Expenses Row Sees UK Media Ignoring The Big Picture, Yet Again

The expenses row, aka the best way to fill papers for a fortnight since Jade Goody started dying, is claiming its first few reluctant scalps: junior health minister Phil Hope is handing back the cash he spent on fitting out his second home with new furniture. Other expenses paid back so far include Chris Huhne’s trouser press and Cheryl Gillan’s dog food. Oh yes, victory is ours!

When this story first hit, the focus was on Prezza’s mock-Tudor beams and Blears’s capital gains tax. It looked like another nail in Labour’s coffin, but instead of cacophonous Tory savagery filling the slipstream, there was silence. And for the obvious reason that MPs across the party political spectrum would have been inevitably labelled hypocrites if they attemped to lambast Labour – this story has shifted from the usual political point-winning into a maddeningly pointless attack on politicians in general from the media.

Just as it’s so much easier to generate public interest in the recession if there’s a bogeyman like Fred Goodwin to rally around, it’s so much easier to use politics to sell papers if the focus is on something digestible like expenses. Rather than attempt to articulate policy direction in layman’s terms, just before European parliamentary elections, the papers are cynically manipulating public distrust in elected officials. What a tonic that is for the country. And the only ones set to win are parties with no MPs to make expense claims, like the BNP.

Yesterday’s showdown between two public servants, Carrie Gracie from BBC News 24 and Michael Foulkes, in which Foulkes demanded Grace reveal her salary of £92,000, served to show just how crazy it is to attack only MPs on this issue. Broaden the net to anyone who has the public’s interests at heart, from building contractors to private doctors to, yes, journalists, and expenses becomes an issue too big to manage. Keep it in its little sweet spot of antagonism towards MPs though, and it becomes a debate that people will pay to read.

The real issue should be abuse of the system, a la Derek Conway who paid his two sons as researchers to research, presumably, secret areas of Xbox games and YouTube’s funniest animals. But labelling all expense claims as bogus, which the blanket coverage by the newspapers is in danger of doing, pointlessly undermines the trust we have in politicians. And after seeing one MPs six-month diary recently, with its constant 80-100 hour weeks, I’m quite happy for them to have a comfortable garden to relax in very occasionally while they keep the country running. Transparency is needed, so that it doesn’t take a freedom of information request to find out what MPs are spending – that way MPs won’t be tempted to go for the gold taps when the regular ones will do. But restrictions that will actively hamper and demoralise MPs, borne out of self-serving, overzealous media attention, won’t help anyone but the media themselves.

Meanwhile, here are some more stories involving public funds today. The UK government is in danger of spending £500m in penalties for not making payments on the Eurofighter jets it ordered. Guy Hands has moved to Guernsey to avoid paying tax. The Bank of England could increase its quantitative easing program amid worries about inflation – last time it used quantitative easing, it increased the national debt by £75bn. Meanwhile the amount of expenses paid back hasn’t yet reached £100,000. The media must move on from personality-led politics, and towards educating the country on what the bulk of their tax money is being spent on, and what their votes will mean.

Posted by Ben Beaumont-Thomas in Creative Economy | May 13, 2009 1:32PM |