People are missing what is wrong with Sir Thomas Legg’s inquiry into MPs’ expenses.
People are missing what is wrong with Sir Thomas Legg’s inquiry into MPs’ expenses. It is not so much that it is unfairly retrospective: after all, MPs were supposed to decide themselves what was appropriate in the discharge of their parliamentary duties, and so they should not now take refuge in what the Fees Office may have advised them. The problem is rather that, by decreeing a particular level for cleaning, gardening and so on, Sir Thomas is herding sheep and goats together, instead of separating them. People who claimed a bit more than the limit he has now invented may have been unwise, but they are in a different class from the cheats and profiteers. The Legg demands are harsh, in that they force all sorts of MPs who are not wicked to pay back money, but they are also a cover-up. ‘They’re all the same,’ voters say, and that is the view that the Legg method tends to reinforce. But they aren’t all the same: some are definitely good, many are middling, and some shouldn’t have a Legg to stand on.
Patrick Magee, the unsmiling Brighton bomber, appeared on a ‘forgiveness’ platform in the House of Commons this week, 25 years after blowing up much of the Cabinet, killing five people and crippling Norman Tebbit’s wife, Margaret. The simple point about Magee is that he is not repentant. Although he expresses ‘regret’, he always maintains that what he did was ‘legitimate’. He claims the high status of a proper combatant, as if he were a Luftwaffe or Spitfire pilot meeting his opposite number for reconciliation. He is politically motivated, always pushing the Sinn Fein lie: ‘We had no other way.’
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