Rob Merrick on politics: Save the innocent in the expenses scandal

May 13 2009 by Rob Merrick, Liverpool Daily Post

WILL scores of Labour MPs be swept away by the expenses scandal engulfing Westminster – ending the party’s near-monopoly of Merseyside seats?

Attention is already switching to the impact on next year’s general election, with predictions of a populist backlash against all “incumbent” MPs, accused of riding the gravy train.

It may not matter that the most recent revelations – the claims for chandeliers, swimming pool upkeep and horse manure – suggest the Conservatives are also up to their necks in this sleaze.

Most incumbents – and, certainly, most in marginal seats – are Labour MPs, which means a voters’ war on sitting MPs will be calamitous news for Gordon Brown.

Already, Stephen Hesford (Wirral West ), Ben Chapman (Wirral South), Claire Curtis-Thomas (the new seat of Sefton Central) and Rosie Cooper (West Lancashire) are extremely vulnerable to Labour’s ongoing turmoil.

More Mersey MPs will fall if the pent-up fury triggered by all the tax-dodging and furniture-scrounging is released, next May, in a wipe-out of those stained by their years at Westminster.

Furthermore, in Cheshire, memories are still fresh of the last such backlash in 1997, which saw former BBC reporter Martin Bell sensationally defeat Tory Neil Hamilton in true-blue Tatton.

If the Tories could lose in the Cheshire “footballers wives’ belt”, could Labour lose in its working-class heartlands of Liverpool and the like?

The first thing to say is that there is, as yet, no evidence that Merseyside MPs have engaged in the sort of expenses skulduggery laid bare elsewhere.

Secondly, we should resist the temptation to scream “they are all crooks”, even as the number of MPs who have abused the system tots up, day-by-day.

I spend time with the Merseyside MPs. I know they are hard-working and enter Parliament to improve the lives of their constituents – not to enrich themselves at taxpayers’ expense.