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.]

 

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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.

 

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[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.

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10/04

 

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www.eutruth.org.uk

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www.thewestminsternews.co.uk

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www.speakout.co.uk

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Daniel Hannan - Forming an OPPOSITION to the EU

www.telegraph.co.uk.blogs

 

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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?