Ellen Barnes

Please Mr Cameron, sack Mr Duncan or persuade him to resign before a very good friend completely loses the plot and decamps to a longhouse in the Borneo rain forest. 

After months of  agonising and rationalising, he convinced himself that despite being a lifelong Labour voter, this time round he'd force himself to put a cross against the 'other man or woman's' name.  He wasn't yet ready to admit - even to himself - he would actually vote Conservative.  But fed up with being nannied, watched, inhibited and restricted by what he saw as an overwhelmingly bossy, self seeking and pompous government, he decided enough was enough.

Then up popped Alan Duncan, first of all on Have I Got News for You, where, being no match for the wits of Merton and Hislop, he made a fool of himself by laughing and posturing at their disingenous references to his good fortune in being able to take more or less whatever he fancied from the public purse.

My friend, let's call him Jim, decided there was really nothing to choose between the parties as far as rooking the electorate went, so continued to assert he would 'probably' vote Tory next time around.

However, yesterday's scene of unashamed greed was a step too far for poor Jim.  Alan Duncan, one of those charged by David Cameron to lead the Tories' response to the expenses scandal, evidently shows no remorse and is disdainful of public feeling.  As shadow leader of the House, presumable he would be offered a senior post in any Tory cabinet.

Poor Jim.  If it were not that he firmly believes there are so few democracies around that if you live in one you have a duty to vote, he'd he'd stay firmly at home on polling day.  Leaving the country for the duration might salve his conscience, but then he'd have only himself to blame if he found the next incumbents as unacceptable as the present lot.

Ellen Barnes

There are not many handouts coming the way of the middle classes - whomever they might be.  So when at sixty I applied for and got a free bus pass I treated it like gold.  Something for nothing at last. 

But not for long, I fear.  The news came yesterday that the association of local authorities is lobbying to have them withdrawn from 'the middle class elderly who have cars and can afford to pay their fares'.

I am hoping the Local Government Association finds itself in difficulty defining 'middle class' and 'elderly' to begin with, and even if they manage that, how will they know which of us has a car or can afford to pay our fares?

The association's argument should not be with pollution-conscious pensioners who queue at bus stops all over the country, but with the government that basked in the glory of bringing in such a popular scheme and then left the bill for paying for it to be picked up by local authorities.

Ellen Barnes

I was reading a book last week about a Jewish immigrant to London at the turn of the 20th century whose family was dirt poor and was therefore obliged  to share a three-bedroom terraced house in the east end with a second large and poor family.

A child of that family grew up to be the renowned poet, Isaac Rosenberg, who was no mean painter either. A biography of Rosenberg, published last year, tells us how the young Isaac was plucked out of poverty and given the chance to learn about writing and painting by kindly adults who were loosely connected to the family through his mother and older sister.

An art student took the boy to exhibitions and to cafes where Isaac, just a child, listened enthralled to chatter about poets and painters. Isaac's grown up sister entrusted her little brother to her friends who, seeing the child had potential and was interested in writing, gave him the help and guidance he craved.

Today that could not possibly happen. The kindly adults would be regarded with suspicion by social workers, teachers and possibly even, because of our rapidly diminishing faith in the goodness of people, by parents.

Thirty years ago I lived in a street where mothers took it in turns to take and fetch a gaggle of children to and from school. Today, each of us would have to be police checked, we would need to wear a yellow flack-jacket and we would have to designate ourselves a 'walking bus'.

The government now requires the birth of every baby to be recorded on a national data base, along with details of their parents, health visitor, doctor and details of the  birth. This record will follow them through life with new data added year by year. the accuracy of the data base depends on meticulous inputting by a number of agencies and can only be checked by parents following a written request.

All this, ostensibly to prevent another Baby Peter. It doesn't seem to occur to the rulemakers that little Peter was known to any number of social workers and medics and was not the victim of random abuse from his parents' friends.

Today we are all viewed with suspicion and some of us begin to feel guilty. A friend who writes childrens' books, spends time perusing the work of his fellow writers in the children's section of book shops. He says he lookes neither left nor right and especially not down. How sad is that?

And how sad that we may be missing out on future pleasure to be gained from the poetry and painting of a budding young artist and writer because we are afraid to show a kindly interest in nurturing their talent.

Ellen Barnes

Has Nadine Dorries no shame?  Has she not been around long enough to realize that shooting the messenger does not make the problem go away?

On Friday’s Today programme, Ms Dorries launched an attack on the Daily Telegraph, accusing the paper of conducting a witchhunt,  for telling the rest of us how she and her fellow MPs use our money.

Ms Dorries asserts that members of the media knew how the expenses system was abused and are therefore as culpable as the perpetrators.

Does Ms Dorries consider members of the media who report on and acknowledge the existence of child abuse as therefore as culpable as the abusers?

The fact is that up to now journalists have not had the evidence to back up in print any unsubstantiated rumours circulating about financial abuse.

Unlike Ms Dorries’ blog which makes unsubstantiated allegations that no self respecting journalist would ever put forward in print, the Telegraph is giving tax payers verifiable information that has shocked and amazed us.

She may claim, as she did on the Today programme, that MPs are walking about Wesminster in a state of shock, awaiting the next revelation with undisguised terror.  Well, they would be wouldn’t they.  They’ve been found out.

Many have spent years thinking they were cocooned in their own secret world, protected from prying eyes by their own rules and regulations.  It took a journalist to call for clarity, citing the Freedom of Information Act.

Ms Dorries’ blog gives a flavor of the writer :

“What they (The Daily Telegraph) are doing by taking out a few MPs a day, from all parties,  not allowing them to defend their position, not printing what they say, shouting over them and doing this day after day after day amounts to a form of torture which any group of human beings would find difficult to bear.

"Treating a group of people in this almost sadistic way is as appalling and has to stop.”

Put more succinctly, MPs can behave appallingly and the Telegraph is evil to challenge them. She does not substantiate her allegations about journalists shouting over MPs or not allowing them to defend their position.

This, even though I have read with incredulity and fury the attempts at self justification which the Telegraph has printed daily after talking to many MPs.

On Radio 4, Ms Dorries speculated about the salary of the journalist interviewing her, saying that it was bound to be more than the £64,766 annual salary of a back bencher and implying this would be unjust.

I’m sorry Ms Dorries feels she is not paid at a level commensurate with her experience, qualifications and position.

Possibly the voters of Mid-Bedfordshire will right that situation at the next general election.

Ellen Barnes

It wouldn't hurt the people charged with restoring confidence in our political class to cast a furtive eye across the Atlantic to see how things are done in Washington, where members of Congress get no housing allowance at all and are expected to make all their own and their families' living arrangements.

Our growing ethos of secrecy and of non-accountability, not just in politics but in the financial world as well, where top executives who lead banks to ruin are rewarded with huge pension plans, is extremely dangerous.

Populations that feel disenfranchised and ignored by the establishment tend to revolt, or more likely in our case, turn to minority and sometimes repulsive parties that appear to offer a more accessible alternative.

Undoubtedly, some members of parliament need somewhere to stay in London, but not all of them. Trains from the town where I live, 45 miles north of London, are packed with commuters, both in the early morning and late evening. More than half the working population of my town commutes into London for work.