Norman Baker: Our task as Members of Parliament is to regain the trust of the electorate
How can it be right to charge the taxpayer for oil paintings, goldfish bowls and pot plants?
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Independent Minds
Another day, another terrible set of headlines for MPs and for Parliament. How long can this corrosive saga continue?
The basic problem is this: claims for expenses should reflect expenditure legitimately and necessarily incurred by a Member of Parliament as part of his or her duties – no more, no less. Instead, they have been used by too many MPs as an alternative income stream, as a way of bumping up salary without having to vote through an embarrassing increase.
It is quite wrong that MPs should be taking out mortgages with money provided by the taxpayer, then pocketing the capital gain when the property is sold. It is even worse when they regularly change the designation of their second home in order to maximise the income they can generate through the allowance system.
Does the Home Secretary not realise how wrong it looks to the average person when she calls her sister's spare room her main home, while running up bills at taxpayers' expense for her real home, where her family lives?
And how can it be right to charge the taxpayer for oil paintings, goldfish bowls, pot plants, and mock Tudor beams?
The standard defence trotted out is that everything done has been within the rules. But that does not make it ethically correct, not least because those rules have been written by MPs themselves.
And so we have the unedifying spectacle of Peter Mandelson, who after all knows a thing about houses, claiming £3,000 to improve his house less than a week after he announced his intention to stand down as an MP. Within the rules? Yes. Defensible? No.
The next two or three months are going to be truly awful for MPs. There will be more revelations, more outrage. That cannot now be avoided.
But MPs must ensure that when the outrage has subsided, they repair the damage with new rules that limit claims to rent and other running expenses, with every claim subject to complete transparency and external audit. The test will be this: can we walk into our local pub or supermarket and feel comfortable defending what we claim. Until the public think the answer is yes, this corrosive matter will not go away, and nor should it.
Norman Baker is the Liberal Democrat MP for Lewes
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Comments
Sorting expenses is like moving the proverbial deck chairs. Is there are aspect of government that is not tainted?
Allowance payments can be reinstated after a new Government has been formed and restructured and implemented a more equitable system.
Furthermore, those people and businesses who have experienced or witnessed the wrath of the tax authorities when they suspect tax fraud (not avoidance) will be watching with interest the approach to certain of the MPs expense claims.
...erm... No
Flouted, not flaunted: to flaunt something is to display it ostentatiously.
Hopefully those who have so flagrantly abused the trust of the public will be held to account at the next election. If they continue to refuse to accept that their behaviour is wrong, that this is no need to apologise, and that they will continue to ciaim all that they can in the future, then the voters can decide who they want to represent them in Parliament.
What we now need is the following course of action.
1/ Full and immediate unredacted publication of the claims made by our so-called 'representatives' so that each of us can see whether they are representing us or simply themselves. We can then pass judgment on their careers at the next Election.
2/ In the situation where unjustifiable claims have been made - or second homes switched in order to claim repairs, decoration or stamp duty or facilitate capital gains avoidance - full repayment should be demanded immediately to reimburse the taxpayer.
3/ Personally, I would like to see all profits from second homes bought and funded via this system also refunded to the taxpayer.
4/ It is time for all of these avoidance issues and excessive claims to be passed to HMRC or the Fraud Squad for investigation. Some of these parasites must be charged for this.
As for future claims, let the miserable slime live under the same rules that HMRC apply to all the real, wealth-generating people off whose backs these people live.
Let us remind them that this is not some bottomless pit- this is OUR MONEY and wE WANT IT BACK
Nothing less than criminal proceedings against these traitors will suffice. But who will bell the cat?
to vote for their local MP at the next election unless they have given back to the taxpayer
fifty thousand pounds of their illgotton gains. This is a golden once in a lifetime opportunity
for the voters to give all MPs the biggest arse kicking in political history. We must not let this
opportunity pass by, it will not come around again. The MPs who refused to give back the money
should be investigated by the Inland Revenue and the Police. MPs allways say they listen to the
voters, let us see if they do.
It's the likes of Moran, Blears, Hoon and Gove who need to go (via jail, preferably).
That's why I want full publication of each MPs expenses claims; therefore we can vote out the individuals who are more concerned about feathering their own nests and keep the rest.
It should be a strange election; Blears, for example, has a solid Labour seat but all her opposite number needs to do is remind people of what a thief and a liar she is and we could see a bizarre result.
Both these parties continue enthusiastically to support FPTP despite Labour's 1997 electoral reform commitments so cynically abandoned under pressure from the party tribalists. Among the many evils of the current bizarre system is that it keeps out new blood and is bound to have a negative effect on the"culture" of the House including the maintenance of the cozy expenses scam.
PR would have a serious downside of course: prolonged negotiations to form coalition governments and also the presence in Parliament of several highly unsavoury minority parties who are kept out under the present system (though that's not necessarily an unhealthy thing: even vile opinions have a right to be heard). But I still can't help feeling that it'll be a lot better in the long run than the moribund and thoroughly dysfunctional set-up we have at present. It might even get people interested in politics again, and a few normal people into Parliament.
Years ago in Sweden I worked with a radio engineer, a former fighter pilot, who had recently served five years as a Riksdag deputy and then returned to his job working on radio-wave propagation. The Scandinavian countries have a political class certainly. But it's nothing like as much of a closed shop as ours: "ordinary people" quite often get elected to parliament for a spell it seems.
The media paid 150,000 and we took these. Now let us be sensible and see if we can forget these and forgive if they pay these back. There is no point, honest, no point in taking them to task. After all we have to look for the future. If you take them under the microscope, who will act as your ministers with the paltry pay. Increase their pay, live, and let live. Let us roll this off and look for the future of the UK. That is the wisdom.
Stephen Joseph: We are still waiting for cheap public transport
Remember this. The apology means a lot. Read this. He means well. Go and take it from now.
Almost 7,000 council jobs have been lost across England in the past six months, and a further 14,000 are expected to go over the next year as the recession continues to bite, according to research published today. Now we have the jobs. Right. Ride along.
Tell me what is wrong with us. We jump to the conclusion. Law says innocent unless proved otherwise. They are innocent appearing in the appears and TV but they are innocent Remember Colin Powel said the same thing after he left the office. Why did we go to Iraq? There is politics.
Is that a very rational step? We are broke now. Who will take care of the rails, road, radio, media, water, sewage (London is very dirty; you read this in the same paper in other column). Suspend allowances means they will not work at all. Give them a little time and the police to take care of them then we will know.
They've a temper, some of them -- particularly verbs, they're the proudest -- adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs -- however, I can manage the whole lot of them!" boasts Humpty-Dumpty in Lewis Carroll's 1872 classic, "Through the Looking Glass".
If verbs are in fact as conceited as Humpty-Dumpty claims them to be, perhaps they can be forgiven for their hoity-toity ways -- after all, they are the ones that bring a sentence to life. How many of this week's five verbs can you manage?
The director of the White House Military Office, Louis
Caldera, has resigned, an administration official said
Friday. The resignation comes two weeks after Mr. Caldera
authorized an Air Force One flyover of the Statue of Liberty
that terrified thousands of people in New York City.
I thank you
Firozali A Mulla
I'm not trying to be picky, but your 'test' is flawed as shown by the many MP's that are not only comfortable with stealing our money, but they are glad to announce it on national television with a big cheesy grin. If I hear the phrase 'within the rules' one more time, I swear I'm going to go all Guy Fawkes. . .