Main focus of Wednesday, May 20, 2009

British Commons Speaker resigns

Michael Martin, the Speaker of the British House of Commons, announced his resignation on Tuesday in the wake of the British parliamentary expenses scandal. The move came in response to accusations that he had not done enough to shed light on the affair. Martin is the first Commons Speaker forced to leave office in over 300 years.

El País - Spain

The Spanish daily El País considers that the announced resignation of the British House of Commons Speaker in the wake of the parliamentary expenses scandal will sorely damage the reputation of the entire institution: "It is improbable that the scandal over the expenses of British MPs at taxpayers' cost will have a decisive negative effect on voting patterns. What is sure, however, is that the reputation of Parliament, which is held up as a model internationally and which is above suspicion domestically, has suffered a severe blow. Labour MP Michael Martin's inept handling of the affair and his attempts to hush up the wrongdoings make his unusual resignation - the likes of which hasn't been seen in three hundred years - imperative. Nevertheless it will not put an end to this affair." (20/05/2009)

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Corriere del Ticino - Switzerland

"So much for it all being much ado about nothing," the liberal daily Corriere del Ticino writes commenting on the resignation of the parliamentary Speaker in allusion to Shakespeare: "The game is up. Day after day of accusations in the daily newspapers, particularly the Daily Telegraph, have stoked a boundless fury among the English … at a political, profit-craving caste that is not up to its tasks. As often happens in such cases a scapegoat was required, and the first who happened to be on hand was Speaker Michael Martin, who must now suffer the consequences. … British citizens are less interested in internal parliamentary details. They want to get at the core: Martin, who after the Queen and the prime minister holds the third-most important office in the UK, is not a mediator for the monarch, as speakers once were, but primarily a mediator between the parliament and the people. He is the embodiment of an institutional bond of trust, and he was untrue to his task." (20/05/2009)

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La Repubblica - Italy

The left-liberal daily La Repubblica sees the Speaker of the House of Commons as the scapegoat in the expenses scandal: "With his heavy Scottish accent and the loose black gown which makes him look like a judge or a prelate, Michael Martin … was a symbol of British democracy. He is the Speaker of Westminster, which is considered the mother of all parliaments. … Until yesterday Martin had rejected the calls for his resignation from all sides of Parliament and hoped that a rapid reform of the expenses system would calm the fury of Parliament, the media and the public. He thought it would be enough to ask the country for forgiveness. But this was not to be. The only one who could have saved him was a fellow Labour politician, Gordon Brown. But without hesitation the prime minister made him the scapegoat because he realised that the people needed to see someone burn at the stake. He preferred to watch Martin burn than step onto the scaffold himself." (20/05/2009)

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De Standaard - Belgium

The parliamentary expenses scandal involving British MPs comes down to the age-old interplay between power and money, writes the daily De Standaard: "If Michael Martin has announced his resignation it's not because any law has been violated, but because such practices no longer appear proper in a time of crisis marked both by growing democratisation and an increasing distance between citizens and their representatives. A political class must administer itself, and British politicians have clearly established very generous benchmarks for doing so. The size of their pay packet allows one to surmise that they were certainly not suffering from an inferiority complex when they made their exhorbitant expense claims. It is simply a quirk of human nature that anyone in a position to distribute money will not hesitate before pocketing some himself. And the fewer people there are looking on, the greater freedom they have, for example in determining the size of their own incomes. ... The fact of the matter is simply that politicians are only human. That, and not their commitment to politics, is why they sometimes derail so catastrophically." (20/05/2009)

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The Guardian - United Kingdom

After the announced resignation of Commons Speaker Michael Martin, the left-liberal daily The Guardian is starting an online campaign for constitutional reform: "The common thread that must run through any new constitution for Britain has to be the shift from parliamentary to popular sovereignty. Once you understand that in a true democracy the people are sovereign, the next moves become obvious. Of course the second chamber has to be elected: a sovereign people chooses who writes the laws that govern them. Of course there should be full transparency regarding MPs and their expenses: imagine employees refusing to show their boss how much of his money they had spent. Yet this is how our employees - the MPs - have behaved. ... Should there be a written constitution? Naturally. If you own a house, you have a copy of the deeds; if you buy a car, you get an owner's manual explaining how it works. And we are the owners." (20/05/2009)

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