Beyond bathplugs

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.