democracy

democracy is a funny old thing. we take it for granted.
it has to be said that on any list of least liked people there would be estate agents, richard littlejohn, simon cowell and members of the british parliament.
there are various reasons why people no longer respect members of parliament the most recent, and the most damming; reason has been the expenses scandal.
this has led to a lot of hand wringing and self-flagellation on the part of the political class. this has led to suggestions that politics needs to be cheaper, and one of the ways offered to achieve this has been to cut the number of members of parliament.
unsurprisingly david cameron and the conservative party like this idea, they have even said they would reduce the numbers of mps by 10%. another example of the conservatives desire for a smaller government, and cutting is their default response to anything. (the liberal democrats have also argued that a cut in the number of members of parliament should take place.)
jack straw, the justice secretary, has described this as being undemocratic, and i agree with him. he also claims that the other reason the tories are interested in reducing mps is a cynical attempt to make sure they have more seats in parliament. i don’t know if that is the case, but they are tories so let’s just agree that jack is right.
the outrage over the expenses wasn’t because politics was expensive; it was because people who were earning a decent wage were supplementing it by claiming all kinds of things as legitimate and necessary expenses when really all they were doing was to line their own pockets. it wasn’t the cost of having members of parliament that got people annoyed it was that many of the ones we had were cheating.
if anything there should be more mps. we elect them to represent us. the fewer of them there are, the larger the number of people they have to represent. the larger the number of constituents that they have the less chance there is that they can know the issues that are important to their area.
with more mps they would have to work harder to ensure that they got re-elected as they would be relying on a much smaller number of people, who would be able to see if they were doing a good job at the local level. it would also mean that there would be easier access to your local mp because they were dealing with a smaller catchment area.
we want mps to be accountable to us the people, rather than to be accounted on by bean counters.