I said I'd write about it, so I will. I generally don't like this perception (and argument) that is utilised by all spectrums of political blogs, the idea that because democracy costs money we should keep a reign on it. Recess Monkey is one of the latest to do this, predictably in response to his parties quite shameful voting over expenses.

I was bemused to see the John Lewis list debate still chuntering on today.. yawn. But aren’t there gross wastes of public money going on that don’t even give someone’s spouse and kids the lasting benefit of a lovely new sofa?

I won't bite by pointing out ID cards...oh, wait...

According to TheyWorkforYou this serial department-botherer asked a gigantic 701 PQs in the last year (not just on abortion) which they say is ‘well above average amongst MPs’. Based on the £138 average, that’s incurred a whopping £96,738 in answering them.

So what? Perhaps there is a case for more scrutiny over uses of answers to parliamentary questions (PQs) to ensure that they are "used", but even then it ignores that an MP should be perfectly within their rights (as every person should be) to find out information that isn't classified to further their own stance or understanding of a subject. You cannot put a price on this, however Mr Hilton tries.

His abortion questions invariably relate to publicly-available info which his researcher could call up in seconds, since they’re presumably more intimate than they’d ever want to be with the latest abortion stats.

So, in reality, the staff probably didn't spend all that long and therefore much money at all in getting these answers for him since they were so quick and easy to access!

I accept fully that we can't just let the staff of MPs to get bogged down with this sort of thing until they are inefficient for their own constituencies purposes, but if we were ever to get to that stage I would say the first thing we would need to ask is how we can ensure that proper representation continues to take place and where the funding needs to come from. Again, not wanting to get on to ID cards...