Sorry is sometimes too easy

I have this memory of an event I may not have actually been involved in. Which, in itself, is a little weird, but bear with me. I can see it, perfectly, in front my mind’s eye, yet there is the possibility that this is someone’s else past.

Again.

Anyway, if this is my history then it was when I was a tourist to London rather than a resident. We were walking through Parliament Square, me, my then girlfriend, her flatmate and the flatmate’s boyfriend. I may well have been pompously holding forth (as is oft my want) on the irony that the only statues outside the Houses of Parliament are of Richard I (majestically atop his horse, sword arm held high) and Oliver Cromwell (moodily looking at his feet).

We may have been a few drinks to the wild for suddenly flatmate’s boyfriend hurled himself at the fence and started to climb whilst (clearly slightly lost) bellowing out sub-standard Welsh indie-rockers Catatonia’s Storm the Palace. As this was pre-global terrorism flatmate’s boyfriend wasn’t shot. Instead, he was forcibly instructed to ‘go home and sleep it off, sunshine’.

Meek we may have been, but just for a moment (for we were young and naive) there was the prospect of tearing down the system, of starting everything afresh. But taking off those rose-tinted glasses I wore back then and replacing them with a pair of sceptical spectacles two things struck me. One, at the time I wasn’t aware of any alternative and two, every generation goes through its young and angry phase where it feels like we’re the only ones who ‘get it’, whatever ‘it’ may be, but in order to instigate real change the whole country would have to be united in anger, a moment of uniform indignation. I couldn’t foresee how this could come about.

Hell, if an illegal immoral war couldn’t do it, what could possibly bring everyone together?

Heh, it’s always the money, isn’t it?

Feel the public’s rage, listen to the anger with every news broadcast, every copy the Telegraph printed, every feeble attempt to excuse themselves.

Chandeliers, private security, moat cleaning, helipad tidying, hanging baskets, dog food, horse shit, scatter cushions and a disco ball (for Menzies Campbell, no less), dry rot, unnecessary rent, non-existent mortgage claims.

Initially, I was disappointed that what finally united our ire was money. But then it dawned on me. It isn’t, is it? Not really. It’s more the arrogance of people like Margaret Beckett saying that the ordinary people cannot possibly understand what it’s like to be a MP. Or the way diddy Hazel Blears can dash off a cheque for thirteen grand and waft it around like it doesn’t really matter, suggesting she has more than enough money in the first place. Or the continual insincere apologies and feeble attempts at blaming it on the system.

Which is a bit like a murderer saying ‘it wasn’t my fault. I just pointed the gun at her head and pulled the trigger. The real blame lies with Smith and Weston for designing guns that fire bullets that kill people.’

All systems are open to abuse and manipulation should you know how to play the game. When I worked for a large publishing house we were paid commission on advertising booked, but not that which was necessarily paid for. In other words, if the advertiser went bust or the advert had to be given free of charge due a production error then the rep would still get paid, even if my employers hadn’t been. In addition, with the ridiculously tight weekly schedule, that there wasn’t much emphasis placed on getting a signed contract. Bookings were taken with confidence purely on the back of a hurried phone conversation with nothing in writing to support to it. Clearly, this was open to abuse, but just because you could cheat didn’t mean you should - or indeed, to the best my knowledge, that anyone actually did.

If there’s one group of people whom you would hope to have the moral judgement to distinguish between what they can do and what they should do, it would be those who have put themselves forward to run the country.

Or am I still naive?

The thing that really grates at my spine is all the apologising. You’re not sorry. Stop lying to me. You might be sorry that you got caught and I suspect you’ll be extremely sorry about the repercussions, but you are not genuinely sorry about the act itself. Otherwise you wouldn’t have done it again and again, year upon year.

And on that point will someone please shut David Cameron up? If I hear him or one of the Davolytes refuse to discuss the question posed to them and instead whine on about how swiftly Cameron has moved to punish Tory offenders then I may well eat my own face. Cameron has been leader of the opposition for four years and an MP since 2001. If he really felt that the expenses system was rotten, then he’s had an awful lot of time to do something about it before now. But he didn’t. He left it until after the shit storm blew into town and is now feebly trying to make himself look noble and indignant. Hell, he must have breathed a sigh of relief when it enabled the Tories to drop their euro-elections party political broadcast on Friday (‘Um, ah, yes, you see we haven’t actually decided our policy on Europe as yet. Same as everything else, really. But, hey, remember we’re not Labour.’) and make yet another sanctimonious speech about how god-dammed arse-fucking sorry he is.

By Monday evening MPs were falling over themselves to slit Michael Martin’s throat and tear out his tongue thus creating the need for a new speaker. The term ‘sacrificial lamb’ doesn’t seem sufficient.

‘Oh, but he oversaw the system and so it’s all his fault! Wah-wah-wah.’

All right, so the fey, high-pitched bleating (‘eh-eh-eh-ehrder’) plonker should go. Why not? Might as well, but he isn’t enough.

Labour MP Ben Chapman has been claiming that as the commons office approved his claim for fifteen thousand for interest on a mortgage he’d already paid off, and that it’s their fault not his. (Although, of course, he is sorry. Really, really, sorry.) But Ben, come on now. You’re a grown man. YOU had to make the claim in the first place. YOU had to fill out the form. YOU accepted the money when it crash landed in your bank account. At what point were you going to say, ‘er, I say, I don’t think is quite cricket’?

Lembit Opik. Jesus. A Liberal Democrat MP whose judgement should have been question when he tried to marry a Cheeky Girl had the gall to charge to the tax payer his £40 summons fee for non-payment of council tax. What planet is this twat on?

‘Sorry,’ shrugged cheeky Jack Straw ‘guess accountancy isn’t my strong point.’ This is coming from a member of the cabinet who at one point was angling to be chancellor.

Well, I’d like to bet that accountancy isn’t a strong point of a whole load of people claiming benefits either. But thanks to a zero tolerance policy against benefit fraud it is entirely possible to go to prison for claiming benefits without realising you weren’t entitled to them. Even if they offer to pay them back.

So, as the fraud squad swings into the halls of Westminster with a remit to investigate at least five of the formerly honourable members you can’t help but feel that should there ever be an opportunity for wholesale change, then this is it.

When I tended bar during the 2001 elections one of the regulars grunted: ‘Nah, I never bother voting. It doesn’t make any difference anyway. They’re all the same, anyway.’ Could we change that now?

And I don’t mean just by reforming the way MPs are paid. A basic salary of nearly £65,000 for a backbencher is quite sufficient really. After all, you chose to stand for election.

‘Oh, but you don’t underst-‘ SHUT UP!

Don’t understand what? I can think, in five minutes, of a roughly workable expenses system that seems fairer – the state builds high quality, en-suite, kitchenette fitted accommodation blocks in central London for MPs who have a commute of more than an hour by car (let’s be generous and factor in a reasonable amount of London traffic craziness, so basically anyone outside the M25) plus continuing to maintain the existing grace and favour homes for key members of the cabinet thus minimising the threat from terrorism and all MPs in the same building (although, they do all work in the same building...) and then agree a rate for commuting between constituencies and Westminster, say twice a week when Parliament is sitting, by something sensible like the train or a Vauxhall Vectra (not a chauffeur driven limo down from Chester, George Osborne) and then they can pay for everything else themselves – when I was on the road I got money for the miles I drove, but not for the coffee I drank, the newspapers I read or the disgusting, overpriced service station food I was forced to eat.

But anyway, that isn’t what I meant. I meant, have, by a near-universal lack of sense and morals, all the mainstream parties given us a remit to get rid of them all?
The only problem is, eight years on since storm-the-next-authoritarian-building-gate and I still can’t think if a workable alternative.

Which is why it was important that I was honest with you at the beginning of this piece. I could have just told the story of flatmate’s boyfriend’s brush with the revolutionary spirits as a nice dramatic opening, but it might not have actually happened like that. Why can’t I remember whether I was there or not? It was a long time ago (Christ, I’m using Catatonia as a cultural reference it was that long ago) and I’ve done a lot and had a lot of drinks in the meantime, but it doesn’t matter why – the point is that it highlights my agenda. I’m shoehorning it in because I’m suggesting we man the barricades, tear up the cobblestones and break open the bastille, although to what end I have no idea, and it’s vital for you to remember that every opinion is grounded in a personal history and current circumstance including that the millionaire tax exile owners of the Daily Telegraph.

So, if I doubt we’ve the stomach to start from scratch, even if we knew how, then is there an alternative? Strike a protest vote in the European elections (‘give the fat cats in London a message’) and support marginal parties? Where does that get us? UKIP (members expelled for holocaust denial and fraud), the English Democrats (bunch of berks) or the BNP (dear God, Jesus no, we’re not that stupid are we?)?
Don’t panic, though, here comes Esther bloody Rantzen to stand for Parliament in Luton next year.

Meanwhile, whilst we tut and scoff and rant and rave in pubs and lounges and cafes and in phone conversations and on social networking websites and poorly informed blogs, Parliament, or Parliament Square at least, has been bought to a standstill. Someone is doing something. It’s a sit down protest over the government’s inability to shout loudly enough as the Sri Lankan army shells its own civilians in a relentless pursuit of the Tamil Tigers.

Twenty-six years of terror and civil war. Over eighty thousand dead.

Makes getting so annoyed about a fat bloke in Hull needing two toilet seats repaired seem pretty pathetic, doesn’t it?