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 MailOnlineMAIL 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.
OutrageousNot, 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 ThievesLike 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
