Conway twitter...

Courtesy of Plato: Derek Conway - Freelance sleaze buster?

I don't think bringing secretaries and assistants in house is not what is needed. Transparency is. A civil servant will not always be thought of as loyal or trustworthy under any Government. Your wife/mother/son/daughter would be.

From a constituent's viewpoint - would you trust an MP whose staff were an arm of the State?

Bringing secretaries and assistants in house looks like a simple kneejerk to me. More just a possible solution to the problem than some nefarious attempts by Brown - I don't think he or his people are capable of such joined up thinking and a lot of incompetence from others has hitherto been ascribed to plotting, scheming and talented politiking by Brown. Brown gets his strength from the weakness of his opponents. He is not Samson. He is not Hercules. He is is not even Achilles. He's just a malignant shit.

MPs ought to stand up for themselves more. It is troughing when they fiddle the system. It is unacceptable that they repeatedly attempt to cover it up. If they argued from the position of each member being self-employed and able to call on taxpayer's money for justifiable expenses (with the requisite routine publication of those expenses and to have MPs subject to exactly the same tax rules as the rest of us) there would be far less chance to throw mud at them.

I am beginning to see parallels with the financial sector everywhere and this is no different. There is a regulator of expenses and the Green Book is supposed to be the rules. Like the FSA relied on bankers to not be too greedy and largely left them to their own devices, the expenses authorities have relied on MPs being honourable, decent and above reproach. Yet it is plain to see that many of them are instilled with an entitlement culture and a gross welfare dependency. There was simply nothing and no one to stop them cheating, so many of them did. Not even the bastion of er... truth - the media. Too often they are nothing more than a weathercock pointing the way after public opinion has changed.

Again and again these problems boil down to appointed (or self-appointed) regulators not doing what most people would see as their job. Why that is I cannot imagine. There is a pervasive culture of indifference at the heart of the running (and ruining) of this country.