Wow! Things sure are moving fast!

It’s a bit of a cliché to talk about the rapid pace of change, but we have certainly seen it lately. When I wrote “A Feeling of Worth” there was nothing (at least in my experience) to suggest there would be a crisis over MP’s expenses. Yet in the past few weeks we have seen an investigation into MP’s expense claims result in daily exposés that, amongst other things, have:

• Forced a significant number to recognise that they have killed the goose that laid the golden egg and so stand down at the next election.
• Resulted in many others being investigated by their own – suddenly scrupulous – party, with the threat that they might no longer be considered “worthy.”
• Raised a very real possibility that a number will face criminal charges for excesses that actually amounted to fraud or embezzlement.

Yet, by far the biggest consequence is the sudden clamour for major political reform. There are government ministers now suddenly advocating proportional representation, something they never considered before there was a possibility that they might lose the next election. And David Cameron is suddenly calling for “sweeping reform” with power “redistributed from the political elite to the man and woman in the street.”

These comments should be enough to raise the alarm bells for any thinking person. How on earth do we get from what – apart from the obvious fraudulent cases of a minority of MPs – is simply a massive (and unethical) abuse of an incredibly weak, inadequately controlled, expense/allowance system, to wholesale constitutional reform and changing the whole way of governing? News reports today are talking about the ‘mob-rule’ mentality that is being galvanised, and there is no doubt that the electorate is entitled to feel disillusioned, but mob rule does not provide a good basis for balance or hence for constructive, effective change.

While it is massively encouraging to have some of the ideas in my book so suddenly and publicly endorsed, I am concerned about the motives for such radical changes, and even more by the haste with which they have been aired. Unless they have been on a hidden agenda for a long time and now is suddenly seen as an ideal time to test them out, they cannot have been properly thought through. And a hastily conceived solution and/or a rushed implementation of a solution may well create a worse problem than the one being remedied.

So, let’s just fix the MPs expense system and then have some proper debate about structural change, rather than have this sort of partisan point-scoring which is something the book condemns anyway.