So for offering to change legislation for cash, and then for lying to the committee investigating it with a story they called “Wholly implausible”, Lord Scumbag Taylor of Blackburn has been suspended for a whole six months – for 50% of which the Lords is on holdiay anyway!!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8060003.stm

It is another symptom of the failure of the Establishment to understand that the public really are furous at their easy tolerance of corruption among their number.

Taylor has been doing this for years, making millions of pounds as a “Consultant” and “Director” for numerous companies which depend on government contracts, particularly in the defence industry, but he also has a major financial interest in the government’s crazed authoritarian ID card scheme.

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2007/08/more_lord_scumb.html

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2007/08/theres_good_mon.html

So in the autumn Taylor will be back in the Lords, peddling Jack Straw’s influence again.

It has been a comparatively good couple of days. While there is little justice, at least there is exposure of some of the criminals that this blog has been pursuing for years. Tessa Jowell paid off her mortgage – three times – with money given to her husband by Blair’s friend Berlusconi, as a reward for lying for him in court.

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2006/02/normality_and_t.html

That is undoubtedly true, and has been again confirmed by Italian judges.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/8058206.stm

The fact that Jowell is still a minister is quite astonishing, and again says a great deal about New Labour’s toleration of corruption. She still maintains a pretence of having separated from Mills. Berlusconi is no doubt engaged in his normal bribery and threats of the Italian judiciary to keep Mills from having to serve his sentence. I do hope that he fails, and that the Jowells are genuinely separated, for the four and a half year jail term at least.

The memories of political commentators are short. It is remarkable how little the name of Elizabeth Filkin has featured in discussion of the current massive sleaze revelations.

The outcry against Commons sleaze at the end of the Major government led to a toughening up of regulation. The Blair government found this inconvenient, particularly when standards commissioner Elizabeth Filkin was investigating ministers Geoffrey Robinson, John Reid and Keith Vaz.

So Blair and Martin forced her out, replacing her with someone more compliant, on a markedly lower salary and with less resources to do the job.

The culture of sleaze and corruption did not accrue accidentally and innocently. It was entered into quite deliberately, and New Labour ruthlessly eliminated obstacles to corruption.

This is the BBC interview Filkin gave as she was forced out:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/olmedia/1690000/audio/_1693146_filkin08_filkin.ram

One particularly egregious abuse of MPs’ allowances is not covered by the interim measures Lord Martin-in-waitng announced yesterday as agreed by the party leaders.

The additional cost (or second home) allowance exists in theory to cover the extra cost to an MP of having to maintain a home in both their constituency and at Westminster.

But there is nothing preventing an MP from maintaining their main home somewhere else entirely, and then claiming a second home either in their constituency or in Westminster. Most of us expect to have to move to our place of work. MPs don’t have to do that.

This practice of having the main home somewhere else completely is apparently quite common. That must be true, because we have the word of the great Iain Dale for that (or Dorries Dale as he will henceforth be known here). He told us in a comment on this blog:

Craig, there are many MPs who don’t have their first homes in Westminster or in their constituencies. It can be for a number of reasons. In her case it was to do with her family.

I’ve made clear that if it was me I would have my main home in the constituency, as I promised in North Norfolk. But what is right for one individual might not be right for the other. Surely the point is that any claim on the taxpayer has to be for a consituency home or in Westminster. Margaret Moran’s was neither, which is why you were wrong to draw the analogy. Perhaps you’d be good enough to admit that.

Now it seems to me that, if people are stupid enough to elect an MP who won’t live in the constituency, we can’t stop that. But I can see no reason at all why the taxpayer should pay for a second home anywhere, for an MP who insists on having their main home neither in Westminster nor in their constituency.

(The case of Nadine Dorries is an example of this and in fact still worse. She did in fact have her main home in the constituency, but Nadine Dorries lied about it and pretended her main home is in the Cotswolds, in order to defraud the taxpayer of a great deal of money for her “Second home”).

http://www.bloggerheads.com/archives/2009/05/aca_nadine_dorries.asp#comments

This system of absentee MPs funded by the taxpayer is a major abuse and must be stopped immediately.