A straw poll

A trip back from the local garage this morning resulted in me being in a car with three other gents of "a certain age".

What was the topic of conversation? Swine flu? No. Local elections? No. You guessed it MPs and their expense claims.

In this admittedly small survey, 100% of the people polled thought that MPs had behaved disgracefully. (That wasn't the word used but we'll keep things polite.)

All of those polled thought that the Government had effectively lost control of the situation and did not have an ounce of moral fibre left in them.

Then we went to work; because in the end we all look after ourself and our family first. Hopefully we do that without taking from others what is not ours to take.

That of course is just what the MPs have done, looked after themselves first. They just forgot that it is the great mass of the population that pays their wages and somehow came to believe that they were worth far more than the £65,000 salary they get paid each year.

MPs salary = £65,000 Moral Compass = Priceless

How is your moral compass?

In the week that has seen the exposure of the vast and very questionable expense claims made by MPs of all parties, I have been left wondering, where they each left their moral compass?

What I mean by moral compass is that innate sense of what is right and proper for oneself. The rules that you run your life by because you feel that that is the right thing to do, not because someone is watching over your shoulder.

That moral compass in the case of MPs has been shown this week to be badly out of alignment with the majority of the UK poulation; or has it?

It appears that the MP expense system (designed by MPs, run by MPs with rules set by MPs) was constructed in such a way as to encourage the topping up of the pay packet by claiming expenses that no other employer would allow.

As a consequence, many of the people who spend their time telling us what we should be doing, framing new laws that define what is acceptable, have themselves been broken the trust that they were once invested with.

But what would you do? When faced with a system that positively encourages you to go and buy a new TV and charge it to the Tax Payer, would your compass stay true?

Are each of us capable of staying withing our moral code without some notion of external scrutininy or the threat of it?

The answer seems clear, even if the majority of people have a clear sense of what is right and wrong, exposure to the light of day helps to ensure that we remain true to commonly agreed ideals.

Does that mean we can't have a secret part of our lives? No of course not; we are all entitled to have a secret if we want to...but please don't ask someone else to fund it!