To be fair, paying for things like your accommodation in London and tour surgery out of expenses isn’t a scam; that’s the idea of an expenses account. Nobody ever expected MPs to pay for that out of their wages, except maybe a few idiots who assume that since some expenses claims were fraudulent, they all were.
The bigger problem with ‘stealth wages’ for MPs is, to me, that it helps reinforce the cliquey nature of politics: for the ‘in crowd’ of Westminster, having high wages but not advertising them lets them enjoy the money without too many other people trying to join in.
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