As The Daily Telegraph continues its exclusive coverage of the UK’s MP expense scandal, few in the British capital would suggest that the scandal — and its limitless number of embarrassing revelations about MP expense claims — is anywhere near an end.

While some stories have been recycled ad nauseam, in part to highlight the ludicrous nature of some MP expense claims, the scandal’s focus on the accounting of daily lives and expenditures promises to continue producing an endless supply of dirty laundry.

And while the financing of MPs everyday expenses has enraged the British public, anger over the recession has served to displace personal tabloid reporting in favour of a much more nuanced and multi-mediated reporting of expenses claimed for MPs second homes.

Like parts of the United States, the UK housing market has all but collapsed. Some real estate watchers have estimated that residential properties in London have shed nearly one third of their value since 2008. 

There’s no wonder Gordon Brown continues to blame the global banking industry as the main culprit for the UK’s economic downturn. Apart from subsidizing their drinking, fashion sense and expensive tastes in furniture, a number of British MPs have turned Westminster’s expenses system into a real estate cash cow — an opportunity to use public monies to renovate and then flip their second homes in relatively short order. Note to PM: whatever you do, don’t blame this recession on real estate speculation!

This made-in-Britain real estate aspect of the global recession has been “pre-mediated” (to borrow from multi-media theorist Richard Grusin) for many years in the UK. One of Britain’s most successful televisual exports over the last decade has been the home renovation television genre, in the garden, surprise renovation teams, swapping reno jobs with friends … the list goes on and on. The impulse to uber-reno-spend is all but subtitled in these infotainment like programs — many of which of course were supported by ads and free supplies from home improvement stores and lumber yards.

Today, however, no one is pitching a television program about politician’s homes. With access to MP’s homes all but shut off, newspapers have turned to the skies for (visual) perspectives on MP expenses. And in so doing, newspapers such as The Telegraph, have translated a potentially dull complicated story about accounting and parliamentary regulations, into one about lush gardens.

The lavishness of publicly financed renovation is made all the more apparent through daily newspaper’s use of bird’s eye photography, particularly on the homes of the more well-to-do Member’s of Parliament. Enormous country estates, with well-groomed lawns, drudged moats (!) and blooming flowers are made available from the view of gods — or at least Google.

The Telegraph’s May 21 edition for example included a Google Earth satellite derived image of a taxpayer financed floating duck house under the screaming headline ‘£30,000 for the garden, including the ducks bill.’  A subsequent page provided eight additional Google Earth images with superimposed red arrows pointing to the offending expense claims — a clean swimming pool, a recently retiled roof, a line of inspected trees and renovated patio. The Guardian and other dailies have also taken to hiring helicopters to provide crisper images of stately mansions updated on the public purse.

Of course in the age of politics 2.0, the expenses scandal has also been socially mediated. Flickr, the photograph sharing website, offers a host of images from outraged citizens. A local police force‘s anti-terrorism poster imploring citizens not to “rely on others. If you suspect it report it” was re-edited into a series of parody posters that included a phone number for a “Confidential MP Fraud Hotline.”

The new Flicker hosted posters include a series of lavish furnishings and home electronics — the site emerging as an Internet-based interior decorating channel for disgraced MPs. Other net based pranksters and activists are seen in Flickr photos planting flowers in the shape of a pound sign on the front lawn of yet another disgraced MP. The gardening crew were dubbed “pound force,” in reference to the BBC’s international garden renovation hit program Ground Force.

Ironically, in advance of this two-week old expense scandal it was poor Gordon Brown himself who took to the airwaves — via Youtube — to gain the upper hand and pre-empt the release of such damning information on MPs expenses. 

At that time Labour MPs, some that we now know were knee deep in publicly financed manure for their lawns, rejected Brown’s Youtube announced policy to revamp their expenses rules and regulations.

Greg Elmer, Director of the Infoscape Research Lab at Ryerson University, is currently visiting faculty fellow at Anglia Ruskin University and the London School of Economics.

This article was orginally published in the Hill Times on May 25 and is reprinted here with permission.

Greg Elmer

Greg Elmer, Director of the Infoscape Research Lab at Ryerson University, is currently visiting faculty fellow at Anglia Ruskin University and the London School of Economics.