Some of the pledges are things that, in my naivety I thought were already part of the deal.  Having been a councillor and been through the vetting for that I would expect the same to be demanded from MPs but even more so.  Also I have been spoiled by having a good Labour MP who not only attends constituency meetings whenever possible (which is most months) but also attends branch meetings and joins in with canvassing and delivering at every opportunity - the fact that we live within commuting distance of London obviously makes that easier for her.  With exposure to such behaviour it is perhaps easy to forget that not all MPs are as active locally.

Anyway, taking the pledges one at a time, here is what I thought of them:

As a parliamentary candidate I will subscribe to high standards of integrity, transparency, accountability and financial economy.

Actually I'm not sure I really understand that one.  The pre-amble says that these are five pledges "which will govern our conduct if we are elected to Parliament" but this one seems to cover being a candidate rather than an MP.   I'm wondering if I am reading it wrong.  Nothing wrong with integrity at any time, but how are you accountable as a candidate, except to your members?

I seek elected office not for personal gain but to serve the public and our democracy, which I consider an honour and a privilege

Well, I'm not sure if standing in Tory Central counts as seeking public office, but I'm always prepared to do the job if it comes down to it.  As it happens, an MP's salary is significantly more than I get now, so I suppose I would have an element of personal gain in that respect and I wouldn't get all hair-shirt and only accept a 'workers wage'  but I would feel sufficiently rewarded to not go looking for ways to pad it out with extra jobs or spurious expenses.

Actually, living close to London I wouldn't expect to generate much in the way of expenses at all.  It is a bit like with my current job: when I incur minor expenses I usually don't bother to claim them because I hate all the form-filling and only go through all that if I have had to pay out serious amounts to do my job.

I will publish my expenses online within a month of submitting them and publicise them annually in full to constituents

This is something I would have done anyway, and have said so in the past.  Not only that, but I would back everything up with receipts even if that was not required.  Having travelled a lot in previous jobs I am used to the culture in which everything is backed up by receipts and would find it easier to just continue that way.   It is so obviously the right thing to do it feels unnecessary to promise to do it - like making a promise not to strangle any kittens.

I will hold regular meetings with my community and will regularly report back to my constituency party

Are there really MPs who do not do this?

I will apply the principle of best value to all decisions I make which involve the use of public money to cover my duties, including for travel and accommodation

I squirmed a bit at the phrase 'best value', reminded of many pointless council best value scrutiny committee meetings.   Again, living less than thirty miles from London and close to an all-night rail link I wouldn't anticipate much need for accommodation.  I would even be in two minds about claiming for travel: I used to be able to afford my own rail fares when I was commuting and only earning half what MPs earn - and that was for travelling every day, all year round - but I wouldn't make any such promise just in case.  Even if I did claim though, it would never be First Class, and I would be walking from Waterloo or Victoria rather than taking a tube or bus.

Appropriate is the key word in the preamble to the pledges I think.  I just had a look at the Loot website and saw that there were 623 flats to rent in London for between £100 and £150 a week.  That comes to a maximum of £7,800 a year.  If your circumstances make a second home necessary then you really do not need to spend over £23,000 on it.   Is it appropriate to spend more on a second home (nearly two thousand pounds a month!) than many constituents will be able to afford, from their own funds, on their first and only home?

My conclusion was that there is nothing to object to in the pledges.  Reading them I am left with a feeling of mild depression that it should even be thought necessary to make them, and a feeling of more serious depression when I realise that it actually is necessary.

There are benefits to joining the list of PPCs.  For a start it is easier to just point people at the list than to explain my own opinion in detail over and over and it is a very public affirmation of intent.  I would have felt happier if it had gone further and added a sixth pledge to not take any additional employment and not to employ members of family in the constituency office.

I would also have liked to see more emphasis on differentiating between personal out-of-pocket expenses and the necessary expenses of running an office.  Even if I claimed not a single penny on accommodation, food or travel I would want to spend as much as was needed to deal with the research and casework.  To do otherwise really would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

I really hope that many of the points will be moot before long, if the system is cleaned up (just removing the automatic right to £400 a month for food with no receipts would be a start) but in the meantime I am gong to add my name to the list.  I can see no good reason not to.

A letter in my local paper the other week said that this sort of thing was an easy promise to make for somebody in my position.  I think 'safe promise' was the exact phrase he used, but if as potential politicians we are prepared to make the difficult decisions and the difficult promises we shouldn't shy away from making the easy ones too. Personally I would happily make the same promises even if I was standing in Hayes and Harlington.

All of which is just a long-winded way of saying that I hope my name will be on that list at number 132 by the time anybody follows this link.

All, no doubt an improvement on the original article but there are still what I'd call a few causes for concern with his article. A culture of benefit dependency is no doubt a problem and I have no doubt that Tom's diagnosis that much of it began with Thatcher in the 80's. I'm less convinced on two other aspects of his argument.

Firstly, there's the Tom Harris vs The Labour Party mentality that persists with stuff like this:

AS FOR the accusation of giving comfort to the ‘Right-wing’, when did it become ‘Left-wing’ to tolerate such a colossal waste of lives? Why is it ‘Left-wing’ to allow millions of people to remain on benefits instead of working? When did ‘Labour’ stop meaning ‘work’ and start to mean ‘benefits’?

With this he is pandering to a set of predjudices that the Daily Mail and it's ilk like to put out that we in the Labour party are driven by some kind of sinister drive to further welfare dependency and that we prefer to bury our heads in the sand over the issue. This is quite simply not the case.

Then we move on to this bit:

No single party, I’m convinced, has all the answers. James Purnell, the Work and Pensions Secretary, has proposed some of the most radical changes yet to the welfare state. But just because Labour is in government does not give us a monopoly on solutions. Former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith and Theresa May, the Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary, have much to add to this debate, as has Frank Field, the Labour MP who was asked by Tony Blair to ‘think the unthinkable’ back in 1997, who did – and was sacked for his efforts

In looking for answers to the problems of welfare dependency, looking to Frank Field, Iain Duncan-Smith, Theresa May and James Purnell seems like limiting yourself to a very narrow set of viewpoints. I know this is simplifying their viewpoints somewhat, but all of them seem to rely very heavily on what you might call "stick" policies (withdrawal of benefits and such).

The problem with "stick" policies is that for many, getting a job means getting a menial minimum wage job with no prospects for promotion or advancement. The prospect of a lifetime in such unrewarding work will not lift people out of the benefit trap.

What we need, in my view, is a serious attempt by the government create new jobs, the market has 30 years to try and I think it's fair to say that it's failed in that aim. The government needs to step in with a fiscal stimulus that has the clear aim of creating good, rewarding work. That and not handing out judgement from on high is what we need.

Paul Evans well demonstrates the liberal hatred of the masses…how very dare they have (the wrong) opinions. None of which are really their own, of course. Unlike him the lower orders have their views dictated by the tabloid press along with a bunch of sinister “think tanks” which 99.99999% of the population has never heard of.

And this one from Tory stalwart Newmania

The argument Paul Evans is making comes down to this . ‘I know I am unpopular but as I am so very clever in my own opinion the structures tat allow my views to prevail should be retained.’

To which I'd answer: "Yes, politicans do know better and should have the power to make unpopular decisions."

Let me explain:

Let us imagine that our voter was given the choice: Would you like to stroke this fluffy kitten? Aside from those with a dislike of cats I think most people would pretty affirmative, now lets imagine that through a complex sequence of events unknown to the voter, stroking said kitten killed a thousand bunny rabbits. All of a sudden what seemed like a harmless decision would actually become a very dangerous one.

The reason we don't put all decisions to referendum is that voters simply don't have the time to evaluate the precise consequences of the decisions they make, we have politicians who can take the time to fully evaluate the consequences and make the decisions. A referendum on council tax rises is like submitting the fluffy kitten question, it seems an obvious choice, but it leads to a whole lot of nasty unforseen consequences.

Adjusting decision making in this way is dangerous because it ignores important wider concerns, it works both ways too. A lot of people would argue that union power in the 70's with it's own narrow populism did untold damage to the competetiveness of British business. Just who exactly has what decision making power is a complex debate but a level of sense in political decision making can save a whole lot of bunny rabbits.

Last weekend, the Mail on Sunday did a story on Jacqui Smith exposing the supposedly vast amount she claims on expenses for a second home while lodging with her sister. I've not canvassed my comrades for a view on this one, but I'll go out on a limb and suggest that it's a pretty pathetic piece of anti government journalism. Claiming a second home allowance and using it to pay a mortgage is not exactly uncommon among MP's, in the big book of MP's sins this would seem to be nothing more than a minor footnote.

But what I'm more concerned with is the journalism. For the first story, the journalists behind it had to invent their fake lobbying firm, arrange appointments with various lords and attempt to steer the conversation towards a change in certain laws. I'd imagine it took a fair amount of time and effort and a hell of a lot of guts. For the second story all that was needed was to ask a few questions and make a few FOI requests.

One was a gutsy piece of serious investigative journalism, the second took hardly any effort at all. It's no secret that journalists are these days forced by time constraints to spend very little time on their stories, commercial pressures have deiven them towards easy stories, and herein we have a problem. I can't help thinking that part of the agenda for transparency is pandering to towards the interst of the press, and I just don't think that's right.

When we talk about scrutiny, accountability, openness and transparency, we should do so with the aim of fighting corruption and keeping politics honest. Spoonfeeding stories to journalists should not be on the agenda.