Simon Jenkins – Nail, head, hit

Leaders and frontbenchers of both main parties have paid back money filched from taxpayers under a regime that would have prosecuted those taxpayers if they had done the same. This patent admission of guilt left them blandly claiming that they had “done nothing wrong”. In that case, why pay it back? Had the house-flipping and tax-dodging been isolated, the culprits would have been drummed from office. Instead, wrongdoing cleansed itself by strength in numbers. Hardly a member of this parliament will depart next year untainted by fiddle or fraud.

by Simon Jenkins, in The Guardian