The inane editorial staff at the Telegraph continue to throw away through poor targeting the great story they have purchased. They insist on leading on political targets who have not really done anthing wrong. Yesterday it was Gordon Brown and his cleaner. Today it was Phil Woolas and his panty-liners, which seem to cause the boys at the Telegraph some behind the bike sheds sniggering. Woolas claims he deducted the non-eligible items on the receipts from the claims. I used to do this myself – when travelling on business I would regularly submit restaurant receipts and deduct the wine on the claim form.
Given that the system is rotten and MPs were allowed food, cleaners etc which they should not have been allowed, Brown and Woolas did nothing with fraudulent intent.
The problem is that there is genuine wrongdoing here which I believe is criminal, and which the Telegraph just mixes in with the panty sniggering trivia. The morally disgusting and quite astonishingly ugly Margaret Moran is a prime example of the switching or flipping of second home to be able to claim expenses.
How Moran was able to claim on a second home which was neither in London nor in her constituency, I do not understand at all. But plainly her designation of a house in Southampton as her second home was purely to claim the renovation costs on an existing family property. Moran joins Jacqui Smith and Baroness Udders in the clearly criminal category, however supine Commons staff may be.
These people are self-serving scum. I am truly sick of being told on the mainsteam media that MPs are underpaid; that they are principled and talented people who could be earning much more elsewhere.
That may have once been true, but it is no longer. The vast majority of MPs are talentless career hacks. More than three quarters of them have never once voted against their party whip. Very few of them have ever had a proper job. The standard of blogging by the tiny minority who bother to keep a blog, is well below the general standard of political blogging in the UK. £68,000 is a perfectly fair reward for these drones. Some of them are more deserving of a jail cell.
Dear Craig. Hope you and your bride enjoyed your brief honeymoon.
I don’t see what your purely subjective assessment of Morans’physical attractiveness has to do with the fact that she has carried out actions which will be condemned as fraud by Harriet’s “Court of Public Opinion”. You are further leaving yourself wide open by listing 3 women, rather than diplomatically expanding your hit list to include men. I would respectfully suggest that you have allowed Labour lickspittles the chance to rubbish your story. Prepare for the hate mail from the usual suspects.
GOM’s right, why weaken a good argument with an irrelevant aside which is going to irritate many who would otherwise be sympathetic to what you are saying?
Go get em, suggest you make sure you have a large espresso before kicking off as per comment 1.
im waiting for the ‘we don’t get paid enough’ argument.
See, snouters always start squealing when their noses are raised from the trough long enought to see what going on around them. (of courses if you not guilty of anything, you’ll know this doesnt apply to you.
I think we have possible found a new pandemic of ‘swine flu’ in london…
ps congrats on the marriage….
£68,000 is a real fortune to most people.
This is not a fair reward……..it is too generous.
As you say, nearly all MP’s are mere lobby fodder, specifically selected (it would appear) for their malleability, dimwittedness and supine natures.
To be fair, they are more like the rest of us than we might like to admit……inmates in a system that has been relentlessly conditioning them for their entire lives to feel vulnerable, controlled and fundamentally helpless…..to understand that if you want to get on you must always do what the boss man says.
We need MP’s who don’t want to ‘get on’.
We need MP’s who recognise that the source of our woes is the fact that we allow money to be created for us by privately-owned corporations rather than by our own government. The interest (that we could avoid by creating the money ourselves) that we pay on 97% of all monies created is the mechanism that does for us.
By this device bankers have displaced and effectively own our government and our very selves. The Usury that was forbidden for most of the centuries since Christ as a moral hazard is now the centrepiece of our entire culture. These people control nearly everything. Through manipulation of what Gordon Brown calls ‘the shadow banking system’ they have the funds to take over or crash any corporation, to set the price of any commodity……to do with us as they will.
Corporate/banking-funded think-tanks create all the policies delivered to us.
Politicians are mere salespersons. The fact that they are prepared to market this Luciferian rubbish at all should tell us all we need to know about their character.
Mind you, to be fair again, when I confronted my own MP with the facts about the struggle between bankers and governments for control of society (the most essential but, of course, forbidden history……the corporate oligarchy control school curricula, universities and traditional publishing)…..this MP didn’t have a clue what I was talking about.
If this sounds like ‘conspiracy theory’ madness, watch the following interview with Norman Dodd who carried out a congressional investigation into the activities of the financial Foundations in 1953 (the film has an unfortunate title for material that is simply factual and delivered by a very old and obviously respected conservative gentleman):
http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=-7373201783240489827&ei=vkUFSujVCYSc-AbJ9dXvAw&q=norman+dodd+griffin
Here’s what Sir Josia Stamp (President of the Bank of England in the 1920’s and, reputedly, the second richest man in England)had to say about the banking system:
“Banking was conceived in iniquity and was born in sin. The Bankers own the earth. Take it away from them, but leave them the power to create deposits, and with the flick of the pen they will create enough deposits to buy it back again. However, take it away from them, and all the great fortunes like mine will disappear and they ought to disappear, for this would be a happier and better world to live in. But, if you wish to remain the slaves of Bankers and pay the cost of your own slavery, let them continue to create deposits”.
One other thing.
The idea is promoted that a person’s ‘talent’ or contribution to society is accurately reflected by that individual’s income.
Utter media-driven (i.e. corporate) rubbish.
As a general rule a person’s income is a rough measure of how far up a banker’s arse they are prepared to crawl.
I’m a schoolteacher, I should know…..
……mind you, I went in feet first.
GOM,
Oh, I call people ugly irrespective of sex. Aaronovitch is a striking example. Prescott, of course.
I just enjoy the taunting. I don’t do it to nice ugly people.
£68,000 is over twice the median London income.
That’s right, it’s enough to pay for two homes.
mmm. I think the Guardian is covering this more succintly and thoughtfully.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/video/2009/apr/28/gordon-brown-mps-expenses
and Martin Bell’s piece:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/may/08/mps-expenses-labour
The bit about Phil Woolas being the most frightened he’s ever been in his life tells us all we need to know. Having his expenses claims unexpectedly surface in the public domain is more scary than, I guess, close relatives needing to go to hospital, or all the terrorist threats he sees in SECRET police briefings.
Use the number10 website to publish all MPs expenses in real times with ‘allow’ and ‘disallow’ vote buttons on each receipts, and let us choose. It will remind them who they are supposed to be serving in their roles quite nicely.
Kevin B:
“Recognition of the falsity of material wealth as the standard of success goes hand in hand with the abandonment of the false belief that public office and high political position are to be valued only by the standards of pride of place and personal profit; and there must be an end to a conduct in banking and in business which too often has given to a sacred trust the likeness of callous and selfish wrongdoing. Small wonder that confidence languishes, for it thrives only on honesty, on honor, on the sacredness of obligations, on faithful protection, on unselfish performance; without them it cannot live.”
Franklin Delano Roosevelt in his inaugural speech, March 4yh, 1933
http://www.bartleby.com/124/pres49.html
No doubt Woolas is scared of being chased up and down Whitehall by Joanna Lumley and a posse of Ghurkas brandishing kukris.
Have to agree 100% with this piece Craig. On Jack Straw, I think it was simply deemed that the Justice Minister could not be accused of fraud. It was too damaging to the whole system. I don’t know what strings were pulled. For me, the key point is why would any MP go back and check their expenses just because they heard they were going to be made public? Public or private has no bearing on getting in your expense claim correctly! Is he claiming a distinction here? Is he claiming that if his expenses had never gone public he still would have noticed? It just doesn’t make sense. Unless of course… He sure spotted his mistake quick though. ‘DOH, i’ve only gone and doubled charged on my council tax claim! Bless me, I must pay it back immediately!’ How he has the balls to tell childish porky pies to all of us on TV is beyond me. He should have resigned in shame. His claims were not within the ‘criminal rules’. Is he going to be questioned by the police? If the police won’t act can a civil case not be initiated against Straw by someone?
Jack Straw has always told porky pies. He has no shame.
Straw was asked on the radio why he only checked his expenses because they were going to be made public, and replied “I’d like to think I’d have checked them anyway”.
We’d all like to think lots of things, wouldn’t we? I’d like to think I had Sir Fred Goodwin’s pension…..
Dear Craig,
My congratulations on your recent nuptials and best wishes for the future.
With regard to some of the other comments, posted in response to your supposed allusion to Ms. Moran’s pulchritude or indeed lack of it:
My own reading of your post was that your use of the term “astonishingly ugly” in this context, related to the undoubted moral ugliness of her expense claims.
However the alternative inference is more than justifiably qualified by seeing her quite convincingly porcine features in the Telegraph article link.
I can only assume that your post cited three female exponents of this abuse very possibly because they were the most egregious. Paradigm shits indeed!
Nonetheless I dare say that perhaps in the very near future some male examples of this swinishly excremental behaviour will emerge into public consciousness.
Keep up the good work!
I like the big girls.
I want to bounce on her 527.50 UKP bed while sweet music wafts from the 699.99 UKP hi-fi.
“Something as tasteful and dignified as you, Maggie, how about Motorhead?”
Actually, maybe “Money Money Money” by Abba.
The public needs to beware a Problem Reaction Solution of giving MPs even more money. We should not be invited to reform thieves by giving them enough money that they no longer have to steal.
That bastard Matthew Parris is at it in The Times, lamenting that these piffling sums have debased the otherwise upstanding political class and proposing a “30000” UKP rise and the end of expenses!
You have to admit, their appetite for spending taxpayer money is matched only by their barefaced cheek when caught.
Phil Woolas’ receipts included a 10% staff discount. I doubt he or his partner work in a supermarket, so why the discount? I hope he didn’t pick up a couple of receipts off the floor by accident.
resistor,
What a devious mind you have…
*save*
“We should not be invited to reform thieves by giving them enough money that they no longer have to steal.”
Isn’t that precisely what Obama and Brown have done to the rogue bankers? MPs’ trough swilling is peanuts by comparison. And, as usual, WE – and future generations – foot the bill.
Ms Moran and Ms Smith study the Anti Social Behaviour handbook. No irony there then.
http://www.margaretmoran.org.uk/wp-content/gallery/margaret/img_2816.jpg