...or is it just a way for the politicians in charge to dodge the issue?
PR will not clean out the government, and Foxy's ideas - fixed term parliaments, taking the date of an election away from the PM, are long overdue - won't stop MPs pinching from the till.
It's like the following scenario: I was at work on Saturday supervising a new employee who gave me a much-needed respite from the job, which normally sees me behind a till for 12 hours. The new girl is mouse totem, usually mice-people do well in shops as most coffee bars and restaurants employ them; they are conscientious, bright and happy people, with smart personal grooming and inquisitive and imaginative ideas (Sarah Teather and Jo Swinson are both mice, and mice tend towards the Liberal Democrat end of politics as they are air-earth elementals - rooted in the country, so they look after their constituents well, but whose ideals often come before practicalities like government pragmatism). She was not the sharpest tool in the book; mice are not often academics, and do often go on appearances rather than deep realities (all totems, as you know, have their upsides and downsides).
Mouse-girl - let's call her Angelina Ballerina - had a £35.50 till deficit when it came to cash up. I'm not accusing her of thieving - it's really hard ever to get a till spot on to balance. Within a pound is fine - but not £35.50 out. The proprietor goes ballistic if the deficit is more than about £5, and mine usually come within a pound, particularly when on Saturday and Sunday I do the whole day. But £35.50 is straying, in newsagent terms, into duck-island territory. The poor girl was obviously at a loss as to what had happened, but instead of saying straight up, "OK, what do you think has happened, and what should I do better next time?" she started to rant at me, saying she'd only had a 60p bottle of water (which she had rung through the till and not put the money in - a surprisingly rare case in which a mistake can be made, since most transactions by a good assistant are made without particular error; my feeling is that most errors come from mistakes in counting and balancing the float rather than mistakes in input and output through the till when a transaction is made*) --- fine, ok, so the till should be 60p short then --- and then the poor girl started saying, "but I only sold ice-creams, it was really slow, someone came in for a paper"...OK, again, fine, but according to the receipt she sold £90 worth of ice-creams etc. since I left her, and there was only £55 in the till after float.
She then declared that she was late and her dad was waiting for her outside, and could she go because it was after 7 and she was only supposed to work from 2 to 7. The problems with the till had taken up longer than normal, yes, but I still hadn't shown her how to shut the shop and lock the doors (which key goes where, which, judging her intelligence, would have been a reasonably dificult job; mind you, I have worked there five months and have only just got it fully learned), and so on - which, if she ever comes back after that, she will be doing on her own next time.
So little Angelina Ballerina was trying to blame everything on the fact that she only sold a certain type of good, rather than that she had either been dipping in herself (not likely) or making a gross amount of mistakes. This situation reminds me of the political arena at the moment, desperately trying to appease the public by deflecting the issue onto electoral reform, while not admitting that the party leaders themselves have bills wrongly claimed for expenses which haven't really been incurred as part of their duties.
As above, so below.
The only plus is that Alan Johnson, everyone's preferred Labour leader (though not mine and not Owlperson's, who says he has a cat in hell's chance), is clean. The minus on this is that he is joining in the general obfuscation, as yet more revelations continue to stream out of Torygraph Towers. (Link only goes to the newspaper front page today - I can't be bovvered to link to each one...)
This only makes it easier to get rid of the lot of them anyway :).
*if I want something from the shop and don't have the cash on me, I note down what I've spent and put the whole bill through the till at the end.
