Anyone landing in Britain after a stay on a desert island, would find it hard to figure out what the important issues of the day must be. To judge from the media, it is neither the plight of the 244,000 workers whose jobs were cut by greedy bosses in the first three months of the year, nor the fate of the 142 families repossessed each day by profit-hungry bankers during the same period!
No, for the media and politicians, the main issue is the allowance-pilfering by MPs of all shades! But MPs milking the system? Why is that suddenly a major news item? A bath plug worth a few quid for one, a fancy carpet worth a few hundred for another, the odd second or third mortgage for yet another, not to mention the ministerial husband's porn favourites? Is this really worth all the noise?
Don't MPs brush shoulders with businessmen, whose interests they uphold, far more than with working people? Is it any wonder, then, if MPs use their allowances in the same way as businessmen use their company credit cards?
Austerity is not for them
The big difference is that MPs get paid out of our taxes. Or, at least, this is the point made again and again by the papers which are running the story.
But why is the behaviour of MPs worse, in this respect, than the squandering of social wealth by businessmen and shareholders on luxuries of all sorts? Isn't that wealth the exclusive product of the hard labour of working people just as much as our taxes? Isn't this theft on a far greater scale than anything MPs are able to cream off?
But then, don't expect the "Daily Torygraph" to expose the capitalists' parasitism! If it chooses to expose MPs' parasitism and to turn it into a daily series, it is to do with boosting its sales, but also the fact that there is an election round the corner. After all, the Commons' graft is bound to be blamed on Labour's failure to put the House in order, even if the Tories had their own lot of similar scandals when they were in office!
Of course, what makes MPs' parasitism particularly revolting - but that is something that the capitalist media won't mention - is the fact that these are the very people who are cutting public services and turning the screw on the rest of us.
Last week's increase in the minimum wage is a case in point: 7p for the adult hourly rate and 2p for the 16-17s! What an insult, coming from politicians who earn more than 5 times the minimum wage (even before they start claiming on their allowances) and have spent the past year rubber-stamping hundreds of billions of pounds worth of handouts to the finance barons!
The real sharks
These MPs are only sidekicks, doing their dirty jobs for the benefit of the big guys in the City and helping themselves to a few crumbs in return. But the real scandal that lies behind this - and which seldom gets exposed by the media, is the profiteering of their capitalist masters.
Why haven't the latest developments at British Telecom become a headline scandal, for instance? What with the CEO of this ultra-wealthy giant announcing, all at the same time, 15,000 job cuts (on top of another15,000 already cut) and the payment of £455 million to shareholders - the equivalent of a year's wages for each one of the workers whose job is under threat? And this CEO, who stands to earn a £600,000 bonus this year, had the nerve to "apologise" to shareholders for their "reduced" dividends, without saying one word about the workers he intends to sack!
Isn't such arrogance - which is displayed by bosses in so many companies these days, from the car industry giants to the large public service organisations - a real reason for anger? Isn't that a reason to say that we have had enough of workers being made to pay for the crisis by the very bosses whose profiteering has caused it? Doesn't this mean that it is more than high time for the working class to make its voice heard, by taking industrial action across all industries and joining ranks in the streets to challenge the bosses' arrogance and stop their job-slashing in its tracks?
Disgusting as the MPs' petty parasitism may be, it is a diversion. The real issue is that the working class majority in this society has no political voice against the tiny minority of profit sharks who own everything. And this is one more reason for us to use our own methods to make our voice heard - the methods of the class struggle!