As the MPs expenses row rumbles on and on, we have recieved this letter showing just how angry many in the movement are about this. Many people raised this as an issue when voting (or, in most cases, not voting) in the local and Euro elections last week. The likes of Harriet Harman have been spouting off about this and saying that action will be taken. Fat chance! MPs like their perks rather too much.Of course we understand that this scandal has acted like the proverbial last straw for many traditional Labour voters, following on from twelve years of New Labour sell-outs, which have seen millions of voters deserting Labour and, in the main, sitting at home on election days. We believe the standard for labour MPs should be simple - A workers' MP on a workers' wage. More than this, to restore voters trust in Labour we need to see a fundamental change towards socialist policies and a fighting socialist leadership to push them forward. This would keep the Tories from getting back in at the next election - as well as ensuring that the likes of the BNP and other vermin never get near an elected position again. 

The nature of the MPs expenses scandal - A Letter

Everyday this scandal gets bigger. Every day we are overwhelmed by a new set of allegations or more precisely a new list of facts which scream for themselves in outlining the massively lucrative side bar which expense claims have given our politicians.

MPs have a standard salary of £64,766 per year. Over and above this, MPs are paid generously for many of the media appearances they make and the various and varied contributions made to newspapers and magazines. Their personal investment history; the stocks and shares they have toyed with over the years constitute yet another veiled means by which they receive more.

But perhaps most importantly many MPs have second jobs.A recent paper by the deputy leader of the commons found that 66% of the Tories, 37% of the Liberal Democrats and 19% of Labour MPs hold other posts. However in the majority of these cases the second jobs in question don't seem to involve any actual work. Often an MP is made a director on a board of a large company; not an active director in any heading to the office and running the business type way, but moreover a director who has the status of a sleeping partner; whose title holds sufficient sway to tie the company to the cradle of political power in Westminster. Including an MP on the board has obvious benefits from the point of view of any business; it provides prospective clients and investors with the sense that the company in question has both economic and political clout.

The sheer numbers of MPs who are now figureheads for such commercial enterprises give a powerful indication that something is rancid more generally. These high numbers show that the interpenetration between government officials and large business interests is neither arbitrary nor something which occurs infrequently on the periphery of political and economic life. Instead business concerns and political decision-making have become largely fused creating a symbiosis of self interest and ambition. Such a situation quite inevitably produces a culture in which political success and financial privilege are regarded as one in the same. The corruption of the MPs and the desperate, despicable scrabble for every last perk emerges directly from this.

In other words the greed of the politicians isn't simply reducible to a lack of character on the part of certain individuals. It is part of the broader process, a process which has been augmented by the current economic crisis. And the more it seems as though they were stood on the precipice of this crisis, the more the politicians have sought to salvage all they can. Their claims have ranged from the petty (a kit-kat at a hotel bar) to the grandiose and absurd (the cleaning of a moat).Many seem to claim with a fevered desperation which verges on despair. In a certain way this is entirely comprehensible. The more the political activity of politicians is welded to the interest of a tiny minority occupying the higher echelons of the business world, the less they are able to receive impetus from the activity of the general population. And there is nothing more creative than the latter. The majority of people in any society are those who produce and reproduce the conditions by which everyone lives.They are therefore a force of sustained and perpetual creativity. A living breathing creativity.As the politicians are further distanced from this realm, they can only look toward their houses and decorations and bank balances. For there is no where else to look. Margaret Beckett (who had claimed among other things £600 worth in potted plants) appeared on the programme 'Question Time'just after the scandal broke.As she beheld the irate audience, her whole expression seemed to ossify in a bitter rictus grin. She stared at the people she supposedly represents and when she finally deigned to speak her tone was lofty and sardonic. She was not the slightest bit apologetic for the £3250 she had claimed on food nor for the £72,000 she had claimed on a second residence even though she was renting out another flat in the capital over the same period.In fact everything about her aspect suggested righteousness and disdain. "You don't understand" she sneered at the people who had provided her with all the luxuries of wealth.

But despite her brazen show of belligerence it could be observed that Beckett's composure was a tenuous one. An expression riveted with contempt but also with unease. She clearly recognised that the spontaneous and genuine outpour of anger on the part of the audience and the population more generally was a danger to her position and those like her.Frightened, contemptuous and angry - "You don't understand" this politician told the population. But what she really meant was that "you can't understand."Beckett was fearful, yes, but also irritated that what she had come to see as little more than a rabble now had the audacity to make such scathing judgements about political careers. How could the ordinary person on the street possibly understand the subtlety and nuance politicians bring to bear? How, therefore, could they appreciate the level of financial benefit which goes with such difficult, delicate work? And how dare they pass judgement on such things!

Beckett's behaviour is interesting because it is far from unique. She exemplifies both the fear and contempt with which MPs, in their isolation, regard the general population. This fear and contempt thoroughly permeates their responses to the political crisis.They imagine that mass anger can be satiated with the most flimsy of concessions precisely because they have a faithless and cynical vision of the majority. Though the public outrage disturbs and frightens them, they regard it as nothing more than a knee-jerk reaction fermented by an over excitable press. The thoughtless and emotive clamouring will grow quiet over time for people have short memories. What is necessary is to give a few concessions here and there and meanwhile wait out the storm. With this in mind some MPs have paid back some of the most excessive expense claims.But, as might be expected this has done little good.There are few people willing to take such gestures seriously. Many are calling for more far reaching consequences.More than once it has been pointed out that if someone were to rob a bank and then get caught in the act, a generous offer made to pay back the money would probably not move the arresting officers much and nor would it save the criminal from jail.

Similarly the solutions the politicians offer up in order to make sure that these "abberations" don't reoccur are vague and unsubstantial.There are the endless and empty calls for committees. Committees to do this.Committees to do that.We are told nothing about such committees other than they are to be "independent." Independent of what we do not know. It is conceivable that a particular committee might be made physically independent of the politicians in that no politician would sit on it. But this would mean very little if the politicians themselves were to select the 'independents.'

And more fundamentally a committee to regulate parliamentary spending, though it might conceivably curb some of the worst excesses for the time being, would be nothing more than a survivalist response allowing MPs to preserve the fundementals of the system. It would not attack the process by which private enterprise has linked so explicitly with political activity in parliament. It would not create a fundamental connection between the politicians and the majority of people they are said to represent.In short it would not change the objective factors which created the political crisis in the first place.

The politicians introduce laws which regulate the conditions of life for a vast majority while at the same time they live and operate in a realm which stands in opposition to those conditions. This fact becomes ever more decisive as finance capital increasingly imposes itself on the higher strata of the political layer.This process can only be reversed by something equally fundamental.A sustained and conscientious accountability on the part of the politicians can only be realised if the political activity of the politicians depends not on a minority but is entrenched in the life processes of the masses as a whole. In other words if the minister of housing were to live in a relatively ordinary house. If the minster of transport were to have just the one car and sometimes use the tube. And so on and so forth. Such organic accountability would not only delimit the current excess but create a profound improvement in the overall standard of housing and transport in general.

But where could anyone find a politician who is willing to exit the realm of politics as it now exists. A politician prepared to abandon privilege. It seems as though you would be hard pressed to find someone like that in the corridors of power in Westminster. Where might you find political actors whose interests are at the same time those of the majority? The answer is, of course, in the majority themselves.  It is only when the majority of people who live in the houses actually plan the way those houses are built and developed, that a genuinely democratic and powerful drive to significantly raise the conditions of living for everyone might materialise. It is only when the people who use the general means of transport begin to actively plan and organise them, that we will experience an end to the under funding, the breaking down and the general all round chaos that is every commuters' experience in the now.

The requirement for a communistic organizing of society is much more than any idealism. It is a necessity which grows from Capitalism in general but also a necessity which emerges in and through the details of the world in which we live including this present political crisis. In the reaction to the programme of 'Question Time' featuring Margaret Beckett there have been thousands of comments posted on the web and in papers. From the few I have read it seems that a tiny minority actually support the MPs while most register profound contempt for their behaviour.But more importantly there is the growing conviction that politics must somehow become the property of the majority, if the situation to change for the better.

On the comments page of the BBC website Andrew Beard from Nottingham asks "Isn't it time we had the guy from Macdonald's running the country while the politicians flip the burgers?"

Ben from Oldham says that the politicians should be made to "stay in a travellodge and eat MacDonald's."

Ana Gilmurray from Liverpool is more expansive when she says - "(I)... am seething at the MPs who have milked the expenses system to the tune of tens of thousands of pounds. If I did that I would lose my job - the same should happen to them. Send them back to the constituencies and let US the people who paid for their unfettered greed make the decision about their future."

It is unlikely that all the people who leave these and other such comments would identify themselves as being Marxists. But such statements are revolutionary in character because they hint at the need for the majority to enter the political realm as protagonists. And this is profoundly important. Less and less do you encounter that wide-spread sense of apathy and hopelessness whereby people acknowledge the disgusting doings of politicians but feel that such behaviour belongs to an unalterable and unknowable realm.

A realm which exists over and above normal life. It seems that the people who are most desperate to cling to this latter belief are the politicians themselves. And through their isolation and corruption, aren't apathy and hopelessness what they should be allowed to claim?