In all the continuing public and media revulsion over our MPs’ expenses, one newspaper columnist wrote this nonsense in today’s Guardian defending them.
Joan Smith whines on about how politicians have been treated in this crisis. Claiming to ‘have a partner and friends who are MPs’, she said:
“It doesn’t matter whether you’re a minor television celebrity, a former glamour model or a politician; anyone who ventures into public life may find themselves the target of a degree of vitriol disproportionate to any offence they have deemed to have caused. Now it is happening to MPs and the degree of loathing is the same whether there is evidence of fraud or the person concerned has merely used (as even David Cameron has done) a now discredited expenses system.”
She then witters on:
“The British public- not all of them, but the smug guardians of morality who are enjoying this crisis so much- say they are disgusted by the behavour of our elected representatives. Let me say that it works both ways: for the first time in my life I am sick of my country. I am sick of the daily undermining of democracy, and sick of the sadistic pleasure people take in humiliating decent public servants…”
Many of us have always been suspicious of our politicians. The expenses revelations confirms the well-worn perception that Britain is being governed by ‘a corrupt political class’. Ms Smith and her colleagues may hate the idea of having the House of Commons filled with ‘celebrities, obsessives who hate the EU for everything, and members of the BNP‘, but at least we, the people, would get the sort of Parliament we want…if we’re prepared to vote for it.
It’s such a shame that a journalist of her standing stoops to have written such sanctimonious nonsense as she does there.
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