Melanie Phillips: Our Democracy's Going Down the Plughole with the Home Secretary's Dirty Bathwater
Luton South MP Margaret Moran claimed £22,500 of taxpayers' money for treating dry rot in a house in Southampton, many miles from her constituency or Westminster. Photo courtesy of MailOnline
MAIL Online: They still just don't get it, do they. With details continuing to pour out about the epic abuse of Parliamentary expenses, MPs are displaying about as much ethical sensibility as the lumps of meat they have charred on their ill-gotten barbecues.

The details and scale of what they were up to are beyond belief.

'Flipping' the designation of their main and second homes to manipulate the expenses system to their advantage and to avoid paying various taxes.

Claiming help with mortgage payments for houses that were already paid for.

Getting the taxpayer to reimburse them for eyeliner, plastic bags, nappies, mock Tudor beams, Maltesers, nail polish, plasma TVs, Christmas tree decorations, horse manure, bath plugs; and on and surreally on.

Yet in the face of such baroque dishonesty, MPs claim that the real villain is the media for publishing the leaked details. So they've set the police on to probing the disclosures. But if the police should be investigating anyone, it's surely the MPs themselves.

Outrageous

Not, it seems, in the parallel universe of Westminster. According to MPs, none of them has behaved immorally. Not one. None of them should be censured or lose the party whip, let alone be prosecuted.

Instead, utterly deaf to the mounting public fury this is causing, they are coming up with one excuse after another.

Apparently, something called 'the system' - which, it seems, has nothing to do with them - is to blame. But the 'system' is simply what the MPs themselves devised.

Like sheep, they all went along with these scams, so that's supposed to make them all right. 'It wasn't my fault, m'lud, that I claimed for a barbecue - it was the system.' Sounds awfully like 'I was only obeying orders' in another era.

In a kind of spivs' chorus, they whine in unison that it was all 'within the rules'. But rules can be manipulated for corrupt or otherwise indefensible ends.

Luton South MP Margaret Moran claimed £22,500 of taxpayers' money for treating dry rot in a house in Southampton, many miles from her constituency or Westminster. She justifies this on the outrageous grounds that her partner works in Southampton and it is 'her right' to have a family life with him.

Her right?

Other people cope with this kind of messy situation every day, paying for it out of their own pocket. Why should Ms Moran imagine it is her right to be paid for doing the same thing? >>> Melanie Phillips | Monday, May 11, 2009

THE TELEGRAPH: Alan Duncan Claimed Thousands for Gardening: MPs' Expenses

Alan Duncan, the senior Conservative MP who oversees the party’s policy on MPs’ expenses, claimed thousands of pounds for his garden – but stopped after agreeing with the fees office that his expenditure “could be considered excessive”.


Mr Duncan’s gardening claims raise serious questions about whether expenses by some MPs can be justified as entirely necessary for their parliamentary work. In a three-year period, he recouped more than £4,000. He has not been asked to repay the money despite later concerns over the garden claims.

The bill for £3,194 for gardening in March 2007 was not paid by the fees office, which wrote to Mr Duncan suggesting that the claim might not be “within the spirit” of the rules.

However, by then the multi-millionaire MP for Rutland and Melton had claimed £4,000 of gardening costs that were approved. In a letter to the MP, the office said that it expected gardening costs “to cover only basic essentials such as grass cutting”. Mr Duncan submitted receipts showing that his gardener was being paid £6 an hour for up to 16 hours a week in grounds of less than an acre.

In March 2007, Mr Duncan claimed £598 to overhaul a ride-on lawn-mower and then a further £41 to fix a puncture a month later.

Mr Duncan also claimed £1,400 a month for his mortgage interest on his home in Rutland. He bought the large detached house without taking out a mortgage on the property itself in January 1992, shortly before he was elected to parliament.

However, it was not until January 2004 that a mortgage was secured against the property. >>> By Holly Watt | Sunday, May 10, 2009

THE SPECTATOR: A Parliament of Thieves

Like any sensible person I've been thoroughly amused and appalled by the scandal of MPs expenses. Appalled because the extent of MPs' avarice is sufficient to shock even an iron-souled cynic; amused because watching MPs try to justify their gluttonous appetite for taxpayer-funded freebies affords a certain pleasure that one might consider vindictive if only it weren't so entirely merited. This isn't a tragedy, it's a stinking farce.

The dreary pretense - duly repeated by every sticky-fingered parliamentarian - that it is all ok because "no rules were broken" could hardly be more priceless. Nor could it do more to underline the essential fact that these people are fools who in turn treat the public as though they are fools themselves. Only the blindest dolt would think that boasting of obeying the rules might minimise the public's entirely-justified sense of outrage (a wrath that is, I suspect, under-appreciated at Westminster and in the media) when it is the laxness of the rules themselves that occasions so much incredulity and anger.

For it is now clear, if it weren't before, that we are governed by a parliament of thieves for whom no expense is too small or too trivial to be borne by the taxpayer. These knaves and charlatans are strangers to shame and decency. Astonishingly, they make journalists and estate agents seem paragons of probity by comparison. Who'd have thunk that possible? >>> Alex Massie | Monday, May 11, 2009

Greed. Unadulterated Greed!
THE TELEGRAPH: Andrea Orcel, a London-based banking executive who worked for Merrill Lynch, is under investigation after receiving $36 million (£25.5m) in pay and bonuses last year.

Andrea Orcel, one of seven senior executives from investment bankers Merrill Lynch, is now under investigation. He received $36 million in pay and bonuses last year alone
Mr Orcel is one of seven senior executives from investment bankers Merrill Lynch subpoenaed by the New York Attorney General over bonuses.

Andrew Cuomo is investigating $3.6 bn (£2.5 bn) in bonuses paid by Merrill shortly before it was bought out by Bank of America (BoA) last September.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Mr Orcel, 45, the company's top investment banker, and nine other colleagues got a total of $209m (£148m) in cash and stocks in 2008 at a time when Merrill's net loss rose to $27.6 bn (£19.5bn) and it had to be bailed out by the American taxpayer.

Mr Orcel has worked on some of the world's biggest investment-banking deals in recent years, including the highly damaging Royal Bank of Scotland takeover of the Dutch bank ABN Amro in 2007, a deal for which he was paid a $12m (£8.5m) bonus.

The doomed deal was one reason why the Government was forced to take a 95 per cent stake in the bank. London Banker to Be Questioned in US over £25m Merrill Lynch Bonus >>> By Nick Britten | Thursday, March 5, 2009

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The Greedy Bastards at ‘Goldmine’ Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch and Dresdner Kleinwort Just Can’t Steal Enough of Your Money!
BANKERS at four City firms have collected bonuses of more than £6.4billion this year, despite the worst financial crisis since 1929, it emerged yesterday.

While the rest of the country struggles under the ravages of the recession, London-based traders at Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch and Dresdner Kleinwort have been notified of their bumper payouts.


They come despite the banks having reported a dramatic fall in profits and the Government bail-out of the banking sector.



Goldman Sachs has taken billions of taxpayer funds, as has Morgan Stanley.



And the huge payouts will hand further ammunition to those critics who blame the greed of bankers for the global economic crisis.



They believe such large bonuses have created a culture of short-termism and recklessness which fuelled the excesses in the run-up to the credit crunch and led to millions of jobs being lost. What Recession? £6.4bn Bonuses for City Bankers >>> By Mark Reynolds and Michael Pickard | Monday, December 22, 2008

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Unadulterated Greed!
THE TELEGRAPH: The two most senior figures in the Church of England have launched outspoken attacks on the excesses of capitalism which they claim have led to the current global financial crisis.

The Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu, condemned the financial traders who made millions by driving down the share price of leading banks as "bank robbers and asset strippers".

In a powerful speech to City bankers on the effects of the credit crisis on Wednesday, he denounced the "Alice in Wonderland" world of global finance where short-sellers profited by laying bets that shares in HBOS would fall in price.

Meanwhile the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, warned in a magazine article that modern devotion to the free market is a form of idolatry and that Karl Marx was right in his analysis of the power of "unbridled capitalism".

The pair's attacks came following a tumultuous week in which four major financial institutions went bust or were taken over, triggering multi-billion pound government rescue plans to steady the markets, after traders targeted banks that had been weakened by exposure to unrecoverable mortgage debts and a reduced ability to borrow money.

The billionaire Wall Street hedge fund manager John Paulson was one of those who made money by betting that the share price of HBOS, Britain's largest mortgage lender, would fall. The activities of such short-sellers - now temporarily banned - led to a collapse in the bank's shares last week and it had to be bought out by Lloyds TSB.

Speaking to the Worshipful Company of International Bankers, Dr Sentamu said: "Those who made £190million deliberately underselling the shares of HBOS, in spite of its very strong capital base, and drove it into the bosom of Lloyds TSB, are clearly bank robbers and asset strippers.

"We find ourselves in a market system which seems to have taken its rules of trade from Alice in Wonderland, where the share value of a bank is no longer dependent on the strength of its performance but rather on the willingness of the Government to bail it out, or rather on whether the Government has announced its intentions so to do." Archbishops of Canterbury and York Blame Capitalism Excesses for Financial Crisis >>> By Martin Beckford, Religious Affairs Correspondent | September 24, 2008

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EU Mideast Policy: Morality and Enlightment or Fear and Greed?
GLOBAL POLITICIAN: The Italian government, it has just come to light, let Palestinian terrorist groups operate freely in its country from the 1970s onward as long as they promised not to attack Italians. As former President Francesco Cossiga explained, the agreement with the PLO and PFLP was that if you "don't harm me... I won't harm you." Thus, these groups could move terrorists and equipment destined for use in murdering [non-Italian] civilians in and out of Italy-protected by Italian security agencies.



In 1995, after PLO terrorists took 545 passengers on the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro hostage (and killed one American passenger), U.S. Navy fighters intercepted the escaping gunmen's flight and forced it to land in Italy. The Italian government was so eager to avoid trouble with Arafat that it let their leader escape and soon freed most of the terrorists as well.



Yet this is hardly new or unique. It was long known that France followed a similar policy and so, at least at times, did Britain. In 1969 British policy, as one official put it in an internal document was "to distinguish between Fatah, which is going out of its way to emphasize its disapproval of wanton terrorism, and the PFLP, a small group which does present a threat." Another British diplomat urged London not to offend Fatah and the PLO since they were powerful and "may one day be a government." One would never guess that at the time Fatah was staging terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians; was the PFLP's close ally; openly declared it would wipe Israel off the map; was subverting Jordan's government, Britain's closest Middle East ally; and would within a little more than a year launch a massive international terrorist campaign against British targets.



It is not surprising then, that the PLO came to believe terrorism was a no-risk strategy and that it had infinite time in which to wage his revolution. No wonder, too, did terrorism become such a popular strategy in general from the 1960s down to the present day.



But there's another point to be made here as well. European countries and much of the elites there and in the United States claim that they sympathize with the Palestinians-or at least are far more critical of Israel-due to a sympathy with the underdog and a higher knowledge about how peace can be made and extremism defused. In fact they are motivated far more by fear (of being attacked themselves) and greed (for trade to the Arabic-speaking world and Iran). EU Mideast Policy: Morality and Enlightment or Fear and Greed? >>> By Prof. Barry Rubin | September 1, 2008

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Endemic Corruption at the Top in Business and Politics, and the Unfairness of the System
Never in the history of the world has so much been earned by so few; and never in the history of the world has there been so much corruption.

Nowadays, we hear about corruption at the top all the time; indeed, almost on a daily basis, we hear some new titbit about the goings on of this CEO or that, or this politician or that. Political appointments are handed out based on nepotism and cronyism. Fat salaries are paid to people who have little experience, and sometimes even little understanding, of the positions to which they have been appointed.

We hear about this sort of thing all the time: one day it’s the slush fund that BAE is alleged to have set up, the next, it’s the enormous salary raise awarded to one’s fancy woman, yet another, we hear about the extraordinarily extravagant lifestyle of the gay head of Head of British Petroleum (BP), Lord John Browne, the socialist peer, who, it has been alleged, ran that oil company as though it had been his private enterprise, and who financed an extravagant gay lifestyle beyond any normal person’s wildest dreams: private jets to take the gay couple to the place or country of their whim and choosing; three-thousand-pound bottles of claret for lunches; trips to the Salzburg festivals; and so on and so forth. All, of course, on company expenses. Lord John Browne took the term ’gay lifestyle’ and gave it its full meaning! Pity he didn’t think of giving the term its full meaning out of his own pocket. Indeed, so gay was his lifestyle that his gay French-Canadian lover, Jeff Chevalier, couldn’t keep up with Lord Browne and is said to have had to go into therapy!

The evidence coming to light about the goings on at the World Bank apropos of the shenanigans of Paul Wolfowitz paints a depressing picture of corruption at the very top, in places one would hope would be corruption-free. Fat salary increases to one’s bed partner should surely be left to one's colleagues to decide; further, where such vested interests lie, they should be handed out by those other people on the basis of merit, and merit alone.

Then we have all those millions which are said to have been laundered in Switzerland to pay members of the royal family of Saudi Arabia in return for contracts and extensions of contracts pertaining to the Al-Yamamah contract which Mrs Thatcher initiated many years ago. It was a very large contract even then; now it is colossal. Funny that the name of the contract - Al-Yamamah- has such a whiter than white name; for in Arabic, the name means ‘the dove’. Doves, as we all know, have such a pure, often white, connotation. There seems to be little white and pure about the goings on behind the scenes between BAE and the Saudi government. Anyone would think that those already fabulously wealthy Saudi princes needed even more money!

The funny thing is that there are hundreds and hundreds (maybe even thousands and thousands) of ex-employees of BAE who have been treated shabbily. BAE is famous for its bad treatment of any employee who happens to fall foul of their autocratic management style. How many innocent ex-employees of BAE have had their careers washed up because of BAE, I wonder? How many lives has BAE destroyed? How many sacrificial lambs have there been since the inception of this so-called Al-Yamamah contract? One can only hazard a guess.

Then we have the Bush-Saudi connection. The relationship between these two parties seems most unhealthy to me and to many I know. Bush keeps harping on about terrorism and the need to win the war against it. Have you noticed, though, that he avoids calling that same terrorism by its proper name: Islamic terrorism? One can only wonder why.

The sad thing about the ‘war on terror’ is that Bush is all for beating it on the one hand, but on the other is allowing the Saudis to pump untold millions, nay billions, into the US to finance the propagation of Wahhabi Islam, known to be the most pernicious brand of Islam around. On this score, Bush speaks with bifurcated tongue. So Islam-friendly have his policies been over the time he has been in office that Islam has grown in the States like never before. Doesn’t the president realise that Islam is out to destroy the US constitution? Does he not realise that Islam and democracy are totally and utterly incompatible? Does he not realise that Islam is as much a political system as it is a religious one? Can Mr Bush really be that naïve? Or is there something else going on behind the scenes which we, the ordinary people, just don’t get to hear about?

Then we have the vast inequalities of wealth created here in the United Kingdom by no less than a so-called socialist government under Tony Blair’s watch. It has recently been reported that the top echelons of society have seen their riches increase threefold in the past decade! And they call that socialism! That’s ‘Champagne socialism’ if ever I saw it.

Now don’t get me wrong, I am no friend of socialism. Socialism is one of the worst forms of government ever dreamed up by any political thinkers. But nor am I in favour of a form of unbridled capitalism which treats people unfairly. It cannot be right for foreigners to be allowed to come to this country and not be taxed on their earnings from abroad, when ordinary people, you the voters, have to be taxed on any small amount of money you might be able to earn from that self-same source.

In London, there are many who have to slave away for a full week for as little as £400, and often less, whereas there are the fat cats who earn upwards of £46,000 in that very same week!

If the corruption I have referred to is allowed to continue, then we should not be surprised if one of these days the people will turn on the people who govern them. Nor should we be surprised if the pendulum will swing in the favour of socialism in the years to come. Even the very best of parties come to an end, sometime. Our politicians should be aware that people’s tolerance is not infinite. It used to be said that poverty was the breeding ground of communism. In those days, they were speaking of absolute poverty, of course. But I should like to add that relative poverty could also one day become the breeding ground of communism. We should all be aware that this is a distinct possibility. Fairness still counts for something. No sensible person wants to live in a political system that treats the rich differently from the poor. Any country that legislates so much in favour of the rich at the expense of the poor is heading for political turmoil. Those odious systems of government – socialism and communism – are not dead; they are simply lying dormant. And in some countries, most notably in Venezuela, we can see extreme socialism beginning to raise its ugly head even as I write this.

Capitalism is by far the best political system around; though it is far from perfect. The greatest weakness in capitalism is that it plays to man’s greedy nature. In years gone by, this wasn’t such a problem, since in years gone by, the influence of the Church and Christianity were far greater: they acted as a counterbalance to man’s greed, and checked people’s lack of principle, thereby keeping corruption, nepotism, and cronyism in check. Alas, in today’s increasingly secular world, there are few such checks and balances. The Western capitalist world has become a ‘free for all’: you take what you can, when you can.

Corruption, nepotism, cronyism, unbridled greed – these are the sad realities of life in the twenty-first century.

©Mark Alexander