http://www.dorries.org.uk/Story.aspx?ID=14

Nadine Dorries, MP for Mid Beds, and her family are to make their new home in Woburn.

“The decision was very much taken out of my hands by the kids” said Nadine. “They fell in love with the town and it didn’t matter where else we went they kept coming back to Woburn.

As any parent will know, a move is a huge thing especially 3 lively girls. It helps with the process when the children have a big say and feel they an input in to what is happening.

It also makes sense logistically. My constituency office is in Shefford and I am in the House of Commons four nights a week so it is manageable”.

That’s a false conjunction of two separate issues:
1. Why should they have easy lives [a complaint that's irrelevant to the real point of criticism; it's simply a trope]
2. Why should they fund a *lifestyle* on public money

The second of those complaints is, I’d say, relevant. But then the distribution of fault changes when the complaint is understood in that way:

Let’s assume there’s no need to make an argument for why MP allowances are necessary, and accept that they are. They perform some gnerally useful function regardless of how specific individuals use it.

We can accept that MPs are therefore at least *conditionally* entitled to an allowance (i.e. if they fall within the formal criteria for claiming. Drawing an analogy with means-testing, somebody may be formally/superficially entitled to a pecuniary benefit on the basis of income, regardless of other possibly-relevant factors).

But any conditional system of distribution is easily manipulable: you simply replicate the formal requirements of the system, within your specific circumstances, even if it isn’t substantively deserved (e.g. designating your ‘second home’ as your mother’s house or something).

Does the system allow you to do that, without being corrupt? Yes. Corruption and bad faith aren’t the same thing. When you give somebody a lax rule, you justify the choices they make to maximise that rule. Exploiters of a lax rule don’t shoulder the culpability, they share it with the rule’s overseers. Therefore the system’s broken, and MPs taking advantage of that are formally blameless, but of course it’s not very public-spirited. Immoral might be too strong, but improprietous would be about right.

There’s a valid objection to public funding for private lifestyles: the public funding’s purpose is a minimal one, namely, to enhance the functional efficacy of MPs. I agree with this argument, strongly. Therefore, choice: do we abolish the allowance, or prescribe its use more closely? But then again, there are very few jobs that require having two lives, in two separate localities.

Abolishing it would probably be undesirable, so the next choice is to prescribe its use. But then how do we prescribe its use without being excessively intrusive on MPs and their privacy and right to financial autonomy?

A third idea would be to impose restrictions on what kinds of goods and services it may be used for. Maybe some kind of ‘spending-penalty’ that forces better judgment on expenditure requirements. But go too far down that road and you risk making politics unattractive to anyone but the rich. I still do favour a minimalist expenses system. The existing one appears, on some grounds, to be needlessly generous.

Personally, I think the system just needs to be better audited and the expenses claimable, diminished. Ultimately, though, we have to accept that Parliament, like any large modern institution, needs to provide a certain degree of convenience, through an allowance system. That this allowance system happens to be publically funded, is no more relevant to its moral status than the Prime Minister’s salary. All these issues need to be kept separate.