In a quest for greater transparency in government, and in the midst of claims of widespread abuse, MPs’ expense claims will be published this summer. We will then discover to what extent MPs have been using the expenses system to top up their salaries. Some details of apparently unjustified claims have already leaked out, and politicians are already getting defensive.

Various defences of MPs facing allegations have already been offered. Two in particular shouldn’t be found persuasive.

The first defence is that a claim was made within the regulations, with the implied conclusion that the MP making the claim has therefore done nothing wrong.

One of the complaints against MPs, however, is not that they have made claims in breach of the expense claim guidelines, but that the expense claim guidelines are too lax and that they have taken advantage. Noting that a claim was in accordance with the guidelines doesn’t answer this charge, and so doesn’t support the conclusion that the MP making the claim has done nothing wrong. To get to that conclusion, the specifics of the claim need to be examined so that it can be shown to be reasonable.

The second defence is that the allegations against our politicians pale into insignificance in comparison to those against politicians in other countries. As Harriet Harman put it, “In our system we do not have the level of corruption that obtains in many other countries.” Our politicians may be slightly corrupt, this argument goes, but relatively speaking they aren’t that bad, so we shouldn’t get too upset about them exploiting the expenses system.

Of course, greater corruption in other countries doesn’t justify lesser corruption here any more than the Tiananmen Square massacre justifies police assaulting protestors at the G20 summit. Corruption is corruption, and it’s a bad thing; this defence commits the tu quoque fallacy.

There’ll be plenty more said about MPs expenses as more information comes out. It’ll be interesting to see just how many times these fallacious arguments are wheeled out, and just how persuasive people find them.

The fight against drugs cheats in sport goes on. One of the sports where doping has been widespread is cycling. Today, another two riders were found to have used banned substances to gain an advantage in this year’s Tour de France, taking the total to six.

It’s always difficult to know what to think when news of a failed drug test comes through. It’s possible to put a positive spin on it, as the German cycling federation (BDR) chief has done:

“It is a shock, but it is also good news,” said BDR president Rudolf Scharping. “The ever tighter net of the anti-doping investigators is making sure that practically no-one is getting through anymore.”

[Source: BBC News, Tour rocked by new positive tests]

As Scharping says, one explanation of an increase in failed drug tests is that the tests are getting better. If we take this view, then although a failed drug test may be bad news in the short term, at least it can reassure us that we have effective tests and give us hope that the sport will soon be clean.

An alternative explanation of an increase in failed drug tests, though, is that there’s been an increase in drug use. Our tests may be no more effective than before (the tests may have improved, but the methods used to evade detection may have improved too), and the reason that we’re catching more riders may be that more riders are taking banned substances. In that case, each failed drug test just shows that cheating is prevalent.

There does seem to be a new determination to clean up cycling, but despite what Scharping says it isn’t obvious that drug tests coming back positive shows that we’re succeeding.

There’s been a spate of strikes recently over pay. Teachers, postal workers, and fire-fighters have all walked out over in protest at the pay deals they’ve been offered. On Wednesday, several hundred thousand council staff became the latest disgruntled employees to down tools, resulting in schools and libraries closing, flights and driving tests being cancelled, and bins being left unemptied, among other things.

BBC journalist (and Dragons’ Den presenter) Evan Davis explains on his blog how the argument goes whenever he interviews union representatives in the midst of industrial action at the moment:

I put what I think of as the obvious points about strikes: “we have to avoid wage price spirals”; “if the money isn’t there for a pay rise, it isn’t there”; “there’s no entitlement to an inflation-matching pay rise” etc.

But on each occasion, the answer comes back that chief executives have not shown the same level of restraint, so why should workers?

Davis admits to being perplexed about how to take things from there. He seems to find the union representatives’ argument persuasive.

He shouldn’t. The union officials aren’t disputing the argument that he offers for pay restraint. Instead, they are attempting to justify workers ignoring the argument on the ground that executives have ignored it. This is a tu quoque. Just because the executives have taken more than they should doesn’t mean that everyone else can too. Pointing the finger at someone else who has done something wrong doesn’t get you off the hook if you’re doing it as well.

Admittedly the situation is a bit of a mess. The economy can’t sustain the pay rises that the unions are asking for, but the unions won’t stand for workers having to exercise pay restraint when executive pay is spiralling upwards. So what’s the best way out? What should the unions be calling for?

Lower executive pay would get the unions the consistency between workers’ and executives’ pay deals that they’re after without destroying the economy. They shouldn’t be striking for higher pay for themselves, but perhaps they could strike for lower pay for their bosses instead.