SNOUTS IN TROUGH

As the reasons for embarking on a political career have descended from high ideals of selfless duty to a desire for power and its trimmings we have been subjected to sights of the most grotesque avarice from our esteemed leaders. The list of scandals is endless and it is amazing how often they have involved MPs lining their pockets and those of their families in ways that are at best underhand and at worst illegal. A recent revelation has involved a so called John Lewis list of furniture and furnishings which MPs can feather their ‘second nests’ to the tune of £22,000 a year. That’s on top of the mortgage interest repayments which are also covered and the £400 of shopping that can be done a month without any need to produce receipts. Quite why all this is necessary is unimportant, what is delightful for the rest of us is to see the content of the list for a look into the coffee-sipping (from the £100 coffee maker they are entitled to) lives of our public servants.

MPs have hypocritically been trying to wriggle out of declaring their expenses for a while. At a time when everyone else is expected to be more transparent in their dealings than ever before it is remarkable that the ruling cabal see fit to hide their own excesses behind a smokescreen of parliamentary procedures and regulations. We can only hope that these Orwellian swine are forced to change their ways by the strength of public disgust with them. Recent local election results seem to show that the ruling party have certainly fallen foul of the man in the street as belts are tightened in the wake of the credit crunch. Perhaps further revelations will now be suppressed as in the last week MPs spent £100,000 on the appeal to prevent further disclosures about their expenses.

What irritates perhaps most, is not the greed or the hypocrisy, it is a clause written into the terms of the slush fund that the furnishings cannot be ‘antique, luxury or premium-grade’. As an auctioneer I can tell you that this clause is absurd.

It presupposes that an antique is automatically a luxury or premium grade item. When it comes to government spending we have had to get used to incompetence and a total failure to get value for money. I have no issue with John Lewis as they fulfil their role in the retail market, but show me a country saleroom and I will show you an antique dressing table for under £100 let alone the £500 quoted in the list. Government failure to get value for money or stick to budgets can be summed up by a few recent white elephants namely that monument to New Labours vanity the ‘Dome’, the Wembley debacle and more recently by the 2012 Olympics – great ideas on paper but ones which ended up costing the taxpayer far more than the projected amounts. Some politicians have axes to grind of axes and one of these concerns class issues. Perhaps antiques, even if they are cheaper than a new item, are not suitable because to some they have the whiff of country houses and elitism about them.

There are two reasons why I think this clause should be revoked and both should chime current thinking among the public and politicians. Famously Gordon Brown proclaimed himself as a ‘prudent’ chancellor so lets start with prudence.

If the furnishings for MPs second homes' furnishings were bought at auction a large saving could be made. I would suggest for starters that savings could be made on the dining table, £600 is actually quite modest for a dining table at retail level but at auction a 19th Century mahogany tilt top breakfast table could set you back £200. Next the £500 for a chest of drawers would buy you two standard Victorian examples. Instead of forking out £200 for ‘lamp tables’ (how bourgeois) you can pick up a late Georgian oak tripod table for £150. One of the biggest savings has to be the wardrobe, the listed allowance of £700 sounds modest for retail but the era of the built in wardrobe has helped to reduce the price of this sort of large furniture at auction. Ordinary Edwardian examples can make less than £50 at auction but why not go for a really decent bit of furniture - a linen press, these were once a staple of the business and worth £1000-1500 for a standard example in mahogany, prices have slumped to as low as £400-600 at auction and you get a lot for your money.

As well as making a saving on the purchase price antique items will hold their value better than modern items which generally have no resale value. Some of the items might gain in value over the period of a parliament and if a sitting MP was ousted the items could be dispersed at a profit. Think of the size of the sale after the next election!!

Secondly, we are being asked more than ever to be ‘eco friendly’ in our lives. Coming from people who fly business class to Bali for conferences on global warming this is pretty rich, but the environment is now a key political battleground. When we are encouraged to recycle I always think of antique furniture as the ultimate example; it may have been owned by many generations of one family or by many different families, either way it is of a quality that will last for centuries. The cold reality for much cheap mass produced furniture of the sort favoured by young people now that we are all ‘minimalists’ is that much of it ends its life at a landfill site. Much of it has been made from pale soft woods and is not built to last. It is cheap but that cheapness is a false economy when viewed long-term. The fact that our ‘throw-away society has reached a stage where even furniture gets thrown away horrifies many people, we need to realise that the environmental effects of mass producing things cheaply (whether it be chickens, cars or chairs) outweigh the benefits. The trouble for MPs is that the availability of cheap consumer items is key to winning votes. They could begin setting an example and offsetting the environmental cost of their ‘two Jags’ lifestyles by buying furniture which has not been made from fast growing wood and chemically treated and that will last far longer than any political career.

As an auctioneer I cannot understand why the industry I work in has been singled out by Government in this way. The same rules do not apply to the cars MPs drive which certainly seem premium grade to me. Perhaps they feel that antiques are inappropriate for MPs because they are built to last, good quality, economic and eco friendly, everything the modern MP is not.