RULES is rules, as the slightly ungrammatical but perennially popular saying puts it. Those who act within the letter of them, as they stand at any given time, get narked if the rulemakers subsequently enact changes and then bust people retrospectively for infringing the revised regulations.
It is on these grounds that a number of British parliamentarians are mounting a determined rearguard action against the ruling from Sir Thomas Legg that they must repay some of their more questionable expenses claims from years past.
What monstrous injustice, the MPs cry! Those gardening bills and cleaning costs were legit when the dockets were signed off. Some insist they will take the matter to court.
From a legal point of view, they may even have a case. But the electorate will be unsympathetic; as Macaulay famously remarked in 1830: “We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality.”
Disgruntled Labour MPs might pause to reflect on the recent decision to backdate rates bills for port operators to 2005, a move that could cost the industry £200m and put many firms and thousands of jobs at risk.
However, ports do not typically claim for moat maintenance or duck houses on the public purse, nor declare the spare bedroom of the chairman’s sister to be their main place of business.
If retrospection is wrong in principle for the House of Commons, it is just as wrong in principle for the private sector.
