Let's not make this even more of a rich man's world.

With my job, I get to travel around a lot. From Minneapolis to Heidelberg, New York to Nice, I've enjoyed the ability to visit countries and cities with a frequency that I otherwise would not have been able to afford. The main activity of these trips is work related, be it presenting at a conference, having meetings or carrying out lab experiments. However, every single academic would be lying if they tried to say with any conviction that they haven't made use of such trips for a bit of pleasure.

A typical oversees conference (of which there are several each year) will cost around £1000 to attend. This includes the registration fees of the conference (several £100s depending on the conference), the accommodation (usually for more than 3 nights), flights, local transport, and any dinners needed outside the onslaught of free conference food. I'm not sure about you, but I can't really justify spending £1000 on a holiday for myself and my wife each year let alone several times a year in order to full-fill the conditions of my employment.

Naturally, you are not obliged to go to conferences, but missing out on attending means that you isolate yourself from the academic community of your field. Your name doesn't get out there, and you find it difficult to form the collaborations needed to bring in more funding for more work (and conferences).

So, why am I bringing this all up now? Well, I recently returned from a conference in the south of France where the dinner table turned to politics. There was a general dislike of politicians from the PhD students (and a couple of eminent professors) rising from the expenses scandal. Even outside the academic field, this is a major complaint for politicians.

Let me make this clear: We were sitting in a fancy restaurant in Nice, eating fine food, listening to people complain about Expenses being Exploited by Politicians, all before collecting our receipts so that we could claim back the dinner later!

Did any of these academics order a side salad with a side of water? Of course not. The amount we are allowed to spend on our per-day food costs isn't infinite, but it is enough that trips for work are comfortable enough that discussions can be held away from the screaming kids of a Burger King.

I'm not a rich man from working in Academia (I'd be in industry if I wanted that), but also, I am not an academic because I'm a rich man. If the expenses weren't there, most of the scientists working in the UK universities wouldn't be able to afford to do their job. This would ultimately close off the job to the upper echelons of our society (would a shallow gene pool really give us the best science? Prince Phillip, PhD etc?!).  It could also lead to increased intervention by companies, privately funding science and guiding it and its results towards their own ends*.

So, back to politicians:

Let's look at it the other way, let's cut every single politician off from the 'gravy train' of expenses. Let's make an MP for Inverness attend parliament and meetings in London on their own cash. Let's have the MP for the Highlands and Islands (Is that a constituency?) travel between London to Mull to London to Bute and back again under their own funds. What kind of people would be able to do this kind of job? Rich people. People with massive amounts of disposable income that they can use to fly around the place.

Is this the type of person that we want to restrict the job of running our country to?

Or, do we want to have a system in place such that the MP for the most northern parts of Scotland, or the MP for the most rural parts of Wales, to have the same ability to do their job as their South of England counterparts? I'm not saying that the current system is perfect, I believe that the amount of expenses available should be based on distance of travel. However, it absolutely should not be scrapped altogether because of a few bad eggs.

Ranting about a politician claiming £1.50 for a bottle of Irn Bru? No matter how much of an absolute, scheming, bastard that politician is, it only serves to divert attention away from more important matters (see also: politicians picking on a Glasgow Bar's sense of humour, or new politician's younger self's Twitter feed).

So, next time I'm at a conference, I will be on expenses, but because I want to keep my job (and I don't have the luxury of the public voting me in and out), I will play the game and have a sandwich and a bottle of Irn Bru rather than the caviar, foi gras and gold ice cream.

*Some of my work has been funded, in part, by a private company, but I have never been pressurised to or compensated for, guiding the results towards the companies manifesto. Science is Science, and if it doens't say what the company want's, then that's still what the company gets.