The Public Good: Reforming Westminster after the Expenses Crisis
| Author | Alexandra Kelso |
| Published date | 01 April 2010 |
| Date | 01 April 2010 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.2041-9066.2010.00006.x |
| Subject Matter | Feature |
of genius. The dichotomy underpin-
ning the crisis was clear: the House
of Commons had the opportunity
to publish the expenses details, and
chose not to do so, and it was there-
fore the responsibility of the media to
do it instead. The public, as we heard
repeatedly last spring, had a right to
know. And the media went all out in
ensuring that right was honoured.
And it is also relatively easy to see
why we, collectively, loved it too.
The expenses scandal confi rmed all
our worst suspicions about politics
and those who perform its dark arts.
It is satisfying to have your hunches
backed up by some hard evidence:
here was that evidence, and reams
of it to boot, demonstrating what the
public had always long assumed –
that politicians are not trustworthy,
that they load the dice in their own
favour whenever they get the oppor-
tunity, and that the political system
has something fundamentally rotten
at its core. An opinion poll carried
out in spring 2009 showed that levels
of trust in Parliament were halved as
a result of the expenses scandal, fall-
ing from around 30 per cent (a fi gure
roughly in line with average levels of
trust in national parliaments across
the European Union) to just 17 per
cent, according to survey data from
Eurobarometer. Not only did the
scandal confi rm our beliefs, it also
served to reinforce them.
The Public Good:
Reforming Westminster
after the Expenses Crisis
In the spring of 2009, Parliament
had a hysterical, and necessarily
public, nervous breakdown. The
MPs’ expenses scandal, with its bi-
zarre accounts of duck houses, moat
cleaning and house fl ipping, satu-
rated British news cycles for weeks
and even the global recession had to
take a back seat in the public con-
sciousness. The story, which at times
seemed straight out of the writer’s
room at The Thick Of It, was utterly
compelling, and unlike anything seen
in recent British political history. As
Parliament’s breakdown proceeded,
we could do little more than simulta-
neously cringe at and rage at the aw-
ful spectacle that unfolded before us.
But no matter how much we wrung
our hands and declared the whole
thing to be unutterably disgusting
and the MPs at the heart of it to be
a shameful disgrace, the truth is, if
we’re really being honest, that we
loved every minute of it.
The Meaning of the Crisis
It is easy to see why the media loved
it. The MPs’ expenses scandal was,
after all, manufactured in part by
Fleet Street. Crises sell newspapers,
and the drip-feed approach adopted
by the Daily Telegraph, which pub-
lished the expenses claims at the
heart of the affair, was nothing short
From duck moats to garlic presses and bell towers, last summer’s revelations lifted the lid on
the exorbitant expenses culture at Westminster. Promised reforms have been slow but the
scandal could turn out to be an important first step in finally making Parliament into a ‘good
institution’, Alexandra Kelso reports.
After the expenses story broke,
we were initially consumed with
the details of how the parliamen-
tary expenses regime had been con-
structed, the specifi cs of what had
been claimed for and how it helped
‘compensate’ for constrained sal-
ary increases. But that focus soon
changed. The party leaders, and
David Cameron in particular, quickly
sensed the enraged public mood, and
promised change. The speaker of the
House of Commons was forced from
his job, and around 100 MPs caught
up in one way or another with the
expenses scandal soon declared they
would not contest the next general
election. The focus quickly turned to
how public trust in Parliament could
be restored, how it needed to change
in order to rebuild its reputation and,
interestingly, how the crisis could be
used to secure a range of institutional
and procedural changes to the way
that Parliament functions.
The Opportunity for Reform
Consequently, the post-expenses
climate was not just oriented to-
wards sorting out the parliamentary
expenses regime and beefi ng up the
standards infrastructure that is in
place to regulate MPs. Those objec-
tives, though, did naturally take
centre stage in the weeks following
8Political Insight
The expenses
scandal
con rmed
our worst
suspicions
about politics
and those
who perform
its dark arts
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