Same shit different day...

The way that Westmonster currently views the political scene is as follows: on the Left we have the useless, on the Right are the artless and insincere, and in the middle hovers an ineffectual bunch of neophytes that nobody really ever listens to. Whereas we could no doubt sit around and ponder on whether or not one party will do some good for us personally, there's no point in leaning to one persuasion over the others as, essentially, it's pretty much guaranteed that whoever ends up in power is going to be terrible at working things out for the country as a whole - instead just leading us down the backwards path to partisanship. Indeed, to use a completely irrelevant analogy, why pledge allegiance to a superior brand when the supermarket's own version is equally as lifeless?

As cynical as that may sound, perhaps the dilemma that David Cameron has found himself digging his party out of today will help to demonstrate why it is that we feel as smitten as we do. As is usual with such cases, it all boils down to the unfair distribution of wealth, or as it is more commonly referred to on the political scene, 'a proper good expenses deal'.

According to an article in today's Guardian, Cameron has been forced to investigate the accounts of Tory MEP, Giles Chichester, who was earlier found to have shifted £445,000 in to a company in which he and his wife act as directors. Dear, oh dear. If that doesn't sound like enough of a scam though, Chichester is, ironically, the man that Cameron delegated the responsibility of ensuring the fairness of other MPs expenses to. He even went so far as to produce a code of guidelines for his Conservative colleagues expenses, a fact that he has now admitted to be embarrassing.

The revelation compounds Cameron's embarrassment as it comes after another Tory politician Derek Conway was suspended from the Commons for making payments of more than £40,000 to his student son who worked as a 'researcher'. But what does this mean for the rest of us?

Well, perhaps it means that whoever ends up leading us in the future will be doing so only because of circumstance, and not because of the right to be there. If Brown wins the next election, he will do so on luck. If Cameron comes through, it will be because he's not Brown. If a Lib Dem pulls through then we can all sit back and talk about how surprised we are.

Cameron's decision to put Chichester in charge of expense probity, without checking whether or not his decision to do so is justified, proves that the Conservatives are just as badly organised as their Labour rivals. By placing his trust in a man that he obviously knew nothing about, Cameron has shown that he may know what to say to the public to convince that he knows his stuff, but that he doesn't really know the Conservative Party.

As it stands, the political parties are all as fundamentally bad as each other, which means that something, somewhere, has gone terribly wrong. As Giles Chichester said in defense of his expenses revelations, though:

"Whoops-a-daisy".

Which probably means that it doesn't even matter.

Photo: Flickr

Written by Oli Anderson on 5 Jun 2008 1:07 PM. Permalink