Another Sunday, another Lord, or in this case Lady, exposed for troughing.
It’s not a question of “if” these days, it’s a question of “which one?”.
This week’s charmless upper-class villain is the unlovely Baroness Goudie, a Labour donor and (you’d never guess this one) close friend of the Prime Minister and Mrs Prime Minister.... well, well!
It seems that the Honourable and Noble Lady (ha ha ha ha ha) was born, and has lived all her life in London, where her two sons were raised and where her husband works as a ‘leading’ barrister. However, according to the “Sunday Times” the Baroness tells the Lords her main address is 400 miles away in a Glasgow apartment block. (Handy for the by-election perhaps?) Unfortunately for her, her neighbours say that she is rarely there. Strange that, considering it’s her main home.
On the other hand, happily for Goudie, this has allowed her to claim subsistence allowances under the ‘accommodation costs for peers who live outside of the English capital and need help (if you please) to meet the cost of accommodation there’ scheme. In this particular case the “subsistence” ran to the tune of some £230,000. Now, just imagine for a minute what a judge would do with a social security fraudster who had diddled the DWP out of that kind of lolly.
And there’s more.... It seems the Baroness is a trustee, along with Lord Paul (you’ll remember him from a couple of weeks ago; he lives in a cupboard in an hotel in Oxford and did us out of £38,000) of Sarah Brown’s Piggy Bank Kids charity. I can’t help thinking that Sarah might want to check a little more carefully the financial probity of her trustees.
Goudie’s connections with London are reflected in her title Baroness Goudie of Roundwood in the London Burgh of Brent (nothing about the Gorbals there then). She and her husband used to live in Hampstead but moved in 2002 to Belgravia. No wonder they can afford to live in one of the most expensive areas of London when we are subsidizing her to that extent.
OK... I’ve laughed a bit at her nobleness, but in honesty, how much longer is this going to go on? How much longer are we going to accept that these people are robbing a broke country blind while decent hardworking people are being made jobless, and losing their homes and families? What can we do to rid ourselves of this kind of lowlife at the supposed top of our society?
