“We can’t be trusted: so you must pay for us to be policed.”

This expenses affair is starting to feel like a particularly surreal episode of Monty Python.

From The Times:

MPs on the House of Commons Commission, which oversees the running of Parliament, will meet today to approve a new independent unit to process expenses. The unit, expected to cost £600,000 a year, is being seen as a desperate rearguard action to protect Parliament’s reputation.

So because a large number of MPs appear to have no concept of morals or integrity, and “the system” is too weak and/or corrupted to prevent them milking it, we have to pay another £600,000 every year to pay a private company to police those MPs and stop them thieving from the public purse?

Wouldn’t it be cheaper just to sack the lot of them and start again?

Parliament must be dissolved NOW and a general election called; AFTER every MP’s expenses are fully publicised, unredacted, so that voters can make up their own minds as to whether the present incumbent in their constituency is fit to hold office.

And as for this …

Senior Labour figures say that the future privatisation of the Fees Office to process claims would exempt receipts from publication under Freedom of Information rules.

… words simply fail me.