Friday, December 10, 2010

Labour Deputy Harriet Harman tries to bury the names of MPs who secretly paid back expenses, openness and transparency out the window again




















Dear All

The purpose of expenses is to help MPs at the House of Commons do their jobs properly and not leave them out of pocket financially.

I don’t think anyone would begrudge them for that.

David Tredinnick is Tory MP for Bosworth.

And he is a bam!

He quietly repaid £755 for astrology software.

How he could claim for this and someone passed it beggar’s belief, anyone with a reasonable IQ in the Fees Office should have told him to piss off.

He needed the software which cures illnesses by dividing people into ‘fiery’, ‘airy’ and ‘earthy’ characters.

I can see people being ‘fiery’ wanting to boot his arse in the wild blue ‘airy’ and then bury this clown down an ‘earthy’ coalmine blowing the entrance up.

This is abuse of the expenses system.

And they still want to cover this up, despite an attempt by Harriet Harman to keep the details secret.

Members of Parliament who over claimed expenses tried to escape detection by discreetly repaying the dough were named and shamed yesterday.

And that is how it should be.

At present we have 3 lambs staked out; Chaytor, Devine and Morley, the rest of the MPs were allowed to escape detection for cheating the expenses regime if they paid the money back.

In fact everyone who cheated the expenses system should be in court, no exceptions.

There is a system called ‘rectification’ by which the Standards Commissioner can fast-track his investigations if he does not regard the matter as serious.

And I can see the Standards Commissioner burying quite a lot so the public are ‘shielded’ from the truth, its business as usual, nothing changed, they altered the rules like moving Titanic deckchairs.

The Commissioner revealed that 16 slap on the wrist cases were rectified in 2008/09, 14 in 2009/10 and ten so far this year.

So they are still at it.

Anthony Steen, the former Tory MP for Totnes, returned £561 for maintenance on an Aga-style cooker in a house he rented out.

What was that to do with his Parliamentary duties?

We were funding his property portfolio investment.

This should be referred to the CPS.

And finally ex-Labour MP Janet Anderson paid back over claimed petty cash totalling £5,700 from 2005 to 2008.

Next time dear buy a piggie bank and save up like the rest of us plebs!
The expenses aren’t a second salary so you don’t have to spend your wages.

In 2010 with the year nearly ending and six months after the ‘new’ start, the rottenness is still there, to the core, from top to bottom.

Yours sincerely

George Laird
The Campaign for Human Rights at Glasgow University

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