First parliament, now the BBC. Steadily, the public is seeing details of the kind of lifestyles that have been funded by the taxpayer for all these years. To the tawdry parliamentarians’ list — duck houses, porn films, Kit Kat bars — we can now add the £638 taxi bills for BBC executives and the £3 which cash machines charge them to take out money. As the Freedom of Information requests are steadily lodged with the legion of quangos, we can expect another tranche of horrors — and this is before anyone moves on to the local authorities. As David Cameron says, sunlight is the best disinfectant. The more we see, the more taxpayer anger is focused.
It has taken some time for those paid by the taxpayer (and this does include BBC staff) to realise the severity of this. The incredulity was wonderfully summed up by Jim Devine, one of the Labour MPs now facing criminal charges. He admitted that he had faked receipts, but was unable to work out that he had done wrong. Throughout his career in the public sector, he said, the creative allocation of budgets was common practice. And this is the root problem: the money was not seen as other people’s money: simply as a pot of cash into which he could delve. Why should he be criminalised for activities that have been going on in the state sector for a decade and more?
The expense claims are the fine brushstrokes that complete the picture of the waste of the Labour years. The concept of tax revenue being somebody else’s money was lost years ago, which is why so many MPs cannot understand why improper claims for such money could be seen as theft, since they never quite grasped the concept of ownership. Once this mindset is established, fiscal debauchery follows. The power of the expenses scandal is that it shows, in miniature, the type of plunder that has been going on for a decade and more.
From the dredging of the MPs’ moats to the £200,000 which civil servants charged to the taxpayer for attending the ‘Earth Summit’ in Rio, it has been relentless. But it has been hard to quantify. One can say that state spending in Britain increased over the past decade faster than in any other major country except Germany in the 1930s. This, for all its horrors, can come across as a historical quirk. But there is something vivid in Jacqui Smith finding it appropriate to charge the taxpayer 88p to buy a bathplug. (Every day, incidentally, Britain’s debt increases by enough to buy a bathplug for every house on the planet.)
The mood is changing in Britain — and that means this could be a conservative decade. The public, who are being saddled with debt at the rate of £5,000 every second, are increasingly aware that this is not monopoly money but a real burden which can only be paid by taking money away from real people. When Canada and Australia had their debt blow-ups, it transformed the political landscape. From that point on, no politician in either country has been elected without promising to balance the budget.
All the greater the opportunity for the Conservatives. Mr Cameron can come to power saying that he will never forget whose money it is. The expenses scandal is not an isolated case of wicked politicians, but simply the most visible part of a culture of public sector excess. So when Mr Cameron makes the case for cuts, he should do so without apology. As he puts it, he stands for society — not the state. Cutting back the cost of government is the only way to redress the imbalance of power between the two.
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