It is time to hold all parties to account for corruption

THERE is only one conclusion to be drawn from Sir Thomas Legg's report into the allowances system for members of the Westminster parliament. It is a damning and depressing one: that there was corruption and fraud at the very heart of the United Kingdom's once venerated democracy – corruption and fraud that was created, encouraged, nurtured, and exploited by the MPs themselves.

In his forensic exposition of the way our politicians milked the expenses regime, Sir Thomas found that the system put in place by parliamentarians was "deeply flawed", something of an understatement given his recommendation that MPs hand back 1.3 million, later cut by 185,000 after some appealed against his earlier judgments.

The scale of this scandal is illustrated by the fact that 373 MPs have been told to repay sums that we now know they claimed illegitimately and, had they not been exposed in the media, would have kept to as an addition to their salary of nearly 65,000 a year.

And it is not just the scale of the false claims but the detail that will lead many voters to view politicians of all parties – they were all in this together – as going into politics not for noble reasons of service but to plunge their snouts deep in the trough.

Labour MP Barbara Follett, married to a millionaire author, has repaid 42,458, a sum she claimed for security patrols at her second (sic) home, for six separate telephone lines and insurance premiums on her fine art collection. Tory backbencher Bernard Jenkin faced the highest demand, for 64,000 spent renting a property from his sister-in-law although the sum was reduced to a mere 36,000 on appeal.

And who is responsible for creating the system so open to abuse? Why, the MPs who spend most of the waking hour preaching to the electorate about what we should and should not do, how we can and cannot behave.

Damningly, Sir Thomas concluded that the culture of deference in the Fees Office, which administered expenses, left it vulnerable to the influence of higher authorities in the House of Commons, including the then speaker, Michael Martin, who was, eventually, forced out of office amid widespread anger over the expenses crisis.

There is much more in the report, but if there is anything positive to come out of it, it is that there were a significant number of MPs who did not abuse the system, who have little of nothing to pay back, and whose probity damns their greed-filled, arrogant colleagues.

Sir Thomas is to be congratulated on his efforts. The outcome must be a cleansing of the Westminster Augean stables. That means parties must refuse to allow anyone who over-claimed their expenses to stand as a candidate. If they do stand, the electorate – with whom the power rests – should take the matter into their own hands at the ballot box.

We need a new generation of fresh, untainted and, above all, humble MPs if the reputation of Westminster democracy is to be restored, though that process will take a long, long time.