Sunny Hundal of Liberal Conspiracy is launching a campaign to demand cleaner and more transparent politics for Britain. He has just set up the Facebook group. Excellent. As the group declares:
We are sick of MPs of all parties making absurd claims on their expenses, while claiming they are not paid enough! Who is going to do anything about these 'Expenses Cheats'??
We have to.
We should put together a series of demands and proposals to reform Westminster, and keep up the pressure to get them into law. Otherwise most politicians will go back to their old ways once this storm passes over.
Our political system is broken. The only way it will be reformed is if WE demand a change. We can't just hope things will change or leave them to carry on as before.
Sunny has published a list of demands and ideas for the campaign:
- We want a full, audited disclosure of all expenses claims, linked to property addresses.
- A full investigation by HMRC, the police and the CPS of potentially fraudulent/illegal cases.
- A ban on paid outside jobs for MPs.
- An independent committee to monitor MPs expenses, and keep these as low as possible.
- We should think about organising street protests to keep up the pressure on MPs.
- Demand changes to the electoral system so we can get rid of greedy MPs from each of the parties!
I'm glad people have started to move on this. If we don't formulate an intelligent and democratic response to the MPs expenses scandal which is now a crisis of Parliament and the party system, the space will be open for a populist figure to step in heading an anti-politics "clean up" campaign with David Cameron becoming more and more the "strong" and "decisive" figure the PR industry urge him to be by way of response. And that's before we even get to the BNP. Remember it was a right-wing media mogul, Silvio Berlusconi, who rose to power following the corruption crisis that rocked Italy in 1992-93. So this is a threat as well as an opportunity.
The last point of Sunny's campaign on the need for electoral reform is vital. A Labour wipeout at the European elections is a window of opportunity for those of us who want a grown up democracy, but we can't simply wait in the hope David Cameron will deliver this for us, as Anthony warned in response to Matthew Norman's excellent article. Cameron takes Blair as his model and hopes to emulate his vacuous, PR-driven form of rule (just read Gerry Hassan's report on seeing him in action yesterday). Cameron won't easily surrender the benefits of executive power provided by the rotten Westminster sytem. We need to make a democratic intervention now. A written constitution and PR can be the focus, the corruption and degeneration of our political system the spur to action.
Magna Carta 2.0 will do what it can to help and I'm sure we'll be hearing more soon from Sunny on his Clean up Westminster campaign and what we can do to support that.
Update: Sunny has posted on the campaign on Lib Con
