As they troop back to Westminster from the champagne and bright lights of the conference season MP’s will find in their In-Tray a letter that may ask them to pay back wrongly claimed expenses.
The letters are a result of an inquiry into MP’s expenses led by former civil servant Sir Thomas Legg held in the wake of the revelations about everything from duck houses and moat cleaning to mars bars and blue movies being charged to the public purse by our elected representatives made in the Daily Telegraph over the summer. All three party leaders have issued instructions to their members to pay up and shut up in the name of not dragging the reputation of the mother of all parliaments any further through the mud.
Things may not, though, go quite so neatly to plan. Many MP’s feel Sir Thomas had overstepped his remit by applying the new rules retrospectively, calling for the repayment of expenses that had been signed off by the fees office up to five years ago.
Sir Stuart Bell, of the influential Commons Members Estimate Committee, to whom Legg will have to submit his report, told the BBC at the start of the week that many MP’s feel ‘Sir Thomas is not staying within the remit, he’s not respecting decisions made by the fees office in accordance with the rules at the time.’
It may be about as popular just now as saying Bankers? Of course they deserve their bonuses, but our embattled MP’s do have a point. Yes the people who made deliberately fraudulent claims should be made to pay the money back and thrown out of parliament, but far from being shameless freeloaders the majority of MP’s do give value for money.
As an example I would site the MP for my own home town in the West Midlands, a man recognised by website ‘They Work For You’ as one of the hardest working MP’s in the commons whine it comes to dealing with cases brought to him by his constituents. No questions at all have been asked about his expenses, but in the court of lazy saloon bar opinion he is judged to be guilty along with the criminal few among his colleagues.
Perhaps we, the permanently outraged British public, should be asking ourselves a few awkward questions.
A large proportion of the MP’s caught with their arm up to the elbow in the cookie jar represented constituencies where one party had a virtual monopoly, if the public took enough of an interest in politics to make no seat safe, the chances of the person representing it becoming complacent and possibly corrupt would be much reduced.
We also have to ask ourselves just what who we want to represent us in parliament. If we want, as is so often claimed on radio talk shows, the job to be done by ‘people like us’, then we will have to pay those people a decent wage and provide them with reasonable expenses. Those expenses should pay for essentials not luxuries and claimants should have to justify every penny they take from the public purse, but there is no way around paying the money out, nor should there be.
The alternative is being governed by a mix of celebrities and people who are rich enough not to need a salary. It won’t work, politics succeeds or fails on whether or not its practitioners can connect with the people they have been elected to represent, whatever talents they may have in other areas I doubt very much whether Jordan or some aristocrat rich enough to think of Devon as his back garden are really up to the job.
Source: bbc.co.uk
Come Dancing? I’d rather we didn’t.
As if they didn’t have more important things to concentrate on at the moment, you know like the recession and climate change turning the poles into a giant slush puppy, the government has decided that we aren’t dancing enough.
Don’t worry though because they’re going to send out teams of ‘dance champions’ to coax us off the sofa and onto the dance floor.
The campaign is fronted by former ‘Strictly Come Dancing’ judge Arlene Phillips, who will be holding a series of ‘dance celebration’ events across the country. Speaking to politics.co.uk earlier this week Phillips said: ‘We want to start a revolution to get the nation on their feet and onto the dance floor.’
Ok, so this is all part of an admirable attempt to get the 100,000 people in the UK who don’t exercise enough up and moving around, but I fear it is doomed to failure.
We Britons are just too shy and body conscious, at least when we’re sober anyway, to dance in public. However good the intentions behind this initiative press ganging a few people into giving an exhibition of ‘dad dancing’ in a dreary shopping mall whilst being ignored by passers by will do nothing to change that awkward fact of national character.
Source: politics.co.uk
Veg and no meat for this spider.
Scientists at Villanova University announced this week that they have discovered the world’s first vegetarian spider.
Bagheera Kiplingi does not use its web to trap or hunt prey and instead feeds on Beltian bodies, a special leaf tip found on acacia plants.
It might be facetious but I have to ask anyway, do you thing vegetarian spiders are as annoying as the human variety? Do they waft about the place in a haze of smugly half starved moral superiority refusing to let anything that hasn’t been sanctified by St Linda McCartney pass their lips? I think we should be told.
Source: inthenews.co.uk
Showing posts with label mp's-expenses. Show all posts
Showing posts with label mp's-expenses. Show all posts
Friday, 16 October 2009
Friday, 22 May 2009
The Duck Island Parliament.
Calling an event or sequence of events ‘historic’ is often the last resort of the lazy and the unimaginative and yet no other adjective seems to fit the week we have just stumbled through. A week that began with the resignation of the Speaker of the House of Commons and ended with the world inside the Westminster bubble turned upside down.
Speaker Michael Martin handed in his resignation following a poor performance in the chair during a debate on his own future that was different from his last poor performance only in that he didn’t end up firing insults at Kate Hoey. All the other elements anyone with a passing interest in democracy has come to know and not like about Mr Martin, partisanship, confusion and a not at all hidden sense that everyone was out to get him. Well this time they were, and get him they duly did.
In what must be one of the shortest resignation speeches recorded by Hansard Mr Martin said he had ‘always felt the house to be at its best when it is united.’ Unity, of course, being something the house could never hope to achieve with a man who had mounted a Cnut style campaign against the tide of public opinion in the Speaker’s chair.
The beach against which the tide of public opinion has spent much of the past two weeks battering itself against is the staggering capacity of our elected representatives for fiddling their expenses claims. These people didn’t just put the odd Kit-Kat of blue movie watched by their other half (in a moment of madness of course, politicians and their significant other or someone else’s significant other never seem to do the wrong thing in any other sort of moment) on the public tab, they put the kitchen sink in both their houses on it too.
The flood of revelations about how dishonourable some honourable members have been has thrown up some interesting flotsam and jetsam. Three senior members of the Labour cabinet have been caught out not paying capital gains tax on the profits they made on selling houses the public had helped to pay part of the mortgage on, they didn’t, they have all protested, break the rules and anyway they paid the money back so let’s forget about the whole thing. Not likely chum. I was acting within the rules looks likely to join ‘I was only following orders’ in the pantheon of excuses that tend only to confirm the guilt of the person by whom they are being made.
The prize for combining greed with a near total lack of self awareness goes to the hitherto unknown Tory MP Alan Steen, who put in a claim for the building of a ‘duck island’ at his country home to the Commons Fee’s Office. In another moment of madness they signed it off. When questioned about the matter by the BBC Mr Steen seemed more annoyed by the impertinence of the press asking why he had spent a hefty chunk of public money building a home for ducks when some of his constituents were struggling to keep a roof over their own heads.
In what was the most assured press conference he has given so far this year Gordon Brown, for whom interpreting the mood of the nation has been problematic of late, said that Westminster can no longer ‘operate like some gentleman’s club’, from now on MP’s will have to get used to no being able to decide on their own pay and expenses.
These are, and here comes another cliché that has risen to meet the moment, revolutionary times, life in the Westminster bubble may never be the same again. All week we have been warned that the simmering discontent over MP’s expenses could translate into votes and undeserved political legitimacy for a slate of extremist parties including the BNP.
We are, perhaps, making our own flesh creep a little unnecessarily over that prospect, while the BNP vote may rise on the back of dissatisfaction with the three main parties the majority of disenchanted voters will probably make their resentment known in the way the British almost always do, by staying away from the polling station in droves. The oafish Nick Griffin may have blagged himself an invitation to a garden party at Buckingham Palace, he may have to wait a little longer for the keys to Downing Street; like until Satan starts going to work on a snow plough.
Something profound has changed though in the way the British feel about politics and politicians, the MP’s who conspired to depose a commons speaker for the first time in more than three centuries got a whiff it, so did the people in the audience of the BBC’s Question Time who have shouted down MP’s representing all three main parties for two weeks in a row. Politics has to be in earnest now, Westminster is no longer a place where the mediocre or the borderline criminal can carve out a comfy niche, the people have had a taste of power and business as usual will never again be a viable option.
Quite where this will end I have no idea, most likely in a compromise of the sort for which we Britons are famous the world over, all that is certain is that whether they told the truth on their expenses forms or not our elected representatives as a whole, like the Magi in Eliot’s poem are ‘no longer at ease in the old dispensation’, and no more should they be.
Speaker Michael Martin handed in his resignation following a poor performance in the chair during a debate on his own future that was different from his last poor performance only in that he didn’t end up firing insults at Kate Hoey. All the other elements anyone with a passing interest in democracy has come to know and not like about Mr Martin, partisanship, confusion and a not at all hidden sense that everyone was out to get him. Well this time they were, and get him they duly did.
In what must be one of the shortest resignation speeches recorded by Hansard Mr Martin said he had ‘always felt the house to be at its best when it is united.’ Unity, of course, being something the house could never hope to achieve with a man who had mounted a Cnut style campaign against the tide of public opinion in the Speaker’s chair.
The beach against which the tide of public opinion has spent much of the past two weeks battering itself against is the staggering capacity of our elected representatives for fiddling their expenses claims. These people didn’t just put the odd Kit-Kat of blue movie watched by their other half (in a moment of madness of course, politicians and their significant other or someone else’s significant other never seem to do the wrong thing in any other sort of moment) on the public tab, they put the kitchen sink in both their houses on it too.
The flood of revelations about how dishonourable some honourable members have been has thrown up some interesting flotsam and jetsam. Three senior members of the Labour cabinet have been caught out not paying capital gains tax on the profits they made on selling houses the public had helped to pay part of the mortgage on, they didn’t, they have all protested, break the rules and anyway they paid the money back so let’s forget about the whole thing. Not likely chum. I was acting within the rules looks likely to join ‘I was only following orders’ in the pantheon of excuses that tend only to confirm the guilt of the person by whom they are being made.
The prize for combining greed with a near total lack of self awareness goes to the hitherto unknown Tory MP Alan Steen, who put in a claim for the building of a ‘duck island’ at his country home to the Commons Fee’s Office. In another moment of madness they signed it off. When questioned about the matter by the BBC Mr Steen seemed more annoyed by the impertinence of the press asking why he had spent a hefty chunk of public money building a home for ducks when some of his constituents were struggling to keep a roof over their own heads.
In what was the most assured press conference he has given so far this year Gordon Brown, for whom interpreting the mood of the nation has been problematic of late, said that Westminster can no longer ‘operate like some gentleman’s club’, from now on MP’s will have to get used to no being able to decide on their own pay and expenses.
These are, and here comes another cliché that has risen to meet the moment, revolutionary times, life in the Westminster bubble may never be the same again. All week we have been warned that the simmering discontent over MP’s expenses could translate into votes and undeserved political legitimacy for a slate of extremist parties including the BNP.
We are, perhaps, making our own flesh creep a little unnecessarily over that prospect, while the BNP vote may rise on the back of dissatisfaction with the three main parties the majority of disenchanted voters will probably make their resentment known in the way the British almost always do, by staying away from the polling station in droves. The oafish Nick Griffin may have blagged himself an invitation to a garden party at Buckingham Palace, he may have to wait a little longer for the keys to Downing Street; like until Satan starts going to work on a snow plough.
Something profound has changed though in the way the British feel about politics and politicians, the MP’s who conspired to depose a commons speaker for the first time in more than three centuries got a whiff it, so did the people in the audience of the BBC’s Question Time who have shouted down MP’s representing all three main parties for two weeks in a row. Politics has to be in earnest now, Westminster is no longer a place where the mediocre or the borderline criminal can carve out a comfy niche, the people have had a taste of power and business as usual will never again be a viable option.
Quite where this will end I have no idea, most likely in a compromise of the sort for which we Britons are famous the world over, all that is certain is that whether they told the truth on their expenses forms or not our elected representatives as a whole, like the Magi in Eliot’s poem are ‘no longer at ease in the old dispensation’, and no more should they be.
Thursday, 14 May 2009
Out of control expenses and an expendable Speaker.
Sunday is the day when the opinion polls come out and, for the government; it is the day when they find out that things have got a little worse since last week.
This week things got off to an even worse start than usual, a poll conducted for the Sunday Times by Colin Rallings and Michael Thrasher showed that Labour are trailing far behind the Tories and the Lib Dems in the 34 local authorities where elections are due to be held on the 4th of June. Another poll, carried out by YouGov this time, puts the Tories on 43 points, Labour on 27 and the Lib Dems on 18.
Speaking to the Sunday Times former general secretary of the Labour Party Peter Watt said the Brown government appeared to have ‘absolutely no direction,’ nobody asked why Labour had seen its support fall by another seven points because everybody knows the answer; MP’s expenses.
Only a day earlier the Daily Telegraph published a damning list of the expenses claims made by members of parliament. The items claimed for ranged from kit-kats and tampons to the activities of Margaret Moran and several other members who repeatedly changed the designation of their second home in order to play the system for a fat profit.
As for the most absurd expenses claim of all, made for the £25,000 cost of providing police protection for Tourism Minister Barbara Follett. Politicians, like everyone else, have a right to overrate their importance, but if they happen to be married to a multi-millionaire novelist they shouldn’t expect a lot of much poorer people to pick up the tab for their hubris.
Labour aren’t the only party with skeletons bought on expenses rattling in their closet, the Tories have had to answer some awkward questions, but David Cameron was able to make his apologies in the certain knowledge that sleaze sticks closest to parties in government.
Amongst the most prominent political careers turned into ashes by the scandal over MP’s expenses is that of House of Commons Speaker Michael Martin.
Gorbals Mick, as he is not at all affectionately known looked unlikely to be one of the more illustrious Speakers before the expenses issue blew up in the faces of our legislators, he has been soundly criticised for being partisan, living high on the hog courtesy of his own expenses account and being generally below par.
Now he faces a possible vote of no confidence instigated by Tory MP Douglas Carswell and has come under fire from the Labour benches with David Winnick calling for him to apologise for ‘personal comments’ made to former Sports Minister Kate Hoey during a commons debate on expenses.
It is unusual for a Speaker to be forced to resign before he or she chooses to retire but an exception could well be made for the deeply unloved Mr Martin. What, you wonder will history say of this pygmy of political debate? Only, I suspect that he contrived to make being a middle aged man in knickerbockers look even more ridiculous than usual.
A dual carriageway complete with cycle path runs for half a mile or so from the gates of the University Hospital of North Staffordshire before losing itself amidst the closes and cul-de-sacs of a rather dowdy housing estate. It is a road I have travelled along almost daily for the best part of twenty years without ever having really thought about why it should end so suddenly as it does and why it should be there at all.
I know now, thanks to a well informed friend, that it was built during the 1930’s as part of a project to make work for the unemployed, a little piece of historical trivia that has acquired an unsettling relevance over the past few months.
This week the unemployment figures for the first three months of 2009 were published, they make for grim reading; there are now 2.2million people out of work in the UK and the rate at which unemployment rose over the period covered was the most rapid since 1981. Despite this a few brave souls have claimed to see the green shoots of recovery poking through the wreckage of the financial disaster that started with the collapse of Northern Rock on the eve of the 2007 Labour Party conference, there optimism is based on a modest rise in the number of new mortgage enquiries and surprisingly robust consumer spending.
All well and good I’m sure, although my own opinion leans towards that expressed, in more erudite terms, by Mervyn King, Chair of the Bank of England, that we have no grounds yet for being sure the light we think we can see at the end of the tunnel isn’t the headlamp of an oncoming train. More to the point I wonder if we will have to build more than a few of our own roads to nowhere before the good times return.
This week things got off to an even worse start than usual, a poll conducted for the Sunday Times by Colin Rallings and Michael Thrasher showed that Labour are trailing far behind the Tories and the Lib Dems in the 34 local authorities where elections are due to be held on the 4th of June. Another poll, carried out by YouGov this time, puts the Tories on 43 points, Labour on 27 and the Lib Dems on 18.
Speaking to the Sunday Times former general secretary of the Labour Party Peter Watt said the Brown government appeared to have ‘absolutely no direction,’ nobody asked why Labour had seen its support fall by another seven points because everybody knows the answer; MP’s expenses.
Only a day earlier the Daily Telegraph published a damning list of the expenses claims made by members of parliament. The items claimed for ranged from kit-kats and tampons to the activities of Margaret Moran and several other members who repeatedly changed the designation of their second home in order to play the system for a fat profit.
As for the most absurd expenses claim of all, made for the £25,000 cost of providing police protection for Tourism Minister Barbara Follett. Politicians, like everyone else, have a right to overrate their importance, but if they happen to be married to a multi-millionaire novelist they shouldn’t expect a lot of much poorer people to pick up the tab for their hubris.
Labour aren’t the only party with skeletons bought on expenses rattling in their closet, the Tories have had to answer some awkward questions, but David Cameron was able to make his apologies in the certain knowledge that sleaze sticks closest to parties in government.
Amongst the most prominent political careers turned into ashes by the scandal over MP’s expenses is that of House of Commons Speaker Michael Martin.
Gorbals Mick, as he is not at all affectionately known looked unlikely to be one of the more illustrious Speakers before the expenses issue blew up in the faces of our legislators, he has been soundly criticised for being partisan, living high on the hog courtesy of his own expenses account and being generally below par.
Now he faces a possible vote of no confidence instigated by Tory MP Douglas Carswell and has come under fire from the Labour benches with David Winnick calling for him to apologise for ‘personal comments’ made to former Sports Minister Kate Hoey during a commons debate on expenses.
It is unusual for a Speaker to be forced to resign before he or she chooses to retire but an exception could well be made for the deeply unloved Mr Martin. What, you wonder will history say of this pygmy of political debate? Only, I suspect that he contrived to make being a middle aged man in knickerbockers look even more ridiculous than usual.
A dual carriageway complete with cycle path runs for half a mile or so from the gates of the University Hospital of North Staffordshire before losing itself amidst the closes and cul-de-sacs of a rather dowdy housing estate. It is a road I have travelled along almost daily for the best part of twenty years without ever having really thought about why it should end so suddenly as it does and why it should be there at all.
I know now, thanks to a well informed friend, that it was built during the 1930’s as part of a project to make work for the unemployed, a little piece of historical trivia that has acquired an unsettling relevance over the past few months.
This week the unemployment figures for the first three months of 2009 were published, they make for grim reading; there are now 2.2million people out of work in the UK and the rate at which unemployment rose over the period covered was the most rapid since 1981. Despite this a few brave souls have claimed to see the green shoots of recovery poking through the wreckage of the financial disaster that started with the collapse of Northern Rock on the eve of the 2007 Labour Party conference, there optimism is based on a modest rise in the number of new mortgage enquiries and surprisingly robust consumer spending.
All well and good I’m sure, although my own opinion leans towards that expressed, in more erudite terms, by Mervyn King, Chair of the Bank of England, that we have no grounds yet for being sure the light we think we can see at the end of the tunnel isn’t the headlamp of an oncoming train. More to the point I wonder if we will have to build more than a few of our own roads to nowhere before the good times return.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)