Time for a serious thread.

MP's expenses have been in the news, and rightly so. Some of them are absolutely shocking. Jack Straw for instance, he claimed his council tax (full amount) for his London residence, despite the fact he was receiving a 50% discount. £1500 overpaid! When did he discover this error. . . within weeks of the High Court ruling ordering MP's to release their expenses details. I've just been reading some of them on The Telegraph's website. All in all it's a pretty poor show.

The one silver lining? Watching the slimy tw*ts squirm as they spout out their excuses.

I’m in the wrong game. Roll in to work whenever I want, have two homes and get you lot to pay for one of them...

As I understand it Jacki Smith was claiming that a house she owns was a second residence so she could claim thousands of pound of tax payers money to pay for it. However for tax purposes she said it was her main home to avoid any capital gains tax.
Either way the fraud squad should be knocking on her door right about now. And don't get me started on the £40k she pays her husband with taxpayers money to be her political advisor.

Power corrupts, you know the rest.

In just about every job I've worked in (public and private sector), fiddling my expenses by even a few pence would have been a sackable offence.

How this shower of bastards can claim thousands with a straight face I have no idea...

If people defraud the tax payer of money through the benefits system the often get jailed.

The same should apply to MPs and I can't believe they keep going on about how bad the system is that's allowed them all to do it. They created the frackin' rules in the first place.

Another silver lining, a few weeks ago seeing that young LibDem female MP who appears on quite a few things (her name escapes me) admitting that in theory she could claim for a 2nd home but doesn't because she felt it would be ridiculous as she's not that far away.

A few more should take a leaf out of her book.

Gah! And politicians wonder why people don't trust them.

The sooner MP's pay and expenses are taken out of their control the better.

I would be in favour of them building a nice big MP hostel in London (or a couple of small ones). Yes the initial outlay would be significant but, honestly, given the bill these people are capable of running up when left in charge of their expenses it should pay for itself fairly sharpish.
Alternatively make the buggers rent and set them the same budget as a student for their accommodation

As for travel, I see no possible justification for letting them get away with claiming first class rail fares. Standard class is perfectly acceptable. If they still want first then they can pay the difference.

I noticed the opposition haven't pounced on the opportunity to criticise individual members of the government. They have merely criticised the expenses system as a whole. Obviously, when the official report is released we will see just as many conservatives guilty as we are seeing labour mp's at the moment. The Telegraph's motives are clearly political, feeding us what they want us to know (i.e. guilty labour), though I'm sure tory indiscretions are most likely to be as bad, or if history is anything to go by, significantly worse.

Though it galls me to say it, I don't expect the Tory ones to be quite as bad as the labour ones. The tories have had their own experience with sleaze and appear to have gone to some lengths to reduce it. They won't have succeeded totally of course, they are politicians after all.
This stuff is going to splash on pretty much every political party. Yes the Telegraph are politically motivated but all of the papers are and they should be releasing the other parties dirty secrets in due course. Plus, it's only natural to go for the bods in charge first.

True, true. Though AFAIK the document has only been leaked to the Telegraph. That in itself has all the hallmarks of the tory indiscrestions I would say. It's fair to say it wouldn't be leaked to the Telegraph by anyone affiliated with the Labour party.

Well, I can't argue with that one.

OTOH if a Tory is the source of the leak then they have to be confident that their own house is relatively clean in comparison. My understand is that it was pretty much every receipt for the last several years that were leaked so the Telegraph will sooner or later be compelled to release the whole lot, the sheer volume of information make it rather unwieldy to do it in a oner.

It could also be a disgruntled member of the civil service. Let's face it, they have to be pretty annoyed at how much the credit crunch it affecting their pay and benefits and this is one way to retaliate against the government.

I thought it was touted around Fleet Street by a 'businessman' and the Torygraph simply outbid the competition. They also said they will be dishing the dirt on all the opposition MPs as well. There's not much point in hiding any of it as the information they paid £150,000 will enter the public domain in July anyway.

Close, but if you consider the papers the document was offered too (not all of them, only a select blue few) it's still pretty obvious what colour the leak is. Look at it this way, if the document was officially released then the spotlight would be on all parties equally. This way the spotlight only falls on Labour, and by the time July 1st comes round the damage to labour MP's would be considerable, and public opinion on the subject may have waned by then also.



http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=1&storycode=43607&c=1

Though I hasten to add, I do believe they are ALL as bad as each other.

I think MPs should be forced to pay back the money they have squandered unnecessarily, and if they can't pay, JAIL!

No Govt. is free from corruption (despite what some may say) but the least we can do is force them to root it out, especially in this time of recession/depression/whatever.

You'd think so initially but the base fact is that's not the way the media works. The government and especially the cabinet are a much juicier story than some backbencher, regardless of what party they happen to be in. Remember this story is actually about the abuse of power, and everyone knows you have to be in power to have power.

In pure 'column inch' value, you can probably put things in order like this

Gordon Brown > cabinet ministers > leaders of the opposition parties > junior ministers > shadow cabinet >backbenchers (colour irrelevant).

So if they have information about all of the above groups they way they're likely to play it is to put out some of the really big stuff first, then chuck out the little stuff with the promise of bigger revelations to come. So given we've already had the best groups, you can probably expect something rather boring tomorrow (with a recap of the juicy stuff just in case) and then something on Cameron and Clegg next week to bookend the whole thing.

The one thing editors will take every time over their own political agendas is selling newspapers. The strategy above sells the most papers.

Jon