Socialist, My Arse!



Here's a post from the blog site archive in which the Private Eye lays bare the greedy behaviour of Westminster MPs.


Now I can't understand how anyone can justify spending public money in this way with MPs of all parties 'filling their boots' and profiting to the tune of hundreds of thousands of pounds from the London property market.


Socialist, My Arse! (10 February 2013)


Private Eye continues to expose the behaviour of the 'not so great and good' at the Palace of Westminster - through its regular HP Sauce column - so here's the latest offering for your interest and amusement

HP Sauce

"So, farewell then John Lyon, who has just retired from his four-day-a-week £105,000 job as parliamentary commissioner for standards after presiding over the worst era of fiddling in the history of the Commons. 

Consistency was not his catchphrase. He was keen totake up complaints from the BNP, including one against Denis McShane. But he let off lucky David Laws, who gace £50k of taxpayers' money to his live-in partner in the form of "rent" - a fiddle no other member had been bright enough to think of.

Lyon refused to investigate some of the biggest examples of MPs' boot-filling, such as the thousands claimed in so-called petty cash. Oddly enough, one of the most regular exploiters of the petty cash wheeze, which allowed MPs to trouser up to £250 a month without receipts, was Kevin Barron MP - who just happens to chair the standards and privileges committee that oversees the commissioner's work, now better known at Westminster as the double standards committee. Since we described Lyon in 2009 as "feeble" and an "establishment stooge" (Eye 1241), he has done nothing to prove us wrong.

Well, almost nothing. In his last act before retiring, Lyon belatedly woke up to the worst abuse of the expenses system - the massive claims for mortgage interest payments. He opened an inquiry into Maria Miller MP, who claimed £90,000 over four years for a house she alreaduy owned where her parents lived. The new commissioner, Kathryn Hudson, now has the delicate task of of deciding whether to ask the culture secretary to repay the money and how long Miller might be suspended for claiming seven times the amount that forced McShane to resign. 

If Hudson does take Miller to task, other MPs who made a fortune from the London property market before 2010 - step forward again, Kevin Barron, who sold his taxpayer-funded flat for a profit of almost £500,000 - will begin to tremble. Dare she antagonise the chairman of her own double standards committee, a challenge her predecessor conspicuously ducked? Watch this space."  

I don't know about anyone else, but I do laugh to myself when I stop and think about the contortions of some Labour MPs - who like to portray themselves as 'good socialists'.

While their party leader - Ed Miliband - bangs on about the 'something for nothing' society, of course.

Socialist my arse - as people might say here in Glasgow
.


Public Money (1 December 2012)


The latest edition of Private Eye has another timely piece about Westminster MPs and what I would describe as a rather cavalier approach - towards spending public money.

Only this time an 'honourable' Labour member is in its sights.

"HP Sauce"

"Kevin Barron MP, chairman of the standards and privileges committee, said Denis McShane's illegitimate expenses claim was "the gravest case" he had ever come across.

What a sheltered life Barron must lead! Although his committee found it impossible to say how much McShane had claimed "outside the rules", they thought it "may have been in the order of £7,500".

The rules that he broke were thise stating that an MP can claim no more than three European trips a yea, with business-class travel and four-star hotels. McShane made more than three trips a year after 2005, in his capacity as Tony Blair's unpaid Euro-envoy, but he travelled on EasyJet and stayed with friends to keep the costs down to the same sort of level as would cover the officially sanctioned trips. 

In total, his Euro-expenses between 2005 and 2008 came to about £12,000. That is what Kevin Barron describes as "the gravest case that has come before this committee". 

Can this be the same Kevin Barron who sold his taxpayer-funded flat at a £500,000 profit after the 2009 expenses scandal, and then exploited a loophile in the rules (following the ban on MPs claiming mortgage interest) by renting a flat from fellow MP John Trickett so he could carry on claiming the housing allowance? "    

Now there's a thing - an eye-watering profit of £500,000 all paid for by the public purse

And I wouldn't be in the least surprised if some of these Labour members who have benefited in this way - continue to regard themselves as good socialists.

I hope one of the newspapers publishes a list of all MPs who have made a small fortune from the London property market - on the back of their housing allowances. 

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