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Over the weekend came news concerning the various refurbishment costs associated with the Speakers House within the Palace of Westminster, this resulted in a fair amount of flack with the implication that the Speaker was “at it” with public money again.

To be fair, whilst Speaker Martin has always been incapable of doing the job and should go, he is only a symptom of the main disease which really took hold in the 1997 Election when there was a sudden influx of totally new Labour MPs. The problem was that whilst these people were happy to be professional politicians, they had no feel for or love of the House itself and its traditions.

Blair Was An Idiot

From Blair downwards – “We are modern and will do mighty things…” was the cry as they then went blundering on with their ill thought out “Constitutional Reforms” and at each step, demonstrated why Parliament is the way it is. To be fair they have all done us a big favour because what they have demonstrated is that if War is too important to be left to the Generals then Constitutional Reform is far too important to be left to the Politicians.

The “tyranny” that Parliament protected us from in bygone days, was the absolute power of the Monarch but the reality is that for a great many decades, that “tyranny” in terms of absolute power sits in the House of Commons as the Prime Minister and yet prior to 1997, in a ramshackle way, it worked – why ? The answer was that on the whole, successive generations of politicians both knew and understood the rules and played the game accordingly regardless of political party.

The Future

Over the next decade, we will now have to carefully construct ever more detailed rules describing codes of conduct, separation of powers and so on because we can no longer trust these people to behave properly. It was the absence of any clear code of conduct within the House, that apparently led to the Police abandoning any thought of prosecuting Conway for fraud, he could hardly be in criminal breach if there were no laid down rules that he had broken !

On expenses, Derek Conway may have started it but there is a lot more to come. I find it little short of amazing that Ed Balls and his wife Yvette Cooper can have claimed £6,000 per week in “expenses” between them last year when they both share the same houses in Yorkshire and London. To put that into perspective and whether expressed as £300,000 or £6,000 per week, is probably the average wages of 10-12 ordinary voters. The Speaker may go to the High Court as often as he likes to keep sticking his finger in the dyke rather than up the taxpayers bottom but frankly, the game is up.

Although there is a lot of frustration with this very poor government and Speaker Martin as a Labour foot stool, I would be cautious in terms of shouting about the cost of refurbishment of the Speakers House. I suspect that the vast majority of the “works” are legitimate and would have been the same whoever was the Speaker at the time. On the other hand, his wife’s taxi fares and the “Air Miles” incident are far more serious because they represent an abuse of trust on both their parts with public funds and his behaviour in the House is a disgrace to his High Office.