SO who do you trust more MPs or bankers?

It seems ludicrous that just a few months ago our back-slapping, bonus grabbing bankers were being grilled by a select panel of back-slapping, gravy-train-riding MPs.

Of course we did not know then what we know now.

Our MPs were happy to tell us how disgusted they were with bankers and how they had abused a poorly-regulated system at our expense. I wonder if they would be so quick to point the finger now?

I remember writing two years ago about how concerned I was that MPs were trying to make themselves exempt from the Freedom of Information Act. Now we know why.

Many MPs still do not get it though, do they?

We are still hearing the terms that make taxpayers shake with fury and anger. “It was within the spirit of the rules”, “it was an oversight, I’ll pay it back” and “my party says I have done nothing wrong.”

And who is to blame? The big bad press of course.

Other meaningless terms like “witch-hunt” and “feeding-frenzy” have been thrown around by some, almost as if some articles, both national and local, have been made up. Despite this no complaints have been made by those hitting the headlines, let alone upheld.

Before the Daily Telegraph started printing the claims, we were told by the Commons that MPs would come clean and copies of all of their expenses would be made public.

Can you imagine what the reaction would have been if we were left to rely on the ‘redacted’ versions? I can – there would not have been one.

No duck houses, no moat cleaning, no second home flipping, no second home address, no clue, no idea.

That is how the vast majority of our MPs – including Prime Minister Gordon Brown himself – would have preferred it.

It is very easy for our politicians to sit on the Question Time panel now and tell us they voted in favour of publishing their claims, but if they felt that way, why not just release them via their websites at the time?

So Parliament will now undergo a huge overhaul but what little faith taxpayers had in their elected representatives has gone.

Those very MPs who criticised stay-away voters will be the reason why voter apathy hits a high at the next General Election.

Those very MPs who criticised bankers and accused them of swindling taxpayers out of millions of pounds knew, at the time, that they had done exactly the same.

Most will be cleared by their parties and Parliament of any wrong doing. Most will no doubt have adhered to the lose guidelines which enabled them to fleece us much in the way that a benefit cheat does.

And whilst many MPs will feel vindicated by their parties, they need to understand that taxpayers will take a completely different view.

WHAT is it with civil servants and police chiefs? If you asked them what colour the sky was they would not say ‘blue’.

Oh no, they would quote John Tyndall (the physicist, not the BNP founder) from 1859 and tell us that “when light passes through a clear fluid holding small particles in suspension (clouds), the shorter blue wavelengths are scattered more strongly than any other colour.”

That is what we call gobbledygook. Not Mr Tyndall’s fascinating discovery, but the need to use it as an answer when one, simple word will suffice.

I have made my feelings on this very subject particularly clear but a ‘paragraph’ released by the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) last week, raised the bar substantially.

Even for the force, the statement - signed off by Chief Constable Sir Ken Jones, the President of ACPO - was up there with the best of them.

I will not bore you by printing all 102 words but it included little treasures like: “amorphous challenges”; “centrally-engineered one size fits all initiatives” and my personal favorite: “authentic answerability”.

The authors, no doubt a load of PR busy-bodies who can only communicate by using gobbledygook-laden statements of at least 200 words, are up for an award: The Golden Bull Award.

The Plain English Campaign (PEC) gives the award out every year, although no police force has got its hands – or should that be the terminal part of the forelimb in primates – on it since the Strathclyde Joint Police Board in 1999.

Its little beauty included wonderful expressions such as: “an exercise in a vacuum” and “divorce from the reality of the strategic approach”.

At a time when jobs are being shed all over the country, it seems ludicrous that people are still employed, at taxpayer’s expense, to write this sort of gibberish.

I could be wrong, but it is my belief that councils, government quangos, police forces and any other public service that likes to waste our money, uses such language in a bid pull the wool over our eyes.

Most get bored and stop reading while others attempt to take it in and fail.

But there could be good news ahead.

In October last year, as reported in this very column, Harrow Borough Council made a jargon-busting, welcome return to the English language banning the use of gobbledygook. Lollipop ladies, traffic wardens and parking tickets all returned making school crossing patrollers, civil enforcement officers and penalty charge notices redundant.

Meanwhile Kent Police is sending 30 members of staff from its corporate development department to a PEC training class this month.

It seems that the Plain English Campaign is working, no good news on this front locally yet, but there is still time.

Martin Buhagiar Editor,