A cure for MPs' travel expenses: just stay in your constituencies

I don't, I really don't want to ruin everybody's fun. But maybe the lather of indignation at the enormity of the expenses of Members of Parliament is a tad overdone. Maybe it really does cost quite a lot of money to be an MP, to run a staff, and to whizz about between London and the dear old constituency, keeping the home fires burning in both.

I don't, I really don't want to ruin everybody's fun. But maybe the lather of indignation at the enormity of the expenses of Members of Parliament is a tad overdone. Maybe it really does cost quite a lot of money to be an MP, to run a staff, and to whizz about between London and the dear old constituency, keeping the home fires burning in both.

There can by no gainsaying the fact that quite a number of our esteemed MPs are using the expenses system - legitimately but generously interpreted - to make their lives as pleasant as possible. The large bunch (49) of outer London MPs, for example, who claim £20,000 in statutory travel and overnight-stay expenses, when they could opt for the far smaller sum granted to a less grasping London MP, are spoiling themselves rotten. The similarly large bunch who are getting the mortgages on their London flats serviced by the taxpayer are being pretty fly as well, unless, of course, they are planning to pay the taxpayer back, with interest, after they have sold their pied-à-terres.

Certainly it has been worthwhile publishing these figures, because it is clear that some reforms are overdue. But on the whole, the universal outrage being expressed over these sums is again testament to the ridiculously high standards we expect of people in public life, rather than a generalised corruption of politicians.

Rather than focusing on individuals, and extrapolating half-baked assumptions about the nature of the humans involved from this, maybe we should step back and take a broader view. Looking purely at human motivation, for example, one could assume that the fact that half the MPs in the profligacy top-20 are Scots proves the old canard that the Scots are money grasping. Instead, of course, it's merely a reminder that they have the most travelling to do.

Why do they do all that travelling, though, when there's a lovely new parliament building in Scotland that they could serve the folks from - since they say that is their one desire - just as well? The West Lothian question has troubled political observers for years. But actually, the problem of funding a many-layered and expensive bureaucracy that remains unable to deliver much in the way of grassroots change is now just as acute in London as it is anywhere else - as these figures amply illustrate.

No, rather than asking how we can keep their expenses down, we should be asking ourselves why we persist with this ancient system that has MPs flying up and down between constituency and Parliament. After all, it's not as if anything important is decided by a vote among MPs. They're mostly so craven, they vote how their leadership tells them to, or so predictably rebellious that they can be counted on not to.

Only the English regions don't have regional parliaments, and it's about time they did. Then government ministers, and their opposition shadows, can be drawn from the regional rank, the meeting of MPs' minds can be conducted via chatrooms, and backbenchers can confine their visits to town to those rare occasions when everything hasn't been cut and dried in Cabinet already. The Palace of Westminster rendered useless? That'd gain Mr Blair his longed-for place in the history books.

¿ It would be lovely to point out that Boris Johnson, in trouble this week over the clashing demands of his twin careers as a journalist and a Member of Parliament, is a man who does some extra work when he wants some extra money. But it appears that, at £117,373, a part-time MP is as expensive as a full-time one. Who, I wonder, will pay for his travel to Liverpool to apologise to its denizens for collectively insulting them? The Spectator or the taxpayer?

No doubt we're splitting it.

Wise, cruel and smug

Praise for Lynda Lee-Potter, who sadly died this week of a brain tumour, has been universal. I don't mind acknowledging that she was a fantastic journalist. She had a nasty, acerbic, infuriating and entertaining pen. She was outrageous, gobsmackingly cruel and wrong as often as she was touchingly wise and right. She was funny a lot of the time as well, and came across as indefatigable, which is one reason why her death seems so shocking.

But nobody on Fleet Street seems to want to acknowledge the fact that she was a professional controversialist, adept at confirming dangerous prejudices, skilled at making people feel that their frightened siege mentalities, their refusal to believe that those less fortunate than them were literally, simply, less fortunate than them, were justified.

All of the plaudits have focused on how Lee-Potter reflected and formed the opinions of Middle England. But the trouble is, the sort of opinions the Daily Mail, Ms Lee-Potter's paper, disseminates, have themselves helped to make Middle England self-righteous, pitiless and selfish. Ms Lee-Potter believed that her humble beginnings gave her the common touch. Instead, they gave her the special arrogance of those who, having succeeded against the odds, believe that all those who fail are worthless.

The Black Watch faces another threat back in Blighty

The general view appears to be that the Black Watch regiment is being sent south of Baghdad not to support an ally militarily, but to support a president politically. According to Richard Littlejohn, of The Sun, this cannot be true. He argues that lefties are always accusing Americans of being oblivious to news about foreigners, so they can't have their cake and eat it now, by claiming that Bush is using his friends in the north of Scotland to gain a few votes in Texas.

Littlejohn's view is amusing enough in a facetious way. But he misses the point, of course. It doesn't matter who's holding the line in Baghdad, as long as the neo-cons can get a big dose of shock and awe in Fallujah to make the folks back home feel that they are part of a great military power. Sadder still, though, are the politics back home. It may seem hard on members of the Black Watch regiment, to send them into dangerous service for reasons that may, on our allies part, be cynical.

But it seems all the more amazing since the regiment was one of five regiments, only a few weeks ago, that the Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon was proposing to abolish. The decision to send in the Black Watch, apparently, was made by Britain and was entirely a military one. I wonder if military reasoning included a desire to secure the future of the regiment, by showing devotion to duty while under threat of extinction. In more ways than one, the Black Watch has been put in a situation it should never have had to encounter.