Oh lookee! Those lovely people in parliament have rejigged their expenses to give themselves a little more without having to prove receipts. And they’re also tightening up on second jobs. Both of the above are bad things.

Allowing any increase in expenses (or salary, or any remuneration for the position of MP) is entire against the will of the population – I can’t think of a single person who would agree with it. So that’s self-evidently a bad thing.

And tightening up on second jobs is ridiculous. It can only be a good thing if MPs earn money outside Parliament – it means that they don’t need to claim as much from us. And it means that they have a working life outside politics, which is essential. They need to be associating with people outside the bubble, or they eventually start judging everything by the skewed standards of SW1. And that’s what got them into this mess in the first place.

To my mind, the less political a politician is, the better a leader they are. The more ways people see MPs doing things other than stabbing their granny in the back to get votes, the more respect they will have for them. And the more MPs learn from a real world that has consequences, the less likely they are to rush through bad laws with no thought of how it’ll effect things in the long term.

Or, we could just encourage people to be nothing but politicians, and care about nothing more than the next election and keeping the whips happy. Because that’s doing us all so well…