AT LEAST THE LORDS CAN'T STEAL REDUNDANCY MONEY FROM US: THEY'VE GOT THE JOB FOR LIFE!

It’s taken nearly a year for the authorities to accede to the Freedom of Information request, but finally we have the figures to show that every single MP chose to accept their Golden Goodbyes, worth up to £65,000. Even those who had been guilty of theft took the money and ran.

Even the chiselling little bitch like Moran, who you will remember stole tens of thousands of pounds from us getting her boyfriend’s house (not anywhere near either London, or her constituency), done up, got half of what she would otherwise have been due, despite being the subject of a police inquiry.

Moran went into hiding after the affair, claiming that she was suffering from nervous exhaustion. Claiming to be sick, and being paid full wages in good faith, the silly cow got herself caught on camera touting for another job in PR because she had good contacts within the Labour party.

Other greedy fat cats, who had absolutely no need whatsoever of a payout to help them resettle to life again, but none the less got their grasping greedy trotters on our money yet again included: Douglas Hogg, Conservative, who is an Earl and who claimed for cleaning the moat on his castle; Conman Conway, who was thrown out of the Tories after overpaying his sons on his taxpayer-funded allowances to work as a parliamentary researcher, when in fact he had done zip all; Stephen Byers, Geoff Buffon Hoon and Patricia Hewitt, who were nabbed in the same cash for access scandal that Moran the moron was caught out in, all got the top whack as did Des Browne (imagine that... after being as useless as he was) and John Reid.

Then there was Andrew MacKay, who fiddled by registering his MP wife’s second home as his main address, thereby having 2 second homes in the family, and the unlovely David Heathcoat-Amory, who claimed for horse manure on his expenses. I wonder he would want to buy that stuff given the fact he spouts it every time he opens his mouth. All of the above claimed £65,000 on top of the money they are all given (£40,000) to wind up their offices and pay off their staff.

Lib Dem Julia Goldsworthy, who lost her seat at the tender age of 31 after five years after she claimed for a £1,200 rocking chair (she must think very highly of her posterior) and who went straight to work as advisor to Danny Alexander at an amazing £74,000-a-year, claimed her share of resettlement money. Greedy bitch.

The money to close down offices (pay rent till end of lease, give staff a small package, pay electricity, gas, etc) is not unreasonable. Money handed to MPs who wanted to go on but were flung out by their constituents, is perhaps permissible, although anyone else wouldn’t get anything like that kind of pay out. However, those who were standing down voluntarily, some over 70, should have got not a penny. Odious Nick Winterton (leaving because he’d be obliged to travel second class with plebs on trains if he stayed) and his unlovely wife, Anne (renowned for her racist jokes about dead Chinese cockle pickers) would have picked up about £130,000 despite the fact that they are in their dotage and planned to go anyway. (Redundancy payments are not normally made to people over the age of 64.)

It’s just another big fat slap in the face for us “ordinary people”. We hardly notice it; we’re used to being treated like David Heathcoat Amery’s estate...covered in manure...all 550 sacks of it.

THE OPPOSITE OF 'NOBLE' IS 'IGNOBLE'

Our last story featured two men who have given a reasonable amount of money from their salaries to charity. Yes, they could afford to do it, but they most certainly didn’t have to. Their acts not only have benefited the charities that they favoured, but will have put pressure on other people in the Edinburgh scene to copy their acts of generosity.

Then there is “Lord” Ashcroft.

He was given a seat in the House of Lords, in the parliament of the UK, in 2000 after agreeing that he would live here and pay tax on his worldwide income. He gave his word to that effect to William Hague, the then leader of the Opposition, who boasted that Ashcroft's decision would benefit the Treasury to the tune of tens of millions of pounds a year.

However, 10 years later, Mr Ashcroft admitted that he had lied to his friend and had, in fact, never bothered to fulfil the conditions of his peerage, safe in the knowledge that, once given, a life peerage cannot be revoked.

Some friend! His actions, or rather inaction, has caused doubt to be cast on the judgement of Hague, who accepted him at his word and did not bother to check that these tens of millions were pouring into the Treasury coffers.

On April 6 of this year, as a result of the revelations in the Daily Telegraph and Times about the criminal activities and near-the-knuckle goings on in “their Lordships’ House”, Labour brought in a new law forcing Lords to pay tax on their worldwide income and assets.

So..... on April 5 of this year "His Nobleness" did what any money grubbing, second rate tightwad would do. He transferred ownership of his main UK company to a trust for the benefit of his children, who otherwise, of course, would be penniless when he died, thus saving the Treasury the bother of collecting millions in tax.

Interestingly, a month before the new law took effect Ashcroft said that he agreed with the new tax rules for the House of Lords. He left out that he didn’t agree with them for himself... only for other lesser lords.

None of this has strictly been illegal. Certainly, putting your money into a Trust so the Treasury can’t get their greedy hands on it, is perfectly legal. Many people have done it, including famously the Wintertons, so that they could avoid tax and continue to receive rent payments on an apartment they now owned (because we had paid the mortgage for them). It’s greedy, it’s despicable and it’s tax avoidance, which the government is pledged to reduce, but it’s legal.

The earlier stuff about lying to the leader of the Opposition in order to have him recommend you for a peerage is also probably not illegal. Ashcroft did some sort of a deal with the Treasury behind Hague’s back so he covered himself there. Our man is far too smart to actually break the law.

But doesn’t it contrast sharply with the previous story of decent men?

No wonder he is set to stand down as deputy chairman of the Tory party. He is not a credit to them, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Cameron had put his foot under the ignoble lord’s fat backside.

BBC’s Panorama, tonight at 8.30 is entitled “Lord Ashcroft’s Millions”. It should be worth an hour of our lives.

WHAT WOULD YOU SAY TO YOUR MP?

I was vaguely aware of a programme in the background last night about MPs and ...well, I wasn’t paying much attention, but I did look round when Nikki Winterton was asked about the flat that he bought on expenses, then put it in a trust for his children and started charging us rent ....... “I not going talk about that”, he snapped in a plumy voice that just smacked of “I’m better than you”.

Anyway. I got to thinking that very few of them understood just how low most of them had sunk in our esteem: how little we liked them.

I’m lucky. My MP, Stuart Hosie, is a good guy who works hard around the constituency and did nothing wrong in the expenses field. He’s approachable and attends his surgeries and takes part in local activities.

But in general I have little time for MPs. I think that many of them, especially those who have held or do hold ministerial office seem to think that they are, as my gran would say, “Erchie”, belonging to a ruling elite or sorts.

So I thought I’d take this opportunity (knowing that this article will be read by the great and the good) to say....

“You’re not!

“What you are is someone who works for us. You are like our dentist, or our mechanic, our doctor or our stock broker, except in all these cases the person concerned is a professional who has trained to do that job, He is, we hope, an expert in his field. With respect, you are not. You may be a professional elsewhere, but for this specific job, you need no qualifications, or experience. You simply need to be chosen by your party. We elect you to go to Westminster to look after our interests there.

“We sometimes hear MPs whine that they are glorified social workers. Well, it’s true but, if we appeal to you sometimes to try to sort out something out, it is because we have tried already with the DWP or the Council or the Revenue, and we have been fobbed off or just plain lied to. You can get things done. Your letters will go straight to the Area Manager; ours languish in a clerk's in-tray ignored. If we call up we will talk to a junior with no authority, whereas you will talk to the boss, You can get things done. Not because you are you, but because you have the authority of parliament behind you, the portcullis letterhead.

“So, if you hate us bothering you about trivia, go sort out the fact that ordinary people don’t have access to anyone who can make a decision anymore. Therein lies your problem.

“Apart from that remember you are an ordinary person too, and when you stop having “The Hon” in front of your name (whether you deserve it or not) and “MP” after your name, you will be back in the same situation as we are.

“It will take a long time for us to get over the fact that more than half your number have been on the fiddle because they thought that they would never get caught. If you are not one of them, then sorry, but people do tend to get judged en masse, rather like your parties have classed everyone who is unemployed and every single parent as a scrounger. It’s hard and it hurts if it's untrue in your case, but that’s how it goes.

“No hard feelings!”

I’d love to hear what you’d tell (or what you have told) an MP .....

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NICHOLAS WINTERTON: THE GIFT THAT KEEPS ON GIVING

SOMETIMES YOU just have to feel sorry for David Cameron. There he is, poor man, trying to persuade the country that Tories have changed. They are no longer the callous, uncaring, devil take the hindmost party of the Thatcher years, nor are they, despite the high marginal propensity of the shadow cabinet members to have Eton and Oxford somewhere on their CV, the class ridden, snobby, superior party of times even further behind us.

No, Dave’s modern Tories (he’d call them New Conservatives if only someone else hadn’t thought of that) are cutting edge, 21st century, open-minded Co-op loving and inclusive. And then out of the woodwork, and just when you thought his likes had disappeared forever, comes dear old Nicholas Burbling Moron Winterton.

The Wintertons, for there are two of them, have a proud history of being “difficult” from a PR point of view. Nicholas is a hard right winger, pro fox hunting, gay hating, pound loving, Europe hating, and capital punishment loving who came in for criticism recently when he slapped a Labour MP on her bottom. His wife is a nasty old racist, sacked from her shadow position in 2002 for telling an unsavoury joke about throwing Pakistanis from a train, she had the Conservative Whip removed in 2004 for telling making fun of the deaths of 23 Chinese cockle pickers. She said recently that she was glad that Britain was still a white and Christian country. I trust that she didn’t include herself in that category, although she is probably white.

The two of them together perpetrated a particularly devious, underhand fiddle on housing allowances, whereby they put the flat, bought on expenses, into a Trust for their children, and then charged us rent to live in it whilst extracting from us £800 in overpaid Council Tax.

Mr Cameron called them “indefensible”. How going to Eton gives one a gift for understatement!

Dave must have been relieved, then, when they announced that they were to stand down at the election. Under the new arrangements there will be, at least for a while, not much to fiddle. I don’t know if these two facts are in any way connected.

But it seems that Nicholas has decided to embarrass the Tories one more time before he heads off to wherever boring old snobs go in retirement. He announced that it is wrong that MPs will no longer be able to claim for First Class travel.

He said "That puts us below councillors and officers of local government. They all travel first class. Majors in the army travel first class. So we are supposed to stand when there are no seats ... I'm sorry, it infuriates me."

Awwwwwwwwwwww. Poor wee thing.

Incredibly he went on to complain that standard-class passengers were a totally different type of people, who looked over one’s shoulder and made a noise and had children..... ARGH!

You can hear an interview he did with Radio 5 Live, here. It really is worth a listen if you like a good laugh.

If ever there is a way for the Tories to lose the next election then Winterton is it. Were I the chairman of the Labour Party I’d be asking him and Mrs Winterton if they wanted to do a few wee interviews.

I think it’s only fair to point out that a Conservative spokesman suggested that Winterton was “out of touch”. Out of touch? Off the planet more like.

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