Rob, Rambling - A lot of things interest me...

File under: epic, epic irony.

Although this figure of £6.6 million doesn’t take into account the fact that this new body is replacing the existing Commons Fees Office, which must require funding itself every year. So it’s not quite as sky-high a cost as it might seem at first.

And to be honest, the problem with the MPs’ expenses scandal was never the money, which in the grand scheme of things amounted to a relative pittance. The public was outraged because of the sheer audacity of the system as a whole, and the lack of contrition from MPs once they were caught.

We didn’t particularly care that the abuses were “only” in the tens of thousands of pounds range; it was the fact that these people were elected by us, and are supposedly our moral guardians, yet took us for a ride. They should be as clean as a whistle, but they’ve been shown to be horribly dirty.

Saying “it was within the rules” isn’t an excuse either. The rules were wrong, and they were allowed to continue being wrong because it suited the MPs to maintain that state of affairs as they milked the system. It’s not a valid excuse to work within the absolute letter of the law when that law is inherently flawed.

This upcoming election is going to be very interesting, because there’s a lot of people very pissed off with the whole political system, probably more than are apathetic towards it all. We have low election turnouts in this country anyway, but this year could be worse than usual.

My prediction is a lot of smaller parties and independents getting elected, standing on an anti-politics or anti-Westminster manifesto. They’ll represent something a bit different than career politicians, I hope, and will bring something fresh to parliament.