On Wednesday, I asked if police could raid an Opposition front bencher's office, what hope is there for the rest of us?
Very little, it seems - as illustrated by this alarming statistic from Fraser Nelson's latest piece in the Spectator:
...partly thanks to MPs’ failure to check the growth of the state, government agencies now have 266 powers to draw upon to enter people’s homes (versus ten in the 1950s and 70 in the 1990s).
Fraser is absolutely right that a large part of the problem is that MPs increasingly do not live by the same rules as the general public. They have their own more secure department at HMRC, if they are a married couple then their allowances are paid in full unlike pensioner couples who get their money reduced, they get special attention from the emergency services and their income is not subject to the same taxation rules. We hear a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth about whether Parliament is representative in terms of race, gender and age, but no matter what it's denizens look like it will never be representative until they live by the same rules.