The Evening Standard has a front-page splash today about Tory MP Patrick Cormack suggesting the best solution to the expenses crisis is to simplify the system by taking away most allowance. To support this, he says, "the salaray of Members would have to be doubled at least."

Of course, Cormack actually said this about two months ago in his submitted evidence to the Committee on Standards in Public Life, which has been available for months on the website (we at Sunlight should know – we’ve been trawling through that stuff for a while). Which makes you wonder if the Standard just discovered this, or if they’re just choosing now as a strategically convenient time to re-launch the story (on the back of Alan Duncan’s mess-up and the NHS debate).

Some might be tempted to think that a massive increase in salary and the abolition of expenses is the way to go. It sounds appealing – it takes the responsibility for all the administrative confusion out of the hands of semi-competent, largely ignored parliamentary committees. But Cormack’s preferred plan doesn’t actually do away with potential for corruption: On top of the doubled salary, MPs would still get the biggest allowance they are currently entitled to, for staffing and constituency office costs. The staffing allowance alone is £90,505, and an unknown amount of that goes towards paying the salaries not just of MPs’ spouses and children, but towards funding party plitical activities by employees who are supposedly only doing parliamentary jobs, like responding to casework requests. In fact, many such staff might also be sending out propaganda on the taxpayers’ dime and going out to campaign for their MP’s party (as "volunteers").

Unless you’re comfortable with quadrupling MPs’ salaries, then, so that being a Member with a constituency office starts to become the equivalent of being lord of a small fief, your reaction to this unearthed "news" story is probably going to be utter bewilderment that MPs like Cormack manage to remain so utterly untouched by public norms.

Published on August 19th, 2009 by Mike Rouse