Told You So
No sooner do I write about the need for voters in the UK to have a 'power of recall' over their elected representatives than a Conservative MP - Nadine Norries - comes along and proves me right.
Nadine is the 'honourable member' for Mid-Bedfordshire - in the heart of middle-England.
But she has decided to turn her back on her day job at Westminster - and swan off to Australia for a month to appear on the bonkers TV programme 'I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here'.
Now you could say that Nadine and the TV programme deserve each other- but there is a serious point here about how our MPs are held to account.
To my mind it's not good enough to say that if the electorate don't like their MP - they can always throw the person out at the next election - becuase the voters in Mid-Bedforshire will not get a chance to do that until May 2015 perhaps.
Meantime Nadine will be able to thumb her nose at whom she likes - while continuing to draw ger £65,000 a year salary plus generous office and other expenses.
The only good to come out of this nonsense wil be if Nadine's crazy antics encourage the public to say - enough is enough.
Power of Recall (3 November 2012)
The former Labour minister and current MP for Rotheram - Denis McShane - has become the latest 'honourable' member to fall victim to a parliamentary expenses scandal.
Despite paying back over £12,000 - which he falsely and deliberately claimed - Denis McShane was facing 12 months suspension from the House of Commons - following a long and detailed investigation by the parliament's Standards and Priviliges Committee (CSP).
So McShane jumped before he was pushed and has now ended his own parliamentary career by resigning from his Rotherham seat - which will now trigger a by-election and potentially a new police investigation into his dishonest behaviour.
The amazing thing is that the MP stopped co-operating with the CSP investigation into his expense earlier this year.
Yet no action was taken to discipline McShane for his outrageous behaviour - only after the CSP announced its decision did Labour withdraw the whip - effectively expelling him from the party.
But if things had turned out differently McShane could have escaped justice - and continued as an MP for years while still drawing his £65,000 annual salary - until the next general election.
As others have done of course - such as Eric Joyce the former Labour MP for Falkirk.
What the UK needs is a similar system to the one that operates in other countries such as Amrica - where elected representatives can be 'recalled' by the local electorate - if they have badly misbehaved and brought their elected office into disrepute.
In fact a power of 'recall' was widely debated in the wake of the Westminster MPs' expenses scandal - yet the idea has been quietly allowed to drop instead of being turned into a reality.
Yet making our elected representatives more accountable in such circumstances is surely in everyone's interests - so there is no good reason to explain why all the political parties have gone cold on the idea.
