The whys and wherefores behind the expenses palaver

Anne Applebaum has a useful take on the expenses palaver. Writing in the Washington Post today, she says:

Both have their origins in the 1980s, when a combination of Thatcherite reforms, the adoption of English as the universal business language, and geography -- Britain is in a time zone about halfway between New York and Tokyo -- made London the financial capital of Europe. Throughout the decade, everyone in Parliament watched their friends from college get not just rich but very, very rich, while their own salaries remained stagnant. As a result, British MPs came down with a bad case of what columnist David Brooks has called "Status- Income Disequilibrium," a disease whose sufferers hold badly paying but prestigious jobs, positions that require them to "lunch on an expense account at The Palm, but dine at home on macaroni" -- (or, in British terms, "go home every night to beans on toast").

It does however get even worse for the MPs (though perhaps their poorer voters might disagree on this one):

The problem worsened as the importance of Parliament declined. With the rise of 24-hour television, the importance of substantive debate declined, too. MPs were not only relatively poor but also relatively insignificant. They earned less, and they mattered less, not merely less than bankers but less than journalists and less than their political predecessors. This parliamentary crisis of confidence seemed to climax in the "cash-for-questions" scandal in 1994, when a few conservative MPs were shown to have taken money -- in cash, in brown paper bags -- from businessmen who wanted them to make official inquiries on their behalf.

The full article from Applebaum can be found here.