Michael Martin singlehandedly justifies every prejudice we Edinburgh people have against the narrow, stunted, ugly, ill-educated, self-serving, chancing whingers from the West. He shouldn’t resign. He should be ceremoniously drowned in Douglas Hogg’s moat. We’ve paid for it, so we might as well use it.

New Labour have had two Speakers in a row. That is enough. The Liberals want to foist Ming Campbell on us, but he is already as insufferably pompous as he is dull-witted. He would be a disaster as Speaker. They offer Alan Beith as an alternative, but he’s stupefyingly dull.

I am hereby declaring for Roger Gale for Speaker. He is a former Director of Blue Peter. If you can control John Noakes, Peter Pervert and Shep, then the House of Commons should be a doddle. More seriously, I worked with him on election observation in Ghana and he is dead straight, alarmingly energetic and with a real passion for democracy.

I posted this link this morning, but it strangely vanished. I like this article. The comments are good too.

http://simonhickson.wordpress.com/

From Guido’s comments page:

Clapham Commoner says:

May 14, 2009 at 10:03 am

I walked past Harman’s house last night (Herne Hill) and there was a Range Rover outside and a ferrari in the drive.

She is a “socialist” MP and he is a union official.

Go figure.

http://www.order-order.com/2009/05/mps-crying-into-their-subsidised-beers/#comments

I have had a great sleaze wheeze. The news channels are reporting that Douglas Hogg is defying Cameron over any notion that he should pay back taxpayers’ money used to maintain his country estate, complete with moat, housekeeper etc.

The public have been maintaining this property for decades. Surely that makes it a kind of National Trust property? It is a place I would love to see, as it incorporates parts of the original manor of Margaret Beaufort. She was a fascinating and extremely strong woman who knitted together the alliance that won the throne for the Tudors, whose sole claim to the throne came from her. Indeed, it is arguable she was considered a Queen in her own right.

Anyway, enough of the history. We pay for this place, so let’s go enjoy it. Who is up for a Grand Day Out at the Hogg estate in Lincolnshire? Let’s launch toy yachts on the moat, swim in the pool, picnic on the lawns and look round the house.

If you’re interested, let’s put this out in the blogosphere and see how much interest we can get. We could hire some charabancs. We have been paying for this place for years. Let’s get some use out of it!

Michael Foot is now 95 years old. He received an unexpected blaze of media mentions last weekend when polls showed Gordon Brown had overtaken him as the “Most unpopular Labour leader ever.”

I confess to a soft spot for Michael Foot. I have only ever had one conversation with him, about Byron. His biography of Byron, “The Politics of Paradise”, is one of my favourite books.

The sad thing is that Michael Foot was perhaps the most honourable man ever to lead a major political party in this country. Foot would never have dreamed of milking his MP’s allowances, or letting anyone else do so. It is totally inconceivable that Foot would have tolerated creatures like McBride and Draper around him. he was not in politics for backstabbing and smear.

The irony is that it was Foot’s innocence of the dark arts we now deplore in politicians, that led to his extreme unpopularity. He deliberately and consciously abjured the media soundbite, in favour of the well made and complete argument that did not fit in a news bulletin. He absolutely refused image makeover. I remember very well that this came to a head when he arrived at a cold Remembrance Day at the Cenotaph wearing a duffle coat. The Murdoch press went crazy, calling it a “Donkey Jacket”. It was at the tiime as big a media sensation as the MPs expenses claims are today.

For Foot, the commemoration was just that: an act of remembrance of the fallen. He had volunteered to serve immediately on the outbreak of World War 2, but been turned down because he had weak lungs. He went to pay respects to the dead of his generation, not to show himself off. If he had worn a £2,000 cashmere coat, as Tony Blair did at the Cenotaph, he would have cut a better media figure. But he would never have thought of doing so.

I have never been a supporter of Labour. For me, Foot and his generation remained infuriatingly romantic about organised labour and blind to the abuses, bullying and fundamental lack of democracy in the trades unions. The public were not so blind, and this is why Thatcher was able to hold support for a viciously over-radical programme of closing down heavy industry to deny the unions their base.

When I look at Blair, Brown, Blears, Reid, Blunkett, Smith, Hoon, Straw and the others, it is hard to believe that less than thirty years ago their party was led by somebody as genuine, kind, genial and intellectual as Michael Foot. At least he will never again be mentioned as the “Most unpopular Labour leader”.

The rumbled fraudster Hazel Blears has written out a cheque for over £13,000 to the Inland Revenue to pay the Capital Gains Tax (CGT) on her taxpayer-bought property. She had avoided CGT by telling the Inland Revenue it was her main residence, after getting the taxpayer to pay her mortgage on the grounds it was her second residence.

Rather peculiarly, she did not post the cheque to the Inland Revenue, but handed it to a Sky News reporter. I know she is a supporter of the privatisation of the Post Office, but this is ridiculous. Plainly this stunt is meant to improve her image. But the sight of a “Public servant” who can at the drop of a hat dash off a current account cheque for over £13,000 is deeply unedifying. For more than half her constituents, that cheque was for more than a year’s income after tax and national insurance. It was nearly three years of the state pension.

There remain some questions. There will be interest and late payment charges due to the Inland Revenue. Has she agreed the sum with them? And has she calculated the sum due correctly? At the time of the sale, the rate applicable was 40%. £13,000 would indicate it was paid on profit of £32,000. But I am told by a Commons staff source the profit was actually “significantly more” than £32,000.

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.