3 Down, 387 To Go!
The Director of Public Prosecutions, Keith Starmer, has announced that three Labour MPs, along with a Conservative peer, are to face criminal charges under the Theft Act. Whilst this in itself is welcome news it is a drop in the ocean when compared to the systemic abuse (some might say fraud) of the expenses system.
When the story broke last year in The Telegraph the public were quite rightly shocked at the scale of the claims and the sheer number of claims that seemed to be outside of the spirit of the law if not the wording of the law (the ’flip-flopping’ of homes, for example, and ’employing’ family members as assistants). MPs were shocked as well: shocked at getting found out! Totally missing the mood of public fury (one MP was forced into resigning after saying that voters were ’jealous’ of his designer kitchen accessories), our elected representatives instead protested that they didn’t get paid enough and that it was disgraceful that this information had been leaked.
Let us get one thing straight: these invidious practices have been common for many years, decades even, and if The Telegraph, aided by their courageous whistle-blower, had not brought this matter to light then the duplicity would have continued unabated. The words of contrition from some MPs are weasel words that have been forced from them by party leaders wary of a public backlash at the impending General Election.
The scale of the abuse is staggering: 390 MPs are being forced to grudgingly pay back £1.12m that was falsely claimed. You can get an awful lot of duck houses for that money! That means that over half of our MPs were fiddling their expenses, these are the men and women that we elect to make and enforce the laws of the land! Even after being found with their hands in the till they squirm and wriggle and try to get out of it whilst repaying as little as possible!
If the average Joe in the street had been caught inflating their expenses to such a fragrant extent then they would be sacked: if they had been claiming thousands of pounds over a period of years for a mortgage that did not exist then I would not expect them to have to pay it back, I would expect them to be arrested!
This is tax payers money that has been used and abused, from the overstretched pockets of you and I. Our brave troops in the Middle East, so we are told, are being sent to fight without armour, without boots! Well, we can see clearly where some of the deficit in the defence budget has ended up!
Three MPs are rightly having their collar felt, but it seems to me that many more have had a lucky escape. They can call my comments treason, lock me up in the Tower and throw away the key if they like: just think how much I could claim in expenses for my time there!
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