Groundhog Day takes hold of our politics

TOMORROW is Groundhog Day, when thousands of people will descend on the tiny US community of Gobler's Knob in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, to listen to sage advice and predictions from Pete, who will come out of his burrow as the sun rises.

This is one of those folksy, quirky traditions which would have gone unnoticed throughout much of the western world until the film Groundhog Day starring Bill Murray was released in 1993.  Murray plays a character who is trapped in a time warp, going to bed and waking at the same time on the same day time over and over again. Groundhog Day is now the code for unpleasant, unchanging, repetitive situations.

The political fundings row engulfing mainly Labour but also the Tories and Lib Dems seems to be the UK's very own equivalent of Groundhog Day. It's unedifying, brings politics into even more disrepute, and engenders an understandable cynasism in the public at large for the body politic. Brown and Cameron have acted to instruct their MPs to register which of their family members are employed from the public purse as secretaries and researchers.

But much more needs to be done to restore trust in Parliament as an institution which should be the most trustworthy in the land.

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