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We may have read this morning about our elected rep's in parliament trying yet again to cover up their expences...

Here the site Letter from a Tory descirbes this very well in a letter to Harriet Harmen. 

Dear Harriet Harman,

Your popularity ratings must be going through the floor right now. After reigniting class warfare earlier this week with your plans to force public sector bodies to reject job applications from anyone who has received a decent education (a terrible sin, indeed), you are now heaping shame on Parliament itself by introducing new and absolutely scandalous rules on MP expenses. When voters’ faith in politics having been crippled by the behaviour of Derek Conway, Michael Martin and many others, I hardly think this is an appropriate course of action.

Yesterday you told MPs that, under your proposed changes to the MP expenses system, ”the public will have more information than they ever had before, and we will take it back to 2005 so that, for all Members each year, their allowances against 26 headings will be made public.” Wow, sounds great. Well, it sounds great so long as you don’t dig a little beneath the surface. Should anyone do so, they will quickly come to the conclusion that this line of argument is feeble. Having lost a three-year legal battle over Freedom of Information requests demanding disclosure of a receipt-by-receipt breakdown of MPs’ spending on second homes, government officials were planning to release a full breakdown of MPs’ expenses down to the last receipt. Should these plans have gone ahead, up to one million pages of receipts would have been released. However, you decided that this would be worrying close to something I like to call ‘accountability’ and have therefore decided that MPs’ expenses will be exempt from the Freedom of Information Act, preventing the public from seeking a breakdown of MPs’ taxpayer-funded allowances. So, in effect, you’ve tried to con the public into thinking that you are being more open about MP expenses by breaking down the claims into more categories, but what you’re actually doing is preventing the public from finding out exactly what constitutes the total amount spent under each category heading.

The cynicism doesn’t stop there. You have the nerve to claim that the announcement had been long planned when it just happened to coincide with major announcements on Heathrow and Equitable Life. I suppose that this announcement could have planned a while ago but this would only have been to bury the bad news as deeply as possible. Then we have Michael Martin - the same Michael Martin who thinks that he can use taxpayers’ money to pay for his wife’s taxi fares when she goes shopping - telling us that “it would be excessively burdensome for Members to have provided receipts for all transactions.” Well I’m terribly sorry Mr Martin that letting taxpayers see how you spend our money is such a burden. It’s so nice to hear that accountability and integrity is so important to you that you feel comfortable just sweeping it to one side just to make your life a bit easier. Everyone else in the country has to submit expenses claims that get checked by other people so why the hell shouldn’t you? The new “Green Book” that details what MPs can and cannot claim for does not inspire confidence either. MPs will still get taxpayers to fund new furniture, electrical goods and cutlery for second homes in addition to getting us to fork out for your home maintenance, utility bills and decoration costs. To complete the humiliation for taxpayers, you are also introducing a new flat-rate £25-a-night allowance for MPs’ staying away from home, even though they can already claim for travel costs and the cost of running a second home.

Matthew Elliott of the TaxPayers’ Alliance has rightly said ”this is taxpayers’ money, these are elected representatives, and the people have a right to know how their money is being spent.” And we do, or at least I thought we did. MPs will be voting on this matter very soon and I expect some heavy handed tactics from Labour whips to keep everyone in line, despite your despicable attitude towards accountability, openness, transparency and honesty. As FOI campaigner Heather Brooke pointed out: “This is the problem with the Parliamentary system – if they don’t like the law, they can just change it, unlike the rest of us. It’s a way to change the law without having a public debate.” With faith in politics and politicians at an all time low, this is just going to make things even worse. The sad truth is that I cannot take any comfort in the fact that Labour will be hammered in the media for your actions, because at the end of the day it is democracy that loses and that will never put a smile on my face.