MPs from all sides and political commentators last night agreed that blacking out details of MPs’ expenses had gone too far.
A lively edition of the BBC’s Question Time took place in the sports and conference centre at Nissan’s factory on Wearside last night.
Inevitably, the audience wanted to know what the panel thought of the latest revelations in the expenses saga and the practice of blacking out, also known as redacting, sensitive information.
Aidan Crowe, 25, a civil servant, posed the show’s first question.
He said: “What is the point in publishing the expense claims for MPs for the last four years, but blacking out key details?”
Political commentator Polly Toynbee said: “I find it absolutely amazing because they said the whole idea was that sunlight is the best disinfectant – throw light on this and it will never happen again.
“But if from now it’s always going to be what they call redacted – rather a new word I think – blocked-out like this, we will not know the things that are most important.
“We would not know who had flipped their houses – changed which is their main home.
“We will not know a great deal about their mortgages, we would not know who had sold their house and avoided capital gains tax, the worst offences in fact.”
Conservative Shadow Business Secretary Kenneth Clarke said he believed publishing the redacted expenses had cost the taxpayer about £1.5m.
He said: “Quite a few of my colleagues have done some very silly things and now it has just become a scraping of the barrel, trying to get everyone.
“The question about the redaction is bureaucracy and alleged security.
“MPs have not done this.
There has been a whole process going on whereby the bureaucracy has been redacting and the security people have produced this ridiculous consequence, and this has cost a lot of money.”
Perhaps the biggest round of applause was reserved for consumer champion Esther Rantzen, who is considering standing for Parliament at the next election.
She said: “I understand that the plan was that this was how Parliament was going to be transparent. Lord knows how many efforts were made by the speaker and others in Parliament to prevent any of it coming out for all sorts of reasons. This was the maximum that Parliament thought was going to be revealed to us.
“However, a gentleman or lady in the citadels of The Daily Telegraph did a deal and the result was, we all know, infinitely more.
“It proves the cover-up was going to be almost complete and that shocked me as much as the terrible abuse of the allowances expense claim.
“This has totally destroyed the trust we had in the people who are running the country.
“They made us feel that they were taking us for a ride, treating us as stupid, taking advantage of us – and that erodes trust. You have got to win it back.”
Speaking of the redaction, Lib Dem foreign affairs spokesman Edward Davey, said: “I do not know why they did it. Tomorrow I have invited all my local press to come to my constituency office to see the unredacted versions (of his expense claims).”
Labour’s Lord Falconer, the former Lord Chancellor, also condemned the level to which the expenses had been redacted. He said: “The right answer is for them all to be produced as openly as possible so people are in a position to make some sort of judgement about how many MPs have been behaving in a way that is not responsible, criminal or should be the object of condemnation.
“Instead, what you get is the redacted stuff, which makes everyone think it’s a cover-up.”
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