Punish Mainstream Politicians, Don’t Vote for Mainstream Parties
Guido has been campaigning for this reckoning for years and now we are at the point where the reality of the venality of the political class has been revealed, public anger is exploding. However the impotence of voting is exposed, because they are all at it. They treat voters like sheep to be fleeced.
There are calls for a demonstration – a “Rally of the Robbed”. That would achieve nothing, even if we burnt parliament to the ground. We face a kleptocratic class that has control of all the main parties. Cameron has so far taken the whip away from Bob Spink and Derek Conway. It remains to be seen what happens to Andrew MacKay, Julie Kirkbride and the long list of other Tory troughers. Nick Clegg says he will come down like “a ton of bricks” on expense fiddlers. So far a few small cheques have been written with no sign of a single brick lobbed. Gordon Brown sits in cabinet with James Purnell, Hazel Blears, Jacqui Smith and Geoff Hoon. Each of them has defrauded the taxpayer and milked the system to an extraordinary degree. As long as they sit around the table he presides over a cabinet of crooks.
Like most humans, politicians are motivated by fear and greed. Greed motivated the now revealed looting of the public purse. Fear is the only thing that will get politicians to change their ways, and what they fear most is losing their positions. The mainstream parties are putting up the bogeyman of the BNP as the beneficiary of the none of the above vote. Tebbit has smartly advocated voters voting for a minority party, there are palatable options available whatever your political leanings. No party is perfect, but if your sympathies are to the left, this election is the time to vote Green, if your sympathies are to the right, time to vote UKIP, if you are more centrist, perhaps Libertas deserves your vote. That would punish the major parties.
Cameron has already ordered his troops to stop claiming dodgy expenses and it now seems likely that all MPs will finally lose their gold-plated expense fiddles. As sure as Hoon has houses they will inevitably demand pay rises. Examine the situation: an MP’s current compensation package (without dishonesty or blatant looting) is worth some £120,000 to £130,000 if added to the basic salary are their “within the rules” allowances and pensions valued at pre-tax equivalent market rates. Guido gives a range because of arguments as to the value of their pension package. So let us settle on a figure of £125,000 as the current all-in value of their package. Don’t forget many of them also increase the household income by employing children and spouses (or their 80-year-old mother in Peter Hain’s case). MP’s basic salaries of £64.766 puts them in the top 3% of earners. MP’s all-in packages put them in the top 1% of earners, yet they are in the words of the late Tony Banks “a sort of high-powered social worker”. 
There is an all party consensus developing in Westminster that to make up for their loss of fiddles they should get a pay rise of some £30,000 – a rise equivalent to the aforesaid social worker’s annual salary, or the annual pay of an army officer risking his life in the taliban’s line of fire. What on earth makes politicians think they are worth three times as much as a lieutenant in Helmand? Being paid to hang round in taxpayer subsidised bars in SW1 for a late vote is not exactly as stressful as taking deadly incoming fire from AK47s or writing to the mothers and wives of young men under your command who have given their lives for their country.
The politicians of SW1 are by comparison undeserving, untrustworthy and overpaid. They have a sense of self-entitlement that is as unjustified as their use of the term “honourable”. They will try to justify a pay rise by comparison to surgeons or headmasters. We need high pay to attract and retain those professionals. Every available safe seat attracts hundreds of applicants, there is no need to raise the rewards. Paying politicians high rewards attracts exactly the wrong type of careerist into politics and the political class have now shown themselves to be as despicable as they are interchangeable. 
You can now watch the Shadow Cabinet expenses updated 
The Shadow Climate Change Minister Greg Barker is doing a Blears – he says he doesn’t have to but he will anyway. He is close (socially*) to the Cameron inner circle. It seems that the closer you are to Cameron the whiter-than-white you have to be.
