Expenses Whining

Via Guido, some examples of the whining of some MPs about the new expenses system. My own personal favourite:

We just have to accept this because the public is not with us. It will take something really horrendous, such as a woman MP being stabbed on the streets of London because she is not entitled to take a taxi home late at night, before people wake up and realise how unfair this is.

Let's break this down, and try to count the number of ways in which this is wrong:

1. The public is against you, because some MPs took the system and used it as a means to shit all over the taxpayer, and then make sure the taxpayer's face was rubbed in it. Duck houses, second mortgages, moats, cleaners, flipping. The public is not just not with you, it is against you. And the best way to overcome that would be to quit bellyaching and get on with the job of running this country.
2. A female MP being stabbed would be pretty horrific, but no more so than anyone else being stabbed on the streets of London. And the fact that it happens to ordinary people should be a clue what MPs need to focus on - not the fact that they too have to walk home through potentially dangerous areas, but rather making those areas safer for everyone. And not just in London - how about in the country as a whole?
3. There is nothing to stop an MP taking a taxi home late at night - I know lots of people, both male and female, who do so regularly because it makes them feel safer. MPs will now have to do what everyone else has to do, and pay for those taxis themselves. That's hardly a big ask, now, is it? For MPs to live as they people they purport to represent do?
4. The system isn't unfair, any more than life itself is unfair. People aren't going to wake up and realise that this is unfair because, basically, it isn't unfair. It really isn't unfair for MPs to have to stop milking the expenses system - and therefore the British taxpayer - to fund a lifestyle beyond the means of the vast majority of people in this country.

So, four different ways in which a brief paragraph is wrong. But I'd like to add a final one. It is the misplaced arrogance in the statement - and the others in the article - that is perhaps the biggest problem that MPs have if they are serious about bettering the public perception of them. They need to realise that becoming an MP is not entering a position of privilege at the expense of others, but rather earning the privilege to serve those people who elected them.