Every British Parliament has had its share of scandal. Everyone remembers John Profumo, caught up in a world of call girls and spies, despite being Secretary of State for War. Jeremy Thorpe was accused (though of course acquitted) of conspiracy to murder. Keith Best was (initially) sentenced to four months in prison for making multiple applications (under assumed names) for British Telecom shares at privatisation. But these scandals of the 1960s, '70s, and '80s did not lead to any sense of widespread corruption, either across Parliament as a whole or even within specific political parties.
All that changed because of a deliberate strategy of Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell. For they attempted to paint the inevitable occasional scandals of the 1990s (much milder, in fact, than the cases above) as symptomatic of widespread corruption and decadence in the Conservative Party, as indicative that the Conservatives were no longer fit to rule. Blair now says he regrets the strategy - likening it to a footballer's diving in the penalty area. I know of no regret from Alastair Campbell.
In combination with a general sense of loss of purpose in politics - the morning-after hangover from the heady excitement of the Thatcher era - the result was initially an enormous loss of faith in Conservative politicians. But Blair would be different, and New Labour would be "whiter than white" - or so he said. But, of course, Labour in government had its own occasional scandal - the Eccleston affair; Mandelson overseeing an investigation of Geoffrey Robinson's business interests whilst failing to mention that he owed Robinson hundreds of thousands of pounds; the Sarwar vote-rigging affair (acquitted, like Thorpe); doubts over the veracity of documents relating to the Iraq War; and many others. The idols had feet of clay, and the despising of Conservative politicians soon became just a despising of politicians in general.
And thus it was that, by the time the expenses scandal broke, the public was ready to believe even the most absurd smears about politicians. By any objective standard, for anyone who has even the slightest comprehension of the processes one must go through in order to be an MP and the nature of the free-given support one must have to stay there, it is simply ludicrous to suggest that most MPs are corrupt. And yet a fair chunk of the public - perhaps even the majority - now believes this.
The public now also believes many other ridiculous things. I am frequently reduced to yelling at my television when I hear members of the public and half-witted journalists asserting that "if anyone in any other job had behaved this way, they'd have been dismissed". That is utterly untrue, and it is only the ignorance of the chattering classes about what real jobs are like, what the real nature of the discretion given is to professional people of substance - that ignorance and the abusurdly low regard in which MPs are held - that allows such nonsense to go unchallenged.
And now we have the kangaroo court of Sir Thomas Legg, with its retrospective rough justice, and all anyone has to say is "He hasn't gone far enough!" How would the rest of you feel if your employer, or a company for which you had been carrying out contracts, came along to you and said "I know that the agreement was that we pay you £30,000 per year, but we've done some thinking and decided that over the past four years we'd really rather have only been paying you £25,000. If you could just send us a cheque for the £20,000 difference, we'll think about what we'd like to do to you next, after that."?
The MPs shouldn't pay. It's absolutely outrageous. It is a slur on their honours. If they pay, they will be saying that they did something wrong - that they were fraudsters and rogues and that no-one should ever have voted for them. If they pay, no-one will ever respect them again. I understand that their careers are at stake, that their Party leaders believe that they can appease the Mob. They can't - the more you appease them, the more they will believe that you were in the wrong. The only way you will get any respect is to stand up for yourselves and say "It is simply a vile slander to assert that we are all corrupt, and we shall stand for it no longer. Our Party leaders may end our careers as MPs, but it has reached the point where our honour is more important to us than our careers. We shall not simply sit here any longer just accepting these insults and not offering our own side of the story. It is precisely our leaders refusing to let us argue our side that has got us into this problem in the first place - always telling us that the public would not understand if our basic pay were raised; always insisting that we must take our remuneration in the form of allowances instead. We shall suffer in silence no longer! We are men of honour! We shall state our case!"