The latest revelations on MPs’ expenses do more than make absolutely plain that the Tories are every bit as greedy as New Labour. (I am, incidentally, glad to see that after the hammering I gave them yesterday the Tory blogs have today given up their attempt to argue that Tory corruption is somehow less corrupt).
The details of Tory expenses have done a much more important job. They have stripped away any Cameron pretence that the Tories have changed, and have somehow become a party that represents ordinary British people.
Look at the details – upkeep of moats, repair of chandeliers, maintenance of country mansions, manure for the estate, taxpayer coiffured tennis lawns, taxpayer resealed private swimming pools. The Tories rail about abolishing the politics of class and envy, yet palinly their very existence is based upon the defence of the tiny class of the ultra-wealthy from which their political heart is drawn. The mist has lifted and the Tory party is starkly revealed before us in the harshest of lights, as a laager of the upper class.
New Labour may be the most squalid and self-serving of arrivistes. The horribly arrogant, bumptious and self-serving Hazel Blears is a flame haired beacon of semi educated populism, whose desire to please the masses is motivated solely by a primeval urge of personal acquisitiveness. On a one to one basis, the smugly wealthy Tories are actually nicer people to meet than New Labour. They don’t suffer from New Labour’s instinct of rigid authoritarianism to try to secure their rule and access to wealth.
But then they don’t need to.
The Tories have taken money off the taxpayer to maintain their inherited grandiosity with the same insouciance with which they used to take money from the serf. The expenses scandal, and the inability of the hoity-toity sneerers to restrain their own sense of God-given entitlement, has just given us an invaluable reminder of precisely who the Tories are.
They have been hung by their own chandeliers.
So the election is really a vote between the Daddy’s girls and the Mummy’s boys.
Sir,
You do not keep a moat and dredge it yourself.
Hoping this meets with your approval,
Homophobe.
Tories: are Mummy’s boys; they want everything to be as Mummy left it; neat, tidy, proper, and predictable, with no threats to the status quo; their porridge belongs to them and them alone.
Socialists: are Daddy’s girls, they want everything to be as they like it, or Daddy will beat you up; your porridge cannot be eaten until it is judged as proper porridge, to ensure everybody eats the same, Daddy’s girl gets to eat the excess.
And it’s people like you, Craig, who lump together the Tories under some umbrella pretense that we are all like that, that all out political hearts lie in wealth and privilege. That is no more true than it is for me to say that the Labour Party are all old Trots obsessed with class politics and gripped by the jealousy from which they draw their political hearts.
Surely, if anything, they have been hanged not hung?
When Tory boy is good, Mummy gives him seconds.
When Socialist girl is good, Daddy is allowed to visit.
Come on Craig, those old Tory squires are just trying to keep up the estates. Many don’t even count as rich (well, not by John McCain’s definition of having an income above $5,000,000 a year.) Many are not even millionaires,unless you count the capital vlue of the said estates, whereas those who have become rich under Nulabour are billionaires.
Tory boy is big and strong… his Mummy says so, and she should know, she beat up Daddy.
Socialist girl is beautiful and fair… Daddy says so, and he should know, he’s on the sex offenders list.
Since we were running out of metaphors, at least alleged ‘trotters in moats’ is a variation. And to mix them Mother of all Gravy Trains comes to mind.
May I be the first to point out that the capital value of your country estate does indeed count in any estimation of whether you are a millionaire or not.
Meanwhile, I’ve just posted this on Charlie McMenamin’s excellent http://itslifejimbutnotaswknowit.blogspot.com/
It’s very interesting how this scandal is developing. I just assumed it would damage NL more than the Tories, and I assumed that the Torygraph would pull its punches against the Tories. But they haven’t and I’m now wondering (hoping against hope?) that this may be the thing to wake up the public to the fact that the Tories aren’t offering the people any of the change they need, in fact they aren’t offering anything other than the proverbial sh*t sandwich. There must be a latent sense in the Great British public that they are deluding themselves that a Tory govt will be on their side or will be any different from NL except for being worse (new chandeliers rather than new bogseat). Will this crystallise that feeling? Maybe this scandal could be our last chance to avoid sleepwalking into the nightmare of a Cameron landslide.
I do hope that the Greens will do their very best to hoover up the protest votes going absolutely begging on this issue on 4 June.
the nightmare of a [David] Cameron landslide, not a Cameron [Murray] landslide…
This is all good theatre, this pie-chucking, mud-slinging carnival.
But something good might come out of this: the realisation that it is very easy to keep expenses under control: just make sure everyone knows that when you spend public money, the public gets to know about it.
Once you’ve got that rule in place, people will stop claiming for moat repairs pretty quickly. As several newspaper commentators have pointed out today, if private guilt is not enough of a deterrent, public shame usually does the trick.
It’s better than that, though. Moat repairs are fun to mock, but they are not really the cause of the crisis in the public finances. We need to save billions in public expenditure across the board. Party leaders like to announce nice round-number sums of “waste” that can be “saved” from “Whitehall bureaucracy” and so on, and then go around demanding savings/cuts of one billion here, another billion there.
Instead, let’s require ALL publicly-funded institutions (schools, quangos, members of Parliament, local government, Whitehall departments, the NHS, the police, private contractors doing publicly-funded jobs, you name it) to publish their costs, outgoings, and expenses, in detail, and in a way that is meaningful and accessible to the citizen – online and in plain English, not in accountantese.
Then sit back and watch the rotten, rancid blubber of wastefulness wither and die, as the disinfectant of sunlight goes to work.
Oh, and many congratulations on the birth of your son!
It’s good that this gravy train is being derailed.It’s not before time these scamsters were called to account.
However…the most telling/astute commentary i’ve heard all week was by Stephen Fry who pointed out that this expenses brouhaha is small beer compared with the real crimes of our political class e.g. wholly disastrous and false wars/torture/incompetent macro-economic stewardship.
Lets not lose sight of the bigger picture of the true issues facing us.
Congrats on the birth of your son Craig.I wish you all well.
But Craig, the Telegraph hasn’t turned over the Clegg’s crew yet – maybe their ACA abuses won’t be outrageous and we can believe in them…
I think Norman Tebbit’s advice not to vote for any of the main parties is likely to be heeded in the up-coming Euro-Pantomime as a means of showing just how angry people are with the scum.
Although the origin of the term Tory is from the Gaelic toraichean – essentially “footpads” – and is applied nowadays indiscriminately to the Conservatives, actually Toryism as a political outlook is different.
As the Canadian commentator David Warren once wrote, slightly tongue-in-cheek, “…Toryism is the political expression of a religious view of life…Conservatism is an attempt to maintain Toryism after you have lost your faith.” It would seem that the modern Parliamentary Conservative Party has lost its morality too.
Cameron and Co aren’t even Conservatives – they’re Neo-Conservative fanatics of Henry Martin Jackson.
We need a new abusive word for them and for Neo-Labour.
If Tory comes from toraichean, perhaps we should use the Gaelic gadaichean, or “thieves”, giving Gady?
I agree that Fry was spot on. Lost weight too by the looks.
Plus I wonder if Hogg had the draw-bridge serviced aswell? Might need it if the peasants arrive on his moat-step?
I thought Stephen Fry’s comment was shocking. “Small beer” it may be for some, but he seemed to forget he was being watched by people who had recently come from a charity shop looking for a mattress (as an email from a viewer pointed out, I believe).
The impression he left was, “I know a lot of journalists and they’re constantly fiddling expenses. What’s all the fuss about?”
Interesting article in the Financial Times today: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/4f82c43c-3e69-11de-9a6c-00144feabdc0.html
Apparently… “The Tory leader is concerned the revelations about his MPs’ taxpayer-funded lifestyles will make it more difficult for a Conservative government to justify proposed reforms, such as curbs on benefits claimants, to an increasingly sceptical public.”
If this row over expenses means that the Conservatives and New Labour will have to take a momentary break from really crushing the poor then I suppose that’s something positive.
I have just asked Ladbrokes for odds against any MP resigning their seat by 1 June because of the allowances scandal; and for odds against any member of the Cabinet being sacked in the next week for the same reason. They could not quote odds, but recorded my request for Special Odds and will come back to me. I’ll post any reply I get on Craig’s website. If anyone else wishes to try (thus increasing the chances that they or other bookmakers will offer odds), ring Ladbrokes customer services on 0800-032-1133. They reply quickly, far more quickly than most government departments…I wonder why?
I’ve just discovered I will be abroad on 4 June and so have applied on the Direct Gov website to get a postal ballot. Norman Tebbit’s suggestion of not voting for the main parties on 4 June is a coded message to vote UKIP. However, it contains the germ of a far better idea – voting Green in protest. That carries no risk of giving life to a party which hardly deserves it. Given the Green Party’s low baseline, it would also be a far clearer indication of numbers voting to clean the Augean stables. There are negative and positive slogans that fit well – ” Green Against Greed”; “Green For Clean”.
Comments?
People like Ed have fallen hook, line & sinker for the amazing narrative constructed by the bankers in which they lost a cool trillion in the casino, went to the Treasury and were instantly bailed out of their losses with taxpayers money, and then started to make us all believe that “we are all to blame” and 30 years of austerity in our public services is the fair price to pay for our sins.
Stephen Fry is correct about the relative scale of these scandals. The Commons scandal at its maximum cannot be more than 4 years x 600 MPs x £25k = £60m, ie about £1 per person in UK. The bailout of bankers’ gambling losses direct from the taxpayer’s pocket has cost at minimum £60bn, ie £1,000 per person in UK, and of course that is just a low estimate of the direct losses to the taxpayer excluding the cost of the recession to us all.
Just a thought. While we are examing the maintenance of MPs’ excessive lifestyles at public expense, maybe it’s time to have a look at the country house conditions of the top brass who just manage to scrape by on upwards of £200k a year and are forced to have country houses paid for by the taxpayer and servicemen and women to wait on them.
Have Greens, get Nuclear.
@Strategist
Not sure which bankers I’ve fallen hook, line, or sinker for. Any bank being propped up with public money should be top of the list of organisations required to open up their accounts to public scrutiny. The point about public services is that they, like any other organisation, spend some of their money on flab and some on doing good, essential things. If we have to cut spending by (say) 5%, do we prefer top-down cuts imposed by Brown or Cameron from the centre, which tend to fall on essential services, or a bit of “sunlight” scrutiny, which would be more effective at scrubbing out the waste? Are MPs are unique in their creative use of expenses and allowances? Of course they’re not. The point is that many, maybe most, people, will push these things to the limit if they think they can get away with it. Private sector, public sector, whatever sector. Keep doing those multiplications – but there is more to multiply by than just those 600 MPs.
I’m reluctant to follow any advice from Tebbit, but of the smaller europarties Libertas seems the best bet.
Agree with the posters wishing to stress Fry’s perspective on things – torture and mass murder is worse than expenses fiddling. But aren’t they related? I desperately want to use the ‘c’ word here, but in deference to the general tone of Craig’s blog I’ll use an asterisk: Isn’t the behaviour of these *s with their expenses just of a piece with their support of US foreign policy? Isn’t that just the same grovelling to the whip in order to get to get to the gravy? It is the utter absence of any faculty for shame or moral judgement – or, worse – the complete absence of the inhibiting capacity for guilt found in normal people.
Another reference to Spicer; this time the scenario is Northern Ireland in 1992. Reminder that Lord Inge is on the Board of Aegis.
http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/index.php/britain/mcbride_mother_vows_to_take_on_mercenary_firm
I’ve met Stephen Fry and chatted to him for about 20 minutes or so. I found him quite affable. I found his comments yesterday quite disturbing and surprising though. Firstly, not everyone in society is on the fiddle and some folk ‘never’ have been. They would have been dismayed by what he said! Secondly, as an individual, you can’t pick and choose where to apply honesty and decency. You either have those traits or you don’t. People can change, sure, but not overnight. Getting at the roots of our corrupted system will in itself help prevent greater injustices further down the line. The unjust wars etc. are symptoms of our dirty system. Lastly, I thought his words, probably seen by some of the crooked MP’s, would make them feel a lot better and less likely to change! A major problem in corrupt systems is everyone taking a little bit of pie for themselves and thinking it doesn’t matter. It matters.
I’ve met Stephen Fry and chatted to him for about 20 minutes or so. I found him quite affable. I found his comments yesterday quite disturbing and surprising though. Firstly, not everyone in society is on the fiddle and some folk ‘never’ have been. They would have been dismayed by what he said! Secondly, as an individual, you can’t pick and choose where to apply honesty and decency. You either have those traits or you don’t. People can change, sure, but not overnight. Getting at the roots of our corrupted system will in itself help prevent greater injustices further down the line. The unjust wars etc. are symptoms of our dirty system. Lastly, I thought his words, probably seen by some of the crooked MP’s, would make them feel a lot better and less likely to change! A major problem in corrupt systems is everyone taking a little bit of pie for themselves and thinking it doesn’t matter. It matters.
On yer bike Norman…your lot’s time in power was hardly lily-white was it?
Tory grandees in a right old Eton mess eh? What’s new? But they’ll feel no real pain whatever happens…
I think Stephen Fry was right to offer some clear perspective.Do the math on this story in contrast to the banking crisis and it’s clear who the greater dangers are-which is not to say he expense scammers shouldn’t be called to account too.
The MPs’ expenses scandal is related to the economic crisis. We are being asked to pay the debts of the bankers by MPs who did not plan on sharing our pain. I think they should share our pain and preferably the unemployment they are sending our way.
On an unrelated matter, I am getting into the moat cleaning business. No job too big or small. Strictly cash.
Vote Green: Get a Green New Deal. A real one, that is.
http://www.neweconomics.org/gen/z_sys_publicationdetail.aspx?pid=258