Politicians enjoying lavish and dubious expenses from
public funds and a media cowed in silence. No, not the old USSR but Britain
today.
An
article by Stephen Glover of the Daily Mail on Tuesday. October 26, 2004 has uncovered the
underlying sickness of our once respected and honourable nation state, which
has become almost terminal over the past five years and can only be changed if
all those truthful and honourable subjects will combine to oust the wasteful
trash from our seat of Government.
Furthermore
it is now quite clear why there has been so little reaction by the majority of
our overpaid Representatives on matters of which we would have expected a more
violent encounter.
But
then we have all been proved right that in the main most of the useless
parliamentarians are only in it for the money and wait for the day when they
can take up their even more lucrative posts in the EU.]
* *
ON THE MAKE
AND ON THE TAKE
Why
have the media not made more of the revelations about MP’s expenses?
Why
no howls of outrage?
With a few honourable exceptions, newspapers and broadcasters have
treated the issue as one of little importance.
Ordinary people feel differently. According to a weekend opinion poll, 82 per
cent of respondents believe that members of Parliament claim too many in
expenses. But we don’t need polls to
tell us that in a resigned sort of way most electors are incredulous that MP’s
can knock up such astronomic amounts.
Over
the past five years their expenses have doubled, thanks to New Labour’s
generosity with [OUR] money.
Have you noticed any improvement in the
administration of our country?
Does
anything work better?
Of
course not.
These
extra expenses have only benefited the MP’s who claim them.
MP’s
work shorter hours than used to and enjoy holidays as long as ever. Much of the legislation for which they used
to be responsible now emanates from Brussels.
And yet, despite declining responsibility, easier hours and doubtful
efficiency as legislators, they want ever better terms and conditions.
Absurd
No
one expects them to incur costs out of their own pockets, even though that is
what many did 50 years ago. It is
perfectly legitimate for members to claim for staff, for necessary travel and
in many cases, for housing expenses.
But some of them are charging absurd amounts for travel and for second
homes they do not need -or should not ask us to pay for.
I repeat my question:
Why are the media not more exercised?
Remember
the brouhaha around the suggestion that Iain Duncan Smith’s wife, Betsy, had
not done all the secretarial work she had been paid for. Mrs Duncan Smith was later cleared. Yet her alleged misdemeanour trivial in comparison with
some of the MP’s scams we have heard about, preoccupied the media for days.
Part of the answer is that the most egregious examples of
exorbitant claims are found on the Labour benches. Of the 20 most costly members, 16 are Labour. And only one is a
Tory. Even allowing for three times as many Labour MP’s as there are
Conservative, this represents an extraordinary imbalance.
Labour members come top of nearly
every expenses league.
The
MP with the highest claim is Labour: Clair Curtis-Thomas (who she) managed to spend
£168,889 in expenses.
Another
obscure Labour MP. Slobhain McDonagh, spent £31,845 on postage, which suggests she sent
113,732 first –class letters on parliamentary business in a single year. Her
secretary must be suffering from repetitive strain injury.
But
it is the extravagant use of public funds among some Cabinet members that is
most troubling-and, which largely explains why there has been no media
assault. Tony Blair and his colleagues
may no longer be greatly loved, but there is a general assumption that they are
going to be around for as far ahead as we can see, and that there is nothing to
be gained from being at loggerheads with them now.
How
different it was ten years ago when every financial (or other) irregularity
among Tory MP’s was mercilessly attacked by the Press- and rightly so. I am not suggesting that any member of the
Cabinet has done anything that can be compared to receiving wads of money in
brown envelopes, as the Tory MP Neil Hamilton was alleged to have done from
Mohamed Fayed. But I am suggesting that Tony Blair, Margaret Beckett and John
Prescott-to name just three-each has a serious case to answer.
Mr Blair has claimed £43,000 over two years in respect
of his constituency home, which cost him £30,000 –20years ago.
Earlier this year he took out a mortgage on this
property, Myrobella House, probably to free up some cash to help him buy his
new £3,000,000 home in central London.
The
taxpayer is in effect subsidising his mortgage on Myrobella House while Mr Blair purchases a London
property.
Can this possibly be right? The Prime Minister’s defence is that Myrobella House is partly
used as an office. I doubt that £43,000
over two years is the going rate for a small office in the heart of Co. Durham. The price would be much less. The point is
that although Mr Blair is paid £178,000 a year, he feels it necessary for the
taxpayer to help him service a mortgage on a property that had already been
paid for.
Profligate
Margaret
Beckett’s case may even be worse. Tha Environment Secretary has a
grace-and-favour flat in the Admiralty. (WHY?) She is able to rent out her
former Westminster home for an estimated £20,000, on which the mortgage was
paid off five years ago. Yet she has
claimed more than £50,000 in respect of this property over the past three
years.
What
is this money being spent on? She does not say. Possibly it is painted, and
repainted, like Forth Road Bridge. Its
radiators may be on night and day. Cleaners may buff up its windows. All the same, £50,000 over three years is a
lot of money. Why should we pay a penny of it? A spokesman for Mrs Beckett
will only say that the claims’were within the rules’. If so, the rules were
drawn up by profligate madman. [Can we have the name –PLEASE?]
And
then there is ‘Two Jags’ Prescott. Like Mrs Beckett he occupies a grace –and –favour
flat in the Admiralty, and he also has an official country house Dorneywood,
complete with 214 acres. But it is not
good enough for him to have the taxpayer shelling out for these two
properties. He also claimed £20,057
last year to help him keep his own home, Prescott Towers, ticking over.
Mansion
If all this came from a history of the Soviet Union, we
would not be surprised. Of course,
Comrade Prescott has to have a country dacha.
Naturally Comrade Beckett may need help with her own property. As for Comrade Blair, a man of his eminence
should have a large mansion in London.
We should joyfully contribute to the cost of keeping Myrobella House
which, truth to tell, given its geographical position in a deeply unfashionable
part of the country; he would rather not visit at all.
But
we don’t live in the Soviet Union. We live in Britain, where so we once thought;
politicians do not feather their nests at public expense, where once people did
not enter public life to make money.
Politicians like to talk a great deal about the gulf between the governors
and the governed. They like to say how
they and the public must re-connect.
How
is that possible when the politicians ‘ behaviour only serves to increase
disbelief? Perhaps we should not expect too much of those MP’s who fiddle their
expenses by sharing cars as they return to there constituencies, while each
charging an exorbitant 57 pence a mile.
These people constitute our new political class; careerist self-seeking
and none too honest.
By
we should expect much, much more of Tony Blair and other members of the Cabinet.
They should know better. They already enjoy immense privileges. They rightly
fear the public’s cynicism and its distrust of the political process. And yet blessed with a mostly compliant
media, they engage in demeaning fiddles, which in any other walk of life would
be regarded as THEFT.
* * *
[Fonts
altered-bolding used-comments in brackets]
[As
we have said over the past ten years to those who exclaim the advantages of the
European Union and in turn the prospects for a World Government that it is in
the nature of the objectives that encourage the same self –seeking politicians
and their cronies to feather their own nests.
What
is self-evident is how low political integrity and honesty has fallen in our
country since joining the EEC over thirty years ago. With the other countries
some who have a culture of corruption now joining the Brussels Gravy Train it
is time the voters in this country used their vote to make a clean start with a
new Party such as the UKIP with no track record of profiteering at the expense
of the People.
* * *
10/04
*
www.eutruth.org.uk
*
www.thewestminsternews.co.uk
*
www.speakout.co.uk
*
Daniel Hannan - Forming an OPPOSITION
to the EU
www.telegraph.co.uk.blogs
*
VOTE
MAY -2007
TO
LEAVE
THE
EUROPEAN
UNION
WITH THE ONLY PARTY WITH A MANDATE
TO SET YOU
FREE
THE
UK
INDEPENDENCE PARTY
www.ukip.org
TO RECLAIM YOUR DEMOCRACY DON'T VOTE
FOR THE TRIPARTITE PARTIES IN WESTMINSTER
BUT
SMALL PARTIES THAT SPEAK THEIR MINDS
WITHOUT SPIN AND LIES.
*
ONLY
PRO-PORTIONAL
REPRESENTATION
WILL
BRING
DEMOCRACY
BACK
TO
THE
ENGLISH
PEOPLE
*
Home Rule for
Scotland
WHY NOT
HOME RULE for
ENGLAND
*
MAY/07
[All underlined words have a
separate bulletin
THE QUESTION THAT THE VOTER MUST ANSWER
‘DO YOU WISH TO BE GOVERNED BY YOUR OWN PEOPLE, LAW AND CUSTOM OR BY
THE CORRUPT ,EXPENSIVE UNACCOUNTABLE AND ALIEN BUSYBODY BRUSSELS’
-SIMPLE IS IT NOT?