Humiliation good for the soul

What planet is the old Archbishop of Canterbury from?

Dr Rowan Williams reckons the "systematic humiliation" of MPs is in danger of undermining our faith in democracy - as if MPs have not been doing a good enough job on their own.

According to the good doctor many of us "will now be wondering whether the point has not been adequately made" and further revelations could have a damaging effect - one might add that that damage would extend particularly to any MPs yet to be revealed as being bent as a nine bob note.

Does he, or anyone else for that matter, believe any of this would have come out if MPs had been allowed to publish their own expenses? Many MPs have battled for years to keep expenses, and anything else to do with MPs, out of the Freedom of Information act and when that failed up came the smokescreen of heavy censorship of what was revealed for "security reasons".

On the basis that if an MP is caught in bed with his mistress or a lady, or even ladies, of the night that the Press are outside his main and second homes before he has managed to get his trousers back on you can assume the average terrorist is not relying on a personal invite to know where MPs live.

But MPs are relying on the state secrecy to hide the fact they are switching second homes every time they fancy a new telly, kitchen, bed or duck house or whatever.

Democracy has already been damaged by a Government which has passed laws allowing 800 different bodies to enter your home without permission, which would keep terror suspects in jail without charge for 90 days or even longer if it could and allows anti-terror legislation to be used against people reading out the names of the war dead at the Cenotaph or even to allow councils to snoop on its citizens for the most trivial reasons.

It is a Government planning to store and potentially listen or read every phone call, text message and e-mail you make or send and is still obsessed with a ridiculously expensive ID card scheme whose sole purpose seems to be to make IT companies- usually with a collection of ex-ministers on the payroll - huge amounts of money while providing massive amounts of personal data on every citizen to the state. Its effectiveness in combating terrorism will be about the same as installing an extra gate at immigration alongside those for EU and Non-EU marked Terrorists this way please.

So Dr Williams, democracy had already taken a fair old battering before we found out how deep many MPs' snouts were in the trough and before the mess can be cleaned up we need to know the full extent of the damage.

Dr Williams has form when it comes to misjudging the mood of the people as the leader of the flock though. Just over a year ago he was advocating the adoption of parts of Sharia, or Islamic law in Britain.

When it was realised by the Lambeth Palace spin doctors that a bollock the size of a small planet had been dropped then there was a week of tap dancing and claims of misquotes to minimise the damage.

Just a thought - go to churches at Christmas Eve and Christmas Day and they are packed which tends to indicate that many people still regard themselves as Christians.

Perhaps Dr Williams might be better employed in working out why that enthusiasm and attendance does not extend to the rest of the year. People seem to believe the message just not the messenger.