What on earth kind of rubbish have we got as representatives in Westminster?
Firstly we were told in the last parliamentary session that more that 50% of our MPs had been dishonest in their dealings with expenses. That’s more than 50% of our MPs had fiddled their expenses, or stolen from the taxpayer.
And then we had the audacity of the three MPs who considered themselves to be above the law because they were MPs, citing an English Bill of Rights dating from 1689 as their reasoning and, if you please, expecting to be allowed not to stand in the dock, where common criminals stand, as if, for some weird reason they should not be considered either common or criminal.
Fortunately the judge threw it out saying: “I can see no logical, practical or moral justification for a claim for expenses being covered by privilege and I can see no legal justification for it either.” But the point is that the chancing toe rags tried it on at our expense (because they are on legal aid now that they are unemployed).
Additionally, in the last session it seemed that hardly a week went by without one or more of our noble lords being found with their regal snouts in the
golden pig swill of the House of Lords Expenses system, and when the law got near to them, an official stamped on legal proceedings saying that it was all perfectly within the rules. So, in the Lords it’s within the rules to cheat on expenses by lying about your accommodation. High time it wasn’t.
Then we had the programme on Channel Four which organised an undercover sting and found host of MPs prepared to sell themselves to the highest bidder, for thousands of pounds for a day’s work, on top of their salary for the days’ work that we were paying them for. (Amazing how people like Pat Hewitt could get two days’ work into one day.)
Now we read that the new office for trying to stop the MPs stealing money all over again was forced to erect a sign at its Commons offices warning MPs: ‘We will not tolerate abuse of staff.’
Apparently MPs are furious at the way they have been treated. Paul Farrelly, Labour, sent a complaint to Nigel Gooding, the man in charge of the IPSA, saying the new system was "prehistoric, amateurish, self-defeating and bureaucracy gone mad".
He wrote: "I have been asked for a copy of my passport or birth certificate to prove my date of birth. Why that is necessary, I do not know. More importantly, as I have used my overdraft limit, my mortgage payment will bounce, causing me embarrassment and further charges
. You could easily have saved us all this aggravation."
Awww wee shame. Try buying road tax, signing on, getting a national health dentist. That’s aggravation.
It’s the kind of thing the rest of us have lived with for years, and it’s the kind of thing that you people brought upon yourselves when you stole all our money. Tough! Now you know how it feels, and you had no idea before. You get zero sympathy from me.
In the meantime Mr Gooding has announced his resignation from the post, for what he calls " for the sake of my health and sanity”, so abusive have MPs become, when they discovered the expenses office was actually going to do its job this time and the gravy train was in the sidings.
What a third rate lot they are.
Firstly we were told in the last parliamentary session that more that 50% of our MPs had been dishonest in their dealings with expenses. That’s more than 50% of our MPs had fiddled their expenses, or stolen from the taxpayer.
And then we had the audacity of the three MPs who considered themselves to be above the law because they were MPs, citing an English Bill of Rights dating from 1689 as their reasoning and, if you please, expecting to be allowed not to stand in the dock, where common criminals stand, as if, for some weird reason they should not be considered either common or criminal.
Fortunately the judge threw it out saying: “I can see no logical, practical or moral justification for a claim for expenses being covered by privilege and I can see no legal justification for it either.” But the point is that the chancing toe rags tried it on at our expense (because they are on legal aid now that they are unemployed).
Additionally, in the last session it seemed that hardly a week went by without one or more of our noble lords being found with their regal snouts in the
golden pig swill of the House of Lords Expenses system, and when the law got near to them, an official stamped on legal proceedings saying that it was all perfectly within the rules. So, in the Lords it’s within the rules to cheat on expenses by lying about your accommodation. High time it wasn’t.Then we had the programme on Channel Four which organised an undercover sting and found host of MPs prepared to sell themselves to the highest bidder, for thousands of pounds for a day’s work, on top of their salary for the days’ work that we were paying them for. (Amazing how people like Pat Hewitt could get two days’ work into one day.)
Now we read that the new office for trying to stop the MPs stealing money all over again was forced to erect a sign at its Commons offices warning MPs: ‘We will not tolerate abuse of staff.’
Apparently MPs are furious at the way they have been treated. Paul Farrelly, Labour, sent a complaint to Nigel Gooding, the man in charge of the IPSA, saying the new system was "prehistoric, amateurish, self-defeating and bureaucracy gone mad".
He wrote: "I have been asked for a copy of my passport or birth certificate to prove my date of birth. Why that is necessary, I do not know. More importantly, as I have used my overdraft limit, my mortgage payment will bounce, causing me embarrassment and further charges
. You could easily have saved us all this aggravation."Awww wee shame. Try buying road tax, signing on, getting a national health dentist. That’s aggravation.
It’s the kind of thing the rest of us have lived with for years, and it’s the kind of thing that you people brought upon yourselves when you stole all our money. Tough! Now you know how it feels, and you had no idea before. You get zero sympathy from me.
In the meantime Mr Gooding has announced his resignation from the post, for what he calls " for the sake of my health and sanity”, so abusive have MPs become, when they discovered the expenses office was actually going to do its job this time and the gravy train was in the sidings.
What a third rate lot they are.
Margarete Thatcher is to blame for allowing and encouraging MPs to fiddle!.
ReplyDeleteas for everything bad in the years since she was in office
Still in the new Coalition politics all this has come to an end hasn't it? ha ha ha ha ha
Quite right, Niko, as soon as Blair took over all fiddling was stamped out. Wait a minute while I check. I'll get back to you.
ReplyDeletetris,
ReplyDeleteNo doubt someone more supine will be given the post, keep the head down, blow no waves and, in the fullness of time, get recommended for the House of Lards.
Aye it makes ye mad tris so it does. It wid seem tae me that that General Election they had a few weeks back didnae draw the line under things that the MPs were hopin'it wid. It seems that nothin' but nothin' has changed. An' this'll drag on, an' every now an' then the Torygraph'll drip oot a wee 'selected' expenses scandal (aw tae suit their ain agenda of course) an' mibbe mair MPs will end up in the coorts.
ReplyDeleteAw it makes yer heart sair so it dis. Like livin' in a timewarp.
An' the answer tae Mr Farrelly, as tae why he has tae produce his birth certificate, is that MPs are nae longer seen tae be trust-worthy, that is 'worthy o' trust'
Just think on that one. MPs can nae longer even be trusted tae tell ye their birthday withoot lyin', or the time o' day, or the state o' the country's finances, or onythin' else!
Hing the lot o' them!
Certainly Niko, she didn't do fiddling any good, and whether she knew personally that her whips were telling people to use their expenses for wage top-ups I'll never know, but there are a few things to consider.
ReplyDeleteThey are not paid that badly for what they do; they didn’t deserve a pay rise;
If the Tory whips were letting it be known that blind eyes would be turned and Tory MPs saw their whips as their bosses, why did the Labour MPs or any other for that matter think that it was open day on theft?
Even if your boss said...just steal as much as you want from the public purse, would you?
And of course, as Brownlie so succinctly points out, what did Blair do about it and what did Brown do about, before the Telegraph made it an issue that they all wanted to do something about?
I'm sure that quietly MPs have been assured that this is just a tightening until the heat dies down. There will soon be other things to worry about.
ReplyDeleteWait till there’s rioting in the streets about the cuts, the unemployment and the fact that there’s no money left for the elderly, the Civil Service pensions and inflation is 20%+, like it was under the last Tory government.
No one will have the time of the energy to worry about how much they are stealing when they are too busy trying to grow a few potatoes in their window box to feed themselves.
As you say, we shall shortly see the appointment of someone who will tell their staff not to bother, if a guy says he has had to make 4 trips to his constituency and he lost his ticket... never mind, just pay him. Oh and that manure for his garden..... just let it go. And in 5 years he will slip into ermine robes and a cushie billet until he dies.
Once a thief always a thief. And public has a short memory
No Sophia. The new parliament; the new rules.
ReplyDeleteCameron and Brown were supposed to have stamped this out amongst their MPs, and Clegg was supposed to have stamped on Ming.
And we lost the Robinsons, so the entire economy of Northern Ireland was likely to have come to a standstill.
But no, nothing has changed as I suspected it wouldn’t.
You’re right; we have got to the stage where we would not believe an MP was born, never mind anything else. Why would we believe his date of birth?
But the reality is that most of these things happen to ordinary people. We all face frustrations every day; we all hit brick walls, and the answer is to phone a machine that gets you to read all your personal details into a voice recognition machine.
We all have situations where because of incompetence and understaffing or staffing that prefers to do other things, our paperwork gets lost or the tax codes are all wrong, and like our “honourable friend”, we have money held up and have problems paying our bills (although most people, Mr Farrelly, probably have enough in the bank to cope with a month’s delay in expenses). But even if they don’t what we have to do is go to the bank and explain. Possibly with a letter from our bosses. Yes it’s embarrassing, but that what WE have to do. Why on earth do you suppose that it would or should be any different for you, you pompous arse? And what on earth gives you the right to abuse staff. You were elected knowing that the gravy train was over. If you dodn’t like it there’s some part time work at Asda going, if you don’t mind the middle of the night.
So although I’m sure there are good ones, all the news that comes out of that place suggests to me that once again we have a bunch of low grade scroungers as our representatives, and whilst hanging them all might be a tad severe, I’d have no problem with sacking them.
In fact if we just have independence we can get rid of them that way.
Nothing much changes, these people are just so convinced that they are special and worth it!
ReplyDeleteYeah Munguin, well they aren't and they don't and the sooner they get that into their dense little heads the less likely they are to be found hanging from lampposts....
ReplyDeleteFine post, lest we should forget what all the furore was about (which the trough hooverers are claerly banking on).
ReplyDeleteClear evidence that self regulation equals nno regulation at all.
I wish the daily telegraph (spit!) would do an expose on corruption and waste of funds (that's our money too by the way) in the banking system. I have a personal grudge against those bankers. Dinnae really think it suits the agenda Sophia mentioned for the paper to do that.
I hope Jim Devine goes to jail when he's found guilty of theft but i bet he doesnae.
Yep Naldo, I think we should never forget that the mess we are in and a lot of our debt is lying in the vaults of the banks we own, and in the pockets of the bankers we employ, who won't lend to businesses...
ReplyDeleteJust like Mr Devine and his colleagues, I imagine that they will get away with it. People like that always do.
Naldo:
ReplyDeleteSomeone just mentioned to me that there's a documentary on 4 tonight at 8 about the banks using public money to speculate with....
Should be good if you can catch it.
I see Mr Maximum Mixed fruit basket is still blaming an old pensioner for Labour's mess both inside and outside of the Commons.
ReplyDeleteMPs have a great job and it costs them nothing to travel. They are payed very high wages and are very privileged. One thing that will unite all MPs is sticking with obscene expenses.
Hello Allan...
ReplyDeleteLove your new name for Niko....
Yep, there is much that is the fault of the poor old bat but you really can't blame her for everything.
I still say there damn all between them. They all only care about London and the sount-east of Engerland... But most of all, they all care about themsleves.
Sorry, I meant to add Allan... this was the lead story in the Times today (I see we anticipated them by a couple of days).
ReplyDeleteI don't think it will go away. They just won't take it.
There is a new system for expenses; like all new systems it has to be bedded in; in the interim there are errors and glitches...we've all had them, passports, tax, pensions, benefits, hospital appointments... all of them. They have been protected from all this until now. They just don't think that this crap should be happening to THEM... well tough.
They complain that the staff are being needlessly demanding. They want to see birth certificates and copies won’t do... you know, all the kind of things that ordinary mortals have to put up with over and over again. They don’t think it’s fair that the staff can’t just overlook the things they don’t have... ha ha.. try that on anywhere else, you bunch of tossers.
Junior staff have to stick to the rules. There is no point in threatening them. Go to the top. Go to the Speaker and get him to change things, but don’t take it out on the staff.
As for the idiot who went on about his bank sending back his mortgage direct debit... well, you know, most of us can have a word with our bank managers, and if they trust us they will give us a wee overdraft. That’s what happens to the rest of us. If on the other hand they don’t trust us...well.... maybe we shouldn’t really be MPs?