Housey Housey

When I was young (yes, I was once young) we used to go on seaside holidays to Withernsea or Kilnsea, in a succession of bleak rented caravans. Or to Butlin’s at Skegness, in good years. The highlight of these holidays, for my parents, was always playing bingo. Personally, I never saw the appeal, but then, as I say, I was young. I guess now, looking back on it, that it was the cheap visceral thrill of unexpectedly supplementing the drudgery of your daily economic grind with some unearned, untaxed income, in a setting outside of the four walls of your own home.

So I can, to a certain extent, understand the antics of Tony McNulty and Jacquie Smith in claiming thousands of pounds in second home allowances, in circumstances that someone less charitable than myself might have described as “questionable”.

The sheer brass face with which these allegations have been “rebutted”, and the fact that it was felt acceptable to claim these allowances in the first place, though, speaks volumes on the contempt with which politicians currently view the electorate who put them there. They obviously think we are blind, or stupid, or both.

The justification for this behaviour is apparently that “they broke no rules”. If this is indeed true, then the rules need changing. It’s as simple as that. There is no way on God’s green earth that we should be paying for MPs’ second homes anyway. I have long argued that there should be a residence qualification for an MP before they can stand for a certain constituency. If you want to be the MP for Lower Snodbury, you should move there, buy or rent a house there, and live there for at least a couple of years before you are allowed to have a go. That way, we would only get people who were either committed to that area or indeed, actually from that area, standing. And the money saved from the payment of second home allowances to already well-off MPs could be put into something socially useful such as feeding, clothing and housing the homeless.