UK News

MPs’ expenses: rubbing it in?

Fury, resentment and a general feeling of being hard done-by is reported to be the prevailing mood amongst MPs as they reconvene after the Summer break to find brown envelopes of an unwelcome sort waiting for them.

These are the already infamous “Legg letters,” the latest symbol along with duck houses, moats and mole-catchers of the expenses scandal which did so much damage to all parties earlier this year.

Written as a result of the inquiry headed by former civil servant Sir Thomas Legg, they assess the expenses claimed by each MP between 2004 and 2008 and, where anomalies have been found, they either demand repayment or clarification.

Gordon Brown is to pay back 12,415 pounds, Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg 910 pounds and SNP leader Alex Salmond 700 pounds. David Cameron has been asked to provide more details about his mortgage repayments.

But three things have particularly annoyed backbenchers.

The first is that Legg has imposed  retrospective limits on various categories of expenses that the MPs themselves obviously cannot have known about at the time. He has said the maximum allowable for cleaning for example is 2,000 pounds and that for gardening 1,000 pounds, according to newspaper reports.

The second is the perception at Westminster that those MPs who made the really big claims, the ones on mortgage payments, are getting away with it. Saying “sorry” seems to be enough, as in the case of former Home Secretary Jacqui Smith.

Was Norwich North just a local protest vote?

At 27, the Conservative candidate in the Norwich North by-election Chloe Smith becomes the youngest MP in the Commons.

She turned Labour’s 5,000-plus majority in the seat into a 7,348-vote winning margin and keeps the Conservative bandwagon rolling. The election had been forced by the resignation of Labour MP Ian Gibson, who claimed almost 80,000 pounds in second home expenses on a London flat which he later sold at a knock-down price to his daughter.

What do you make of the result? Was this a clear message to Labour about its policies and its leader Gordon Brown or a protest against the ruling party in the wake of the MPs’ expenses scandal?

Duck soup

Last week it was pigs who saw their image dragged into the mire as they became symbols of the MPs’ expenses scandal. Now it’s the turn of the ducks.

Ducks are waddling all over the newspapers today after the revelation that Tory MP Sir Peter Viggers claimed 1,645 pounds for a so-called “Stockholm” pond house to give his ducks shelter from foxes and the cold.  

Cartoonists have had a field day.

Matt in the Daily Telegraph has two ducks surveying their aquatic pavilion with one saying to the other: “do you think we could fit a plasma TV in there?”

Steve Bell in the Guardian has two “sitting ducks” dressed as MPs in the line of fire of the Department of Work and Pensions’ campaign to target benefit thieves.

In the Daily Mail, Mac has a pair of ducks sipping champagne on the pavilion deck with one observing: “Make the most of this. Our man is being forced to stand down at the next election.”

Tim in the Independent has a couple of people sitting in front of a TV which features the words “Out for a duck” with one asking the other: “Is that the cricket score or another Tory MP?” 

The BNP at Buckingham Palace

The British National Party (BNP) says its leader Nick Griffin is planning to attend a garden party at Buckingham Palace next month, hosted by the Queen.

All members of the London Assembly have been invited, and since last year they include the BNP’s Richard Barnbrook. He wants to bring Griffin as his guest.

Party spokesman Simon Darby says on the party’s website: “The anti-British people who object had better start getting used to the idea because if we get elected MEPs, this is the kind of thing we are going to be doing on a regular basis.”

The Daily Mirror calls the garden party idea a “vile publicity stunt” and the anti-fascist group Searchlight said many BNP members have been convicted of violence and racial harassment. “On security grounds alone, Griffin should be denied access,” it declared.

Support for the anti-immigrant, anti-Europe group has never historically been strong in this country but with the recession taking a toll and the existing political parties having been shamed by the MPs’ expenses scandal, the BNP is hoping to do well in the June 4 European elections.

Do you think it should have the right to attend the garden party?

Speaker Martin: scapegoat or villain?

Michael Martin, Speaker of the House of Commons, is under pressure like never before and news reports say he might even announce his departure on Tuesday afternoon.

The chief officer and highest authority of the House has become a lightning rod for the strong current of anger swirling around Westminster as the row over MPs’ expenses rumbles on.

Never a Fleet Street favourite, Martin has suffered a particularly bad press this month. Quentin Letts in the Daily Mail described Martin’s behaviour, after a statement on expenses last week, as a “puce-cheeked, finger-wagging, dooon’t-you-cross-me-Jimmy tantrum, improper from any chairman of a parish meeting, let along the Speaker of a Commons in crisis”.

Simon Hoggart in the Guardian wrote after Martin’s Commons statement on Monday: “it was gruesome, horrible, pathetic and miserable. The Speaker resembled a boxer totally outfought, tottering numbly around the ring, barely aware of what was happening, staggering into his opponent’s fists, somehow upright, but swaying. He is a dead man reeling. In any humane venue, the referee would have stopped the fight. But he is the referee! And he’s not stopping anything!”

Liberal Democrat Leader Nick Clegg says Martin should go, otherwise he will die a death by a thousand cuts. 

But his supporters in the Labour Party say the Speaker is being made a scapegoat for the excesses of MPs on all sies of the House.

 What do you think? Is he being unfairly hounded out?   

Echoes of Italy’s Clean Hands revolution

The shockwaves reverberating through Westminster as the MPs’ expenses scandal unfolds have been compared with the “Clean Hands” bribery scandal that effectively demolished Italy’s post-war political establishment in the space of a couple of years in the early 1990s.

If things are going to get that bad, the guilty politicians are going to have an uncomfortable time.

As a reporter in Rome at the time, I remember how surprise turned to anger then just as it has now as the public began to realise the sheer extent of the corruption that was helping to line the pockets of the country’s leading politicians and their parties.

The morning newspapers brought fresh revelations almost daily of how the main political parties routinely demanded kickbacks in return for government contracts. There were the “golden sheets” for example in which invoices for linen and bedding were inflated to thousands of pounds, and the exorbitant demands placed on suppliers to hospitals, which caused particular anger.

People used to demonstrate in the streets wearing white gloves to show they had clean hands. They would try to scare MPs they felt were corrupt by sending them spoof versions of the ”avviso,” the official notice that warned potential offenders they were under investigation. The avviso itself became one of the enduring symbols of the scandal, almost like the guillotine in revolutionary France. Reproductions of it used to sell well as birthday and Christmas cards.

Another favourite amng the angry public, if any disgraced politician dared show his face his public, was to mockingly shower them with coins.

Such was the fate of one of those held to have been most deeply involved in the corruption, Socialist leader Bettino Craxi, who was forced to flee to his second home in Tunisia to escape jail in Italy. Other disgraced politicians and businessmen even took their own lives.

Let’s hear it for the pigs

It’s been a grim time for pigs.

First they were blamed for the swine flu that caused a worldwide stir after it was discovered in Mexico — and now everyone’s likening them to Members of Parliament with their snouts in the trough.

But look at the facts. The genetic make-up of the virus may have been predominantly porcine but the pigs themselves didn’t have it. Even at the supposed epicentre of the outbreak in Mexico they showed no symptoms — things reached such a state that owners of some pig farms in the US were stopping humans coming near them in case they infected their animals. The pigs were innocent OK?

And yet the name “swine flu” stuck, lots of people stopped eating pork and in Egypt they were even culled.

Now this. The image changes from dirty to greedy as all the cartoonists portray our expenses-hungry MPs as curly-tailed pinstriped pigs, shedding wads of notes from their pockets as they pile into the trough.

Experts say pigs are in fact sociable, clever animals. They clear ground, fertilise it, eat vegetable waste and then make the ultimate sacrifice for our bacon sandwiches.

As the fashion of the moment seems to be saying “sorry” for everything, perhaps we should offer our apologies to the pigs — what about a statue of a Gloucestershire Old Spot on the vacant plinth in Trafalgar Square?