Be Excellent To Each Other

I was going to post about how shocked - shocked! - I was to learn that MPs of all parties have been fiddling their expenses but in the end just found myself thinking of this:

All this stuff about MPs' expenses is both very funny and very sad.

yes, always great to see Taxpayers money wasted...

I'm annoyed that half the coverage is "haha - look at the man who expensed £3 for a box of tampax!", rather than concentrating on the actual massive scale of defrauding that the MPs as a whole have been carrying out on the taxpayer.

Also that vile Blears woman coming on telly and commiserating with the public over how awful it all is, when she was one of the worst offenders.

I agree with Kern, and I think we should use that quote in every comments section of every website of every paper, until it appears on the front page of a national newspaper.

"Cock off, fagballs" would be a hilariously funny alternative, though.

"Won't someone please think of the children".

There's no reason why we can't use both!

Cromwell: "Heads will lol for this!"

It beats having to articulate one's own thoughts. But frankly, I'm bored of it all. At least with the dying days of Major we had sex scandals to amuse ourselves with.

Meanwhile: does anyone know or care what's happening in Afghanistan?

Also, it's a bit too concerned with God, so people might start some kind of new religious revolution.

Or something.

Sky are trying to cut staff salaries and create a news story by repeatedly send Ross Kemp out there.

Hey Ollie! How did the puritanical theocracy work out in the end?

It's. Not. Fraud.

How many times?

The rules are shit, but the vast majority of the allowances used are within the rules. It's only penny ante stuff like Jaqui Smith's porn claim that have been outwith the rules. And frankly I'm prepared to pay for poor Mr Smith to cop one off with himself in recompense for having to live with that ghastly harridan.

If one is given access to an incredibly generous allowances system, which member of the public wouldn't take full advantage of it? Anyone who says no, and especially any of the workshy, benefits-cheating Sun readers getting so het up about it, is a lying bastard.

Yes, the rules need changing, but to excoriate MPs for using the system they have is completely fucking hypocritical. Especially coming from journalists.

That's not to say they're not all scummy little shits, of course, not least their fighting tooth and nail against the FOI request that kicked this off. And now to report to PC Plod the leak of information which is legally required to be made public - did they learn *nothing* from the Damian Green affair?

100% with you on Blears though, the nasty little shit. As Andy Hamilton said on the News Quiz, she gives shortarses a bad name.

As Portillo pointed out a few weeks back on that Late Night politics thing, when he was a new MP 30 or so years ago he was taken to one side and told how to "use" the expenses system. It was seen by MP's as a way of topping up their salary and everyone was at it. The attitude was that you were entitled to it so you should claim for it.

Be it right or wrong and however long it has gone on for, it is out of hand now.

Yes, that's why it's called an "allowance" rather than "expenses". And the House of Commons fees office or whoever it is would call up MPs who hadn't used their full allowance and asked if they wanted to claim for anything else to take them up to their maximum.



Well, letting them vote on their own reumuneration isn't best clever, no.

You'll notice I said "as a whole". I'm not blaming individual MPs for this, I'm saying that the 'fraud' in question was perpetrated in the creation of a setup which tries to suggest to the populous that the MPs' remunerations are at a decent but reasonable level, whereas in actual fact it takes a (as you rightly say, heavily contested) FOI request to reveal that in some cases they are pulling in six times the reported figure.

I get where you're coming from, but you're still horribly misusing the word fraud, mind.

And in any event, it wasn't secret that MPs had allowances for housing and such. It was the specifics on which they spend that allowance that were kept quiet until recently. The amounts really weren't.

Not as a lay rather than legal definition:

"deliberate trickery intended to gain an advantage"

Sounds about right to me.

Cras - where's the trickery?

People are shocked and amazed, and a FOI request was required. That makes it trickery.

They won by 89 runs

Eh? Are you doing that "not understanding words" thing again?

The allowances regime as a whole wasn't kept secret. Debates on it were in Hansard and such.

The FOI request was required for the receipts, not for the fact that MPs get to claim tens of thousands of pounds a year in allowances.

I posted this in the cricket thread, but was crudely ignored...

I said trickery, not illegally hiding stuff. How much of the population has a fucking clue what Hansard even is, let alone has read any of it? The majority accepted that MPs claimed expenses for stuff like taking taxis to meetings, a reasonable sized amount, but still not the reality of in many cases significantly larger than their salaries.

Deception by omission is still deception.

Get yer fucken cricket out of this thread.

What? So MPs should have been making formal announcements via The Daily Mail of what they were allowed to claim under expenses?

It was all publicly available information - it's not their fault that the average citizen is ignorant of where that information can be found.

Man, imagine you being a history teacher.

"What, Simpkins? You don't know the date the Hundred Years' War started?! It's publically available information, man! It's not my fault you didn't go and find it!"

Less flippantly, there is no valid excuse for the large majority of the expenses claimed. All those MPs have always known that there's no valid excuse for it. Second home allowances for London constituency homes within 10 miles of your 'primary' home? Toilet seats? Yes, most MPs haven't broken 'the rules'. Every single one of them has been knowingly troughing at the taxpayers' expense, knowing full well that there is no oversight committee capable or willing to take them to task about it. If you want to play with semantics, go ahead - but it's fucking inexcusable however you play it.

I absolutely agree with you, of course. Mrs C and I have, since this started, been wondering why MPs aren't just given the price of a night in the Novotel in Lambeth for each night they need to be in London. They don't need a home in London to work from as a permanent base as they've got a very expensive office in Portcullis House for that, and they're only staying an average of three nights a week anyway so they don't need a wardrobe.



Indeed, as all the oversight is done by MPs....



Sorry, I know that's your job so I apologise for stepping on your toes there...



Well, yeah. I still defy anyone to honestly claim they wouldn't do the same, mind.

I quite agree, but that's why I'm not having a go at individual MPs. I know if I did the same, someone would crack down and I'd probably lose my job for it. The MPs know that there isn't a damn thing that can happen to them over this, and that's just wrong.

It is wrong, especially since being an MP is meant to carry with it some moral authority. It is not at all unreasonable to expect them not to take the piss and they fucking well know this which is why they are all being so contrite.

Well no, you wouldn't, not if you were making the claims within the rules that you and your fellow workers drew up.


Yeah, but that applies to everything they do. Our only sanction against them for anything is to vote them out.

But we can't vote out the rules.

Nor can we vote out ID cards, wars in Iraq or detention without trial, but we can vote for MPs and parties who say they will get rid of them.

You do understand how a parliamentary democracy works, dude.

Right. And when the policies in question are to the benefit of every single MP?

Heh. There are enough people happy to jump on any populist bandwagon that it isn't hard to find serving and potential MPs who'd pledge to rewrite the rules.

And then not do it because there's no way of enforcing manifesto promises and the public has the attention span of a kiddy in a sugar factory who hasn't had his Ritalin?

And that's not more of a problem with far bigger and more important things like tax, ID cards, DNA databases etc?

Frankly if the lack of enforceablility of promises and oversight of MPs' voting and behaviour is your issue then I'd be a damned sight more concerned about their effect on the other things than I would about 2 million quid per annum of allowances.

Dude, I'm in a thread called 'MPs' Expenses'.

Yeah, and I'm suggesting that if you're getting that het up about it for the reasons you're getting het up about it then you're really losing perspective.

I'm het up about everything else, too. But in other threads.

I'm thoroughly het, me.

I just can't bring myself to care about this that much. I mean did we really expect anything different? Mark suggesting that MPs should have some moral authority is, without wishing to be rude, either hopelessly idealistic or laughably naive given the history of politics and politicians.

Compared to the constant deaths in the Middle East it's morally tiny, and compared to the billions pissed up the wall at the banks and the VAT cut it's monetarily tiny too.

*shrug*

I'm totally starting the "Wo'eva" party.

Actually, I can't be arsed.

No it isn't, it's the whole reason that it's a scandal. It's the same with sex scandals etc. The fact that it isn't all that surprising shouldn't make it acceptable.

If we only talked about the single most pressing issue in the world right now, it'd be a pretty dull place.

I've told you before, I don't care what the fucking experts say the little buggers carry TB!

Yes it is.



Nooooo. No. That's not it at all. As with Sachsgate the media are the reason it's a scandal. I don't fucking care that much. It's just a bit shit, is all. Certainly not a scandal. "MPs vote themselves fairly generous allowances".



Ditto. Why should I give a flying fuck if David Mellor was playing with another woman's feet? It's just the prurient media who want to get a juicy and embarrassing story. The fact the guy's cheated on his wife has precisely cock all to do with his ability to do his job. The fact that the media can bring people's private lives into the public arena for this sort of thing is what's a scandal. "People have sex" isn't exactly man bites dog as news goes.



I didn't say it should or does make it acceptable. I'm suggesting that given the greater scheme of the current government's perfidy we've got bigger things to worry about than a few quid in the MPs' pockets. And yet this is the main news story on TV, radio and print, and taking up scads of parliamentary time.

And bear in mind if they lost the allowances they'd have to start taking bribes again to take up the difference.



Indeed. Good job no one has suggested any such thing, eh?

They were your Mums.

I'm with Craster and MarkG on this. You squirmy lawyers are all in cahoots with these political ne'erdowells.

Dude, totally re-read my posts. I think the expenses regime should be scrapped and replaced with the price of a night in a Novotel. I just don't think it deserves quite the airtime and effort and expense that's being put into embarrassing a few irritating and scummy people and all the "ooh, I'm so shocked, the idea of "honourable member" has died with this" hypocritical bollocks from people like Nick Robinson who wasn't in the dark about any of this anyway.

No.

Stop trying to kettle me, man.

In the case of Mellor the Tories were banging on endlessly about family values and how society was facing some sort of moral decline. So when a bunch of them get caught sleeping around it kind of renders much of what they say completely meaningless, it really does affect their ability to do their job. As soon as any corruption is exposed then MPs will appear quite rightly spouting about how terrible it is and this has undermined their authority somewhat.

This is nothing like "Sachsgate" which was just a Daily Mail-lead storm in a teacup. This is most of parliament being exposed for filing absurd claims which they all assumed would never see the light of day, the sort of institutional corruption that they would most certainly be taking the moral high ground over had it been exposed somewhere else. They are banged to rights and cannot just sack someone and move on as they usually do when a slip up affords the public a glance into the canteen culture of parliament.