The Little Picture of MPs Expenses

There's a really good impromptu interview broadcast on the BBC news web site, with Stephen Fry talking to Michael Crick about the context of MPs expenses. And what he says in that broadcast makes a bundle of sense.

Appalling as the behaviour of some of the MPs have been, we've not heard of two dozen MPs whose behaviour has been objectively scandalous. The whole furore is not the last dregs of a small beer in comparison with the massive issues we should be getting ourselves wound up about.

If the debt the Government have placed on the UK in that last year was paid from the complete bill for MPs - salaries and expenses (even including staffing expenses) - it would take 1,500 years to repay, without including a penny of interest!

Or should we talk in the context of lives? (Was it 800,000 people estimated to have been died as a result of the Government's illegal war in Iraq?)

Or should we talk in terms of liberties enjoyed by the UK since magna-carta being taken away slice-by-slice over the last few years?

Or should we talk about democracy represented in parliament itself, that has become the feeble, toothless puppet of half-a-dozen members of the inner cabinet and their press secretaries?

This is the Mother of all storms in Mother's favourite china teacup. In any real kind of real context, becoming transfixed with MPs expenses at the cost of all other issues seems like fiddling while Rome burns.