ceedee's posterous

It happened again, in Prime Minister’s Questions, today. It was bound to, really. Rebuked by the excellent Speaker of the House, John Bercow, for using insulting, unparliamentary language toward Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls, David Cameron fell back, like an involuntary reflex, on a mantra I can guarantee you will hear in at least 99% of Tory (and most LibDem) interviews on TV or radio, in the press or online.

Withdrawing his comment as instructed, Cameron said:

“I will replace it with ‘the man who left us this enormous deficit and this financial crisis’.”

And, of course, cue much Tory guffawing and catcalling of the type that only a £25k a year private education can teach.

This (mostly) Tory tactic has been in place since before they were elected, and has continued, unbroken and to the point of nausea, to the present. Listen to any interview, any ‘debate’ on Newsnight or Question Time (though the Tories like to avoid debate if they can!), and you’ll hear some variation of:

‘the mess we inherited’

‘we’re having to clean up Labour’s mess’

and so on. Clearly, in order to try to get off the hook of the never-ending run of screw-ups, the Tory PR gurus have drummed this into their politicians until they eat, sleep and breathe ‘inherited mess, inherited mess, inherited mess…’

The only tiny problem with all this is this: it’s absolutely untrue.

I’m going to try to show you why. It’s not really that difficult to see, but a lot of people don’t look beyond the mantras and the headlines. Anyone who knows me very well will know that I talk a lot about the ‘Big Lie’ concept. In a nutshell, this says that the bigger a lie is, and the more emphatically it’s spouted, the more people are likely to think, ‘Well, they wouldn’t dare say it, and especially not like that, if it weren’t true!’ But of course, it isn’t true – that’s the whole point. As someone said to me the other day, a plausible lie, shouted loud enough and often enough, usually gets to be taken for the truth.’

Since a picture paints a thousand words and all that, I’m going to use a couple of graphs to illustrate just how untrue this Tory Big Lie is, along with a little commentary. There may be ‘lies, damn lies and statistics’, but when it comes to nailing a Big Lie, a few objective numbers work wonders.

The ‘inherited mess’ lie has 2 main parts. The first says that the economic crisis was caused by Labour’s overspending. The second says that the resulting ’mountain’ of government debt led to such an economic disaster that Dave, George and co had to come galloping in on their big chargers to rescue us with their Magic Sword of Austerity and Competence to clean up the mess and fix our economy.

Let’s nail each part of the lie in turn. First, was Labour overspending, and was government debt drastically increasing under Labour? Well, the IMF (see www.scoop.it/t/deficit-myth) say not, and even George Osborne himself, under pressure from Treasury Select Committee members, has to admit it ain’t so (see www.youtube.com/watch?v=BK-h4aiuGIs). Now, on to those pictures:

Graph 1

This handy graph shows the changes in UK national debt since 1999 (2 years after Labour came to power). It shows something very interesting. In the years from 1999-2002, the UK’s national debt SHRANK to the lowest point it has been since well before Labour took over, right through to the present day. In fact, although not shown on this graph, the debt when Labour took power – the ‘inherited mess’ from the previous Tory government! – was higher than at any time during Labour’s tenure until the 2008 global crash.

From 2002, the graph shows a gradual, managed increase, over a period of 6 years, from about 25% to about 35%. This is the period when Labour – as they had promised to do – started to increase investment in great, beloved British institutions like the NHS, as well as in other public services. This gradual increase was no problem – it was controlled, deliberate, affordable. And it was still lower than it had been under the preceding Tory government.

Of course, in 2008, something drastic happened. There was a global financial crisis that hit virtually every country in the world – hard. National debt increased – but, as the IMF report linked above confirms, this increase was NOT due to excessive public spending! National income fell, and this inevitably pushed up the amount of borrowing. But here’s another thing – without being in the same kind of sudden meltdown, the misguided austerity policies of the coalition government have kept the debt growth-line steep! That’s because those policies are shrinking the national income far further and faster than spending could or should ever be cut. The way out of the current problems is to stimulate growth – and that’s not compatible with austerity budget-slashing.

Here’s another graph that shows very clearly how Labour did not leave a mess behind for the coalition to clear up:

Graph 2:

Now this one’s ever so slightly trickier to read, but bear with me. I want you to focus on the thickness of the very light blue block of the graph at the top. Don’t look at how high up it goes, as that’s caused by the thickness of the blocks underneath it.

This light-blue block represents UK government debt from 1987-mid 2011, as a percentage of GDP (basically, the amount the whole country earns). The striking thing about this light-blue block is that it hardly changes in thickness at all from 1987 all the way through to the big global financial crash in 2008 (in fact it gets a little thinner during most of Labour’s last period in government). The first 10 years of that period were under a Tory government. The next 11 were under Labour. If Labour were being profligate in their spending, so were the preceding Tory governments of Thatcher (Queen of Austerity!) and Major, and somewhat more so.

Of course, as already mentioned debt went up during and just after the 2008 crash, because national income went down. You can see the light-blue block thicken at this point. But Tory spending cuts, even without a global ‘meltdown’, are pushing debt up and making the debt-block fatter. Countries like the USA, who under Barack Obama took a positive approach to stimulate their economy, have experienced growth during the same period that we’ve increased debt and suffered recession. Unlike Labour, the Tories have no excuse for the increasing national debt under their (mis)management – so they invent one: ‘the mess we inherited‘, and repeat it for all they’re worth in the hope of fooling people into believing their Big Lie.

There are other things I could draw out of the 2nd graph, such as the fact that household debt and non-financial companies’ debt during the same period grew, but that far and away the big debt-increase problem, as the graph clearly shows, was irresponsible borrowing by financial companies (in other words, NOT the Labour government!), and that in spite of such companies clearly being the cause of our crisis, this Tory government is not curtailing the obscene bonuses the banks etc continue to pay themselves (I guess they need bonuses to console themselves for the destruction they caused!).

And there are other graphs worth looking at. But I think I’ve made my point and given you enough to chew on for now. So I’ll round off, for clarity’s sake, by reiterating the key point that all the graphs and words above are there to prove. Which is:

WHEN THIS GOVERNMENT AND ITS REPRESENTATIVES SAY ‘THE MESS WE INHERITED’ – AS THEY OH SO SURELY WILL – THEY ARE LYING: IT IS A ‘BIG (FAT!) LIE’!

They want to fool you, so they can continue wrecking our great country and siphoning our money into the pockets of the so-called elite who pay into Tory party coffers (and Tory ministers’ bank accounts, it appears).

Don’t let them.

So it’s war. We knew it would be. 

Obviously, you don’t ask the Tories how they can do this. They, streetfighters of long-standing, the current vogue for simpering head-boy bonhomie notwithstanding, are clear about their aims, interests and concomitant attacks.

Nor is this message addressed to Vince Cable or the wolf-eyed replicant Clegg. Whatever theatrics of choicelessness and discomfort the former occasionally insinuates, he, good Orange Booker, knows just what he’s up to. And the latter dispenses even with the mummery.

But you - you’re one of those Liberal Democrats who takes seriously a commitment to some kind of progressive agenda. You’re another thing. One doesn’t have to share all your politics to believe you sincere. So it has to be asked of you: WTF?

We know that the cuts are massively regressive. We know this is a hecatomb of welfare. We know the arts are being savaged in a philistine rampage. We know that all the gorge-raising horseshit about being All In It Together™ is a meaningless tic. So you, like other left-wing LibDems (LWLDs), know - know - that you’re propping up an economic onslaught by those who think it their birthright to rule in wealth against the mass of working people.

When it’s obvious that there are other ways of saving money that don’t punish the poor, are you happy with what you’re doing?

When the entire agenda about the necessity of the cuts is not only an invention, but a not-very-convincing one, is it mere economic illiteracy that keeps you quiescent? 

When it’s not just radical, but eminently mainstream, even neoliberal economists who are stressing that if your aim is to reestablish the British economy this is economic gibberish, are you comfortable? 

Sure, some Tories are fucking idiots - but a lot aren’t. They know that these measures, far from salvaging it, might very well break the economy. And that is, for them, a risk worth taking, because either way, something is gained: a transfer of power, the finishing of the Thatcherite revolution, a recomposition of class strength. And if the cost of that is mass immiseration, and even the stagnation of the national economy, so be it. 

So the question for you is, just how comfortable are you being complicit with baying class thuggery? 

What are you getting out of this? How many pieces of silver? It profiteth a person nothing if they exchange their immortal soul for the world, but for - what? Minister of State for Children and Families? The same ones you’re taking money from? 

And even if you follow the Auton Lothario of Sheffield Hallam in thinking that morals are for mortals, that concern at the antidemocratic imposition of an agenda the vast majority of those who voted for you would be appalled at is quaint, there’s also the question of strategy. If kneecapping the welfare state does not, in fact, prod the sclerotic economy into anything approaching life (and why should it?), then the LibDems - you - are finished. You face annihilation. 

Even cynically, is it worth it? To be treated, for two terms, minimum, as the scum of British politics? The most craven power-licking integrity-less liars of Parliament? Not even Tories but Tory-enablers? Do you honestly think that the majority of the electorate who supported you (in deeply misguided protest) would be willing to give you their vote again? Unless it was to shit on it, put it in a paper bag, set fire to it and post it through your door? 

Really? 

Would you not feel better being able to sleep at night? Where’s your line in the sand? 

Walk. 

Molly Scott Cato (the Green Party's economics speaker) wants "A Brief Word, Mr Cameron" about government debt:

The class war has been launched, and not by the Labour Party. Cameron's speech today sets the scene for a principled stand in favour of the interests of his owners rather than earners. This should be greeted with no surprise - why else was he elected in the bungled events of last month? Certainly not on the basis of his charisma or incisive intelligence. This speech will be followed up by attacks in the media on the plans for strike actionsby working people defending their living standards before these have even be discussed much less voted through.

The political implication is that the public sector has enjoyed massive investment during the Labour years and that it will now pay the price while the private sector and the interests of capital see their just returns. The problem is that this is an outrageous untruth. My argument rests on the two pictures that are included with this post. Between them they demonstrate how the need for the shocking levels of public borrowing arose and where that money was spent.

The first graph demonstrates perfectly how we got into this mess by tracing public-sector borrowing from February 2007 to December 2008. It shows the steep rise that followed the banking crisis when our money was extracted in various ways to prevent the collapse of global finance. We didn't cause this, we didn't benefit from it, and yet the graph shows clearly that we paid for it.

The second graph shows the same variable - public sector net borrowing - between February 2009 and April 2010. If you compare the graphs you can see that we are on a totally different axis here. Annual borrowing of £35bn. in Feburary 2007 had, by April 2010, been massively increased to £160bn. This is not the result of pointless spending on government bureaucracy, or the overpayment of nurses and teachers, its precise location in time makes clear its origin in the bank bailout.

Perhaps as some sort of weak demonstration of honesty to justify his claim to have introduced a new type of politics Cameron does, in a subtle way, identify where the money went:

'The global financial markets are no longer focussing simply on the financial position of the banks. They want to know that the governments that have supported the banks over the last eighteen months are taking the actions to bring their own finances under control.'

This implicit admission of the massive transfer of value from public to private, from us to them, and the corresponding transfer of their debts to our public balance-sheet is the real political issue here. It is vital that working people defend their interests, and most importantly do not follow the divide-and-rule strategy that the attacks on public-sector pay suggest will accompany the inevitable summer of discontent.

The mess in Britain's finances has three main causes. The first is that the crisis of 2007 arrived when the budget was in relatively poor shape. Tax receipts during the bubble years were weaker than the Treasury expected, which meant that even with the economy booming the deficit stood at close to £40bn.

The second factor was the depth and duration of the recession. Deficits tend to rise during downturns because tax receipts fall and spending on unemployment and other welfare payments rise. In Britain's case, the economy contracted by more than 6% over six successive quarters from early 2008 to late 2009. By the time growth resumed national output was 10% lower than it would have been had the economy continued to expand at its normal rate of around 2.5% a year. That punched a hole in the public finances.

Finally, the VAT holiday and help for the unemployed, designed to mitigate the effects of the recession, cost around £25bn, or around 1.5% of GDP, much smaller in relation to the size of the UK economy than the packages used to support growth in the United States or China.

Part of the deficit is deemed to be cyclical – it will disappear once the economy grows strongly. The other part, the £70bn structural element, is what the government wants to eliminate during the current parliament.

The bank bailouts have little impact: the Treasury does not count money used to buy bank shares because it assumes it will get it back.

The Simpson-Bowles Commission, just established by the president, will no doubt deliver an attack on Social Security and Medicare dressed up in the sanctimonious rhetoric of deficit reduction. (Back in his salad days, former Senator Alan Simpson was a regular schemer to cut Social Security.) The Obama spending freeze is another symbolic sacrifice to the deficit gods. Most observers believe neither will amount to much, and one can hope that they are right. But what would be the economic consequences if they did? The answer is that a big deficit-reduction program would destroy the economy, or what remains of it, two years into the Great Crisis.

For this reason, the deficit phobia of Wall Street, the press, some economists and practically all politicians is one of the deepest dangers that we face. It's not just the old and the sick who are threatened; we all are. To cut current deficits without first rebuilding the economic engine of the private credit system is a sure path to stagnation, to a double-dip recession--even to a second Great Depression. To focus obsessively on cutting future deficits is also a path that will obstruct, not assist, what we need to do to re-establish strong growth and high employment.

To put things crudely, there are two ways to get the increase in total spending that we call "economic growth." One way is for government to spend. The other is for banks to lend. Leaving aside short-term adjustments like increased net exports or financial innovation, that's basically all there is. Governments and banks are the two entities with the power to create something from nothing. If total spending power is to grow, one or the other of these two great financial motors--public deficits or private loans--has to be in action.

For ordinary people, public budget deficits, despite their bad reputation, are much better than private loans. Deficits put money in private pockets. Private households get more cash. They own that cash free and clear, and they can spend it as they like. If they wish, they can also convert it into interest-earning government bonds or they can repay their debts. This is called an increase in "net financial wealth." Ordinary people benefit, but there is nothing in it for banks.

And this, in the simplest terms, explains the deficit phobia of Wall Street, the corporate media and the right-wing economists. Bankers don't like budget deficits because they compete with bank loans as a source of growth. When a bank makes a loan, cash balances in private hands also go up. But now the cash is not owned free and clear. There is a contractual obligation to pay interest and to repay principal. If the enterprise defaults, there may be an asset left over--a house or factory or company--that will then become the property of the bank. It's easy to see why bankers love private credit but hate public deficits.

All of this should be painfully obvious, but it is deeply obscure. It is obscure because legions of Wall Streeters--led notably in our time by Peter Peterson and his front man, former comptroller general David Walker, and including the Robert Rubin wing of the Democratic Party and numerous "bipartisan" enterprises like the Concord Coalition and the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget--have labored mightily to confuse the issues. These spirits never uttered a single word of warning about the financial crisis, which originated on Wall Street under the noses of their bag men. But they constantly warn, quite falsely, that the government is a "super subprime" "Ponzi scheme," which it is not.

We also hear, from the same people, about the impending "bankruptcy" of Social Security, Medicare--even the United States itself. Or of the burden that public debts will "impose on our grandchildren." Or about "unfunded liabilities" supposedly facing us all. All of this forms part of one of the great misinformation campaigns of all time.

The misinformation is rooted in what many consider to be plain common sense. It may seem like homely wisdom, especially, to say that "just like the family, the government can't live beyond its means." But it's not. In these matters the public and private sectors differ on a very basic point. Your family needs income in order to pay its debts. Your government does not.

Private borrowers can and do default. They go bankrupt (a protection civilized societies afford them instead of debtors' prisons). Or if they have a mortgage, in most states they can simply walk away from their house if they can no longer continue to make payments on it.

With government, the risk of nonpayment does not exist. Government spends money (and pays interest) simply by typing numbers into a computer. Unlike private debtors, government does not need to have cash on hand. As the inspired amateur economist Warren Mosler likes to say, the person who writes Social Security checks at the Treasury does not have the phone number of the tax collector at the IRS. If you choose to pay taxes in cash, the government will give you a receipt--and shred the bills. Since it is the source of money, government can't run out.

It's true that government can spend imprudently. Too much spending, net of taxes, may lead to inflation, often via currency depreciation--though with the world in recession, that's not an immediate risk. Wasteful spending--on unnecessary military adventures, say--burns real resources. But no government can ever be forced to default on debts in a currency it controls. Public defaults happen only when governments don't control the currency in which they owe debts--as Argentina owed dollars or as Greece now (it hasn't defaulted yet) owes euros. But for true sovereigns, bankruptcy is an irrelevant concept. When Obama says, even offhand, that the United States is "out of money," he's talking nonsense--dangerous nonsense. One wonders if he believes it.

Nor is public debt a burden on future generations. It does not have to be repaid, and in practice it will never be repaid. Personal debts are generally settled during the lifetime of the debtor or at death, because one person cannot easily encumber another. But public debt does not ever have to be repaid. Governments do not die--except in war or revolution, and when that happens, their debts are generally moot anyway.

So the public debt simply increases from one year to the next. In the entire history of the United States it has done so, with budget deficits and increased public debt on all but about six very short occasions--with each surplus followed by a recession. Far from being a burden, these debts are the foundation of economic growth. Bonds owed by the government yield net income to the private sector, unlike all purely private debts, which merely transfer income from one part of the private sector to another.

Nor is that interest a solvency threat. A recent projection from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, based on Congressional Budget Office assumptions, has public-debt interest payments rising to 15 percent of GDP by 2050, with total debt to GDP at 300 percent. But that can't happen. If the interest were paid to people who then spent it on goods and services and job creation, it would be just like other public spending. Interest payments so enormous would affect the economy much like the mobilization for World War II. Long before you even got close to those scary ratios, you'd get full employment and rising inflation--pushing up GDP and, in turn, stabilizing the debt-to-GDP ratio. Or the Federal Reserve would stabilize the interest payouts, simply by keeping short-term interest rates (which it controls) very low.

What about indebtedness to foreigners? True, foreigners do us a favor by buying our bonds. To acquire them, China must export goods to us, not offset by equivalent imports. That is a cost to China. It's a cost Beijing is prepared to pay, for its own reasons: export industries promote learning, technology transfer and product quality improvement, and they provide jobs to migrants from the countryside. But that's China's business.

For China, the bonds themselves are a sterile hoard. There is almost nothing that Beijing can do with them. China already imports all the commodities and machinery and aircraft it can use--if it wanted more, it would buy them now. So unless China changes its export policy, its stock of T bonds will just go on growing. And we will pay interest on it, not with real effort but by typing numbers into computers. There is no burden associated with this, not now and not later. (If the Chinese hoard the interest, they also don't help much with job creation here. So the fact that we're buying a lot of goods from China simply means we have to be more imaginative, and bolder, if we want to create all the jobs we need.) Finally, could China dump its dollars? In principle it could, substituting Greek bonds for American and overpriced euros for cheap dollars. On brief reflection, no Beijing bureaucrat is likely to think this a smart move.

What is true of government as a whole is also true of particular programs. Social Security and Medicare are government programs; they cannot go bankrupt, and they cannot fail to meet their obligations unless Congress decides--say on the recommendation of the Simpson-Bowles Commission--to cut the benefits they provide. The exercise of linking future benefits and projected payroll tax revenues is an accounting farce, done for political reasons. That farce was started by FDR as a way of protecting Social Security from cuts. But it has become a way of creating needless anxiety about these programs and of precluding sensible reforms, like expanding Medicare to those 55 and older, or even to the whole population.

Social Security and Medicare are transfer programs. What they do, mainly, is move resources around within our society at a given time. The principal transfer is not from the young to the old, since even without Social Security the old would still be around and someone would have to support them. Rather, Social Security pools resources, so that the work of the young collectively supports the senior population. The effective transfer is from parents who have children who would otherwise support them (a fairly rare thing), to seniors who don't. And it is from workers who do not have parents to support, to workers who would otherwise have to support their parents. In both cases this burden sharing is fair, progressive and sustainable. There is a healthcare cost problem, as everyone knows, but that's not a Medicare problem. It should not be solved by cutting back on healthcare for the old. Social Security and Medicare also replace private insurance with cheap and efficient public administration. This is another reason these programs are the hated targets, decade after decade, of the worst predators on Wall Street.

Public deficits and private lending are reciprocal. Increased private lending generates new tax revenue and smaller deficits; that's what happened in the 1990s. A credit collapse kills the tax base and generates more spending; that's what's happening now, and our big deficits are the accounting counterpart of the massive decline, last year, in private bank loans. The only choice is what kind of deficit to run--useful deficits that rebuild the country, as in the New Deal, or useless ones, with millions kept unnecessarily on unemployment insurance when they could instead be given jobs.

If we could revive private lending, should we do it? Well, yes, up to a point there is good reason to have a robust private lending sector. Government is by nature centralized and policy driven. It works by law and regulation. Decentralized and competitive private banks have much more flexibility. A good banking system, run by capable people with good business judgment who know their clients, is good for the economy. The fact that you have to pay interest on a loan is also an important motivator of investment over consumption.

But right now, we don't have functional big banks. We have a cartel run by an incompetent plutocracy, with its long fingers deep in the pockets of the state. For functional credit to return, we'll have to reduce the unpayable private debts now outstanding, to restore private incomes (meaning: create jobs) and collateral (meaning: home values), and we'll have to restructure the big banks. We need to break them up, shrink the financial sector overall, expose and prosecute frauds, and create incentives for profitable lending in energy conservation, infrastructure and other sectors. Or we could create a new parallel banking system, as was done in the New Deal with the Reconstruction Finance Corporation and its spinoffs, including the Home Owners' Loan Corporation and later Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Either way, until we have effective financial reform, public budget deficits are the only way toward economic growth. You don't have to like budget deficits to realize that we must have them, on whatever scale necessary to restore growth and jobs. And we will need them not just now but for a long while, until we've shaped a strategic program for investment, energy and the environment, financed in part by a reformed, restored and disciplined financial sector.

It's possible, of course, that all the deficit hysteria is intended to divert attention from the dysfunctions of private banking, and so to help thwart calls for financial reform. Is that giving them too much credit? Maybe. Maybe not.

 

Green goddess: after her victory on immigration rights for Gurkha veterans, Joanna Lumley has now thrown her support behind the Greens in the Euro elections

Joanna Lumley is urging voters to shun mainstream politicians and instead back the Greens in next week's Euro elections.

Fresh from her triumph in securing immigration rights for Gurkha veterans, the actress has thrown her support behind the party for the 4 June poll. Party insiders believe Lumley's popularity will provide a huge boost to their campaign for the European Parliament.

Lumley, who so far has not shown interest in being a politician herself, said the public should make a “positive vote” for the party and has given her personal backing to Green Party leader and South-East MEP Caroline Lucas.

The actress and campaigner said: “Caroline Lucas is a tireless campaigner in the European Parliament, staunchly defending human rights and strongly promoting greater protection for animals.”

Both women have campaigned against human rights abuses in Burma and Lumley said the Green Party was “the obvious choice for real change”. “I urge you to cast a positive vote for a better future by voting Green in the European elections,” the actress said. Ms Lucas said: “I feel honoured to have her support.”

In Has our electoral system contributed to the MPs expenses scandal?, 'Mark Reckons' attempts to trace links between safe seats and dodgy expense claims.

After this, it got me thinking even more. I decided to do a little bit more analysis on this. I divided the data set up into 4 sections. The top 25% of safe seats, the second 25%, the third 25% and the bottom 25%. Because 647 does not divide perfectly into 4 I have had to make them very slightly different sizes. I then totalled up the number of implicated MPs in each quartile. I have taken a snapshot of the result from Excel and put it here:

Now again, I need to caveat that this is not scientific etc. etc. However, using this methodology again there is a clear increase in the likelihood of an MP being implicated in the expenses scandal the safer their seat. It is in fact a fairly steady progression until it leaps up in the top quartile. Using this data, an MP is more than 3 times more likely to have been implicated in this scandal if their seat is in the top quartile as compared with the bottom quartile. They are almost twice as likely when comparing the top quartile with the second quartile.

I had suspected there might be a correlation but I had not expected it to be this stark.

If I am right about this then there are surely very serious questions to be asked about our electoral system. Advocates of First Past the Post always claim as one of their main arguments that the constituency link needs to be maintained (even though STV, a much more proportional system with multi-member constituencies that the Electoral Reform Society and Make Votes Count advocate also has a constituency link). However looking at the above analysis it strikes me that FPTP does not serve its constituents well at all when it comes to this scandal.

See also Himmelgarten Cafe's We need fair votes to restore faith in our system.

Almost two thirds of voters want a general election to be held as soon as possible amid mounting public anger at MPs' expense claims.

A poll by ComRes for BBC Two's Daily Politics programme found that 65 per cent of those surveyed felt there should be an election while 33 per cent disagreed.

Politicians who have been "named and shamed" in the expenses revelations should be forced to quit Parliament, according to 64 per cent of those questioned.

The poll also suggests that fears the controversy over MPs' expenses will effect voter turn out at the next election are unfounded.

Although 28 per cent said they were less likely to vote in next month's local and European elections following the revelations, 25 per cent said it had made them more likely to cast their ballot.

Another 47 per cent said the scandal had not affected their decision.

ComRes spoke to 1,011 voters between May 13 and 14.