revelations when in fact the important information is going by unquestioned and unnoticed.