Who Are These People?

You may have seen this:-

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2009/may/29/school-application-fraud-case

A mother who faces jail and a fine for trying get her child into the school she considered the best. My blood literally boils at this. Harrow council is suitably smug and self-satisfied at apprehending and prosecuting this fiendish and socially disruptive criminal. What would happen to their social engineering plans if everyone was allowed to choose the best education for their children? Why, the council might have to take account of the needs and desires of the people it professes to serve. Can you imagine the effort that would entail?

Note:

But council investigators found tax records placed her at a different residential address, two miles away from the popular school.

It’s heartening to appreciate the investigative skills and capabilities of the council - or should it be The Council. Capitalisation conveys the true status of this organisation more effectively, I feel. Or, given the ease of access to the tax records of a private citizen (is there such an animal any more?), The State Machine is a phrase which comes more immediately to mind. Jacqui Smith must be delighted to see how effectively the sharing of personal information across government organisations can nail really evil people – hold on – wasn’t that aimed at terrorists? Ah, but then, if you haven’t done anything wrong you have nothing to fear. However, if you have done anything wrong, you are fair game. That’s the brave new world Jacqui Smith wants us to live in.

But the explanation is clear:

David Ashton, leader of the council, said: “Of course we understand that parents feel very strongly about their first choice of school. However, our first duty is to ensure that the admissions system is scrupulously fair and seen to be so.”

This, of course, is Council Code. Decrypted it becomes much clearer:

Sentence 1:

For their own selfish reasons parents feel very strongly about their first choice of school but that is of secondary importance to The Council.

Sentence 2:

The really important thing is that no effort be spared in ensuring that no citizen succeeds in bypassing The System.

Maximilian Robespierre would no doubt approve:

Terror is only justice: prompt, severe and inflexible; it is then an emanation of virtue; it is less a distinct principle than a natural consequence of the general principle of democracy, applied to the most pressing wants of the country.

And look what happened to him.

None of us are without some taint of hypocrisy and self-justification. It is normal, it is human to be occasionally weak and opportunist and give in to a desire to follow the rules that suit us while evading those that do not. However, those who accept the role of making or enforcing rules for others have implicitly accepted that their own standards must be set particularly high. School teachers, the police, councilors, other officials and MPs have all tacitly signed an agreement with the rest of us that says; ‘we will set an example’. If they have not signed, and if they cannot agree then, quite simply, they are in the wrong job.

I do not mean that they must never fall short of the ideal but they must assuredly aspire to it. This they most certainly do not. The letter of the rules, not the spirit, is the watchword.

I may be naïve or pedantic but the following logic seems to me to be fascinatingly convenient:

We made The Rules

We followed The Rules

The Rules need to be changed

But - we did nothing wrong

(Presumably we are to conclude that they were unaware that The Rules needed to be changed until the Great Unwashed were made aware of the ramifications. Coincidence, of course. In the fullness of time, no doubt, these pillars of society would have attended to the matter even if the media hadn’t noticed.)

Yet, to my dismay, this is the effective response to the hard question posed to every MP that I have seen, heard or read so far, that question being - ‘has any MP done anything wrong?’

What an invidious position they have put us all in. We can no longer trust the competence or integrity of bankers. Now we are unable to trust our MPs. But we cannot survive without either of these groups. It’s a case of heads they win, tails we lose. They have us all by the throat.

And what of the solution? For many of us working for organisations large and small, justifying and claiming business expenses was a tedious but necessary chore. It was quite understandable that your employer paid you a salary for the work you did, and paid your expenses separately in order to enable you to do that work. There are many ways of doing this but a simple arrangement of checks and balances, along with auditing by immediate management and accounts departments, make it reasonably efficient and honest. So, in the case of MP’s expenses do you fix the problem? Oh no, you change the system.

The Times thinks the public is being unfair and pious about the whole affair. The first article on page 2 of the Times on Saturday could, I suggest, have been written by Hazel Blears. Quote: Becoming a British MP in order to become rich is a scheme only an idiot would devise. The same could be said for many other lines of work – nursing and journalism come to mind. (Perhaps the writer could also take a look at the field of Information Technology; that’s a pretty thankless task, take it from me. And they have to do their expenses.) There is an interesting little section on the subtle difference between expenses and allowances. There is no discussion on the subject of integrity. It seems to me then, that there are an incredible number of well intentioned, self sacrificing, socially responsible people who cannot wait to sacrifice their time, homes and families just to look after my country and me. How fortunate we are that there are sufficient of these hardy souls that there is not one MP vacancy in Parliament. I am inevitably cynical but I suspect that there are many, many reasons for entering politics and not too many of them are entirely altruistic.

I am startled to see Matthew Parris support the frankly potty suggestion that we just increase the pay of MPs so that they no longer require expenses. And just how much of an increase would guarantee that no MP would be out of pocket? (This according to their own particular requirements and valuation, of course.) £20,000? £30,000? £50,000? Would MPs then increase the ‘expense’ portion separately to the ‘salary’ portion each year? The pension fund that is paid for by the public would also have to increase.

Those MPs who needed to spend relatively little on their parliamentary work would be very pleased indeed. In addition, it would become very much in the interests of MPs not to spend money in support of their constituents’ needs as the more they might save, the more they could keep for themselves.

But, why should MPs have a completely different expense system to that of other businesses? I can just picture my manager’s expression, when I worked for IBM, if I suggested that he could avoid the effort of auditing my expenses and remove the risk of my ‘fiddling’ them, if he simply increased my salary to cover the largest business expenditure that I would ever need. I am sure he would have rejoiced at such a simple scheme – after he had climbed back on his chair, holding his aching sides.

And we have the perfect example of such financial duplicity in the case of the ever smugly smiling Hazel Blears. (The lady who previously has shown such concern that MPs are so totally misunderstood and represented unfairly in the media.) The Communities Secretary told parliamentary authorities that a flat she owned in Kennington, south London, was her second home. However, she told the taxman that the property was her main home – and therefore did not have to pay tax on the profits of its sale in 2005. I know of one circus that would applaud loudly at such impressive juggling.