The 660

The news that yet another MP has been embroiled in accusations around his expenses reminds me of an experiment I thought of carrying out a few years ago. What we need are 660 people, selected at random, to be subjected to the same journalistic scrutiny as MPs so we have some sort of control experiment. Then we might be able to have a sensible debate as to whether MPs so often look like crooks because the profession attracts (or perhaps creates) a liberal attitude to tax law and accounting best practice, or whether any 660 people subjected to that level of investigative scrutiny would be forever being discovered with their hands in the till.