The absence from the daily political scene of Bernard Ingham, who almost always cuts the cackle and talks sense, is a great loss. Here he is on excellent form and sums up the expenses row to perfection. (apart from his faint praise for the ghastly Telegraph!]
Christina
YORKSHIRE POST
18.8.09
Bernard Ingham: Westminster silly season has gone mad and bad
I BLAME global warming. This year we don't just have a silly season but a mad one, what with Harriet Harperson and Lord Mandelson running the country – as if Gordon Brown were not funny enough – and assorted Tories making idiots of themselves, to the embarrassment of David Cameron.
All we need is Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrats' leader, to repeat his plan to put the lights out by getting rid of both coal-fired and nuclear power stations, and we shall have a full hand – a crackpots' convention.
Tory MEPs Daniel Hannan and Roger Helmer, whose existence was a well-kept secret until they crashed into print on the NHS, should have known better. Not even the most balanced critique of the NHS is going to get a good press in Britain, especially when Labour is so proprietorial about it.
The NHS is officially a good thing, a sacred cow, and nobody with even a mildly admonitory word to say about it is going to get a fair hearing. That is a burden it – and the taxpayer – has to bear because it is more perfect in conception – free treatment at the point of delivery, which no party is going ditch – than in execution.
It is capable of both heroic care and abject failure in cleanliness. It is inevitably exploited by both its staff and its patients. It can never hope in any affordable way to keep pace with the demands of an ageing population and medical discovery.
And, as is our wont, we have moved from one extreme to another – from minimal or rudimentary management pre-Thatcher, to over-management post-Thatcher. The human race would save itself billions if it could learn how to control the swing of the pendulum.
The silly season result is an absurd transatlantic row over whether the US should acquire something like the NHS when it is clear that all nations need effective basic medical care for all their people, not just for their country's own physical health but for its economic and social well-being, too.
Which brings me to that well-known fool, Alan Duncan, Shadow Leader of the House of Commons.
I should perhaps say that my friends tell me Duncan has broadly the same view of me after I wrote to him years ago telling him that his energy policy was not worth the paper it was written on. Sadly, it hasn't noticeably improved since he ceased to have anything to do with it. But I digress.
The altogether too cocky Duncan has rightly been ridiculed and squashed for being inveigled into complaining, on camera, that MPs are forced to live on rations, carefully omitting to mention that those rations – if taken within the Palace of Westminster – are subsidised by us.
Where, you might reasonably wonder, do they dig up our MPs these days when they can be so self-centred and so insensitive to public opinion after the expenses and allowances excesses?
Is it so surprising that they are treated like excrement – as Duncan also less elegantly complained?
Of course not. But however stupid Duncan has been, he has managed, entirely inappropriately, to convey a certain uncomfortable truth. Quite simply, our MPs are plagued with as great a sense of injustice as Neil Warnock's over Crystal Palace's denied goal at Bristol City last weekend. [Eh? -cs]
In one sense, The Daily Telegraph did us all a great service in buying a computer disk to reveal MPs' exploitation of the Westminster expenses and allowances system, which the Commons would have otherwise tried to cover up. But in another sense, it did the body politic a major disservice by effectively holding a month-long kangaroo court.
If it has not entirely tarred every MP with the same brush, it has quite failed to distinguish between the criminal and the opportunist. So far, not a single charge has been laid against any MP. I suspect it will be difficult to do so because there seems to be ample evidence going back years, of active official encouragement to milk the system.
Nor, while we may bemoan their generally loose morality, can we have MPs condemned for the entrepreneurial flair in exploiting opportunities that our capitalism extols or for legitimately evading taxes when engineering just that provides a good living for an entire corps of lawyers, accountants and consultants.
It is entirely wrong that useful MPs are being driven out of the
Commons by death threats for doing – and even not doing – what comes naturally to many people.
This is the silly season gone bad
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