One of the major forces driving the public’s reaction to the expenses scandal has been the feeling that we, the voters, simply don’t know what our elected representatives are up to. But this goes well beyond claims for moats, bathplugs and so on. We the electorate actually know very little about what our MPs do. If an MP isn’t in the front rank, their actions go pretty much unreported. Sure, the really determined can read Hansard to find out what their MP is doing. But it is still sometime hard to determine what precisely is going on in that house on the river.
If the performance of Parliament and that of MPs is hard to ascertain in any detail, however, try figuring out what the European Parliament is up to. Whether you believe it is a good, bad or simply irrelevant institution, voters need to know what is going on there.
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