In the Dock

Today former Labour MP for Bury North David Chaytor has pleaded guilty to three charges relating to his expenses claims.

1. Chaytor had claimed almost £13,000 for renting a flat in London which he owned – he faked a tenancy agreement claiming he was paying £1,175 a month rent.
2. He also claimed over £5,000 for renting a home in his Bury constituency, which was owned by his mother. He admitted he had not paid his mother, who had moved into a nursing home. House of Commons rules prohibit renting property from a family member.
3. Chaytor was also charged with falsely claiming almost £2,000 for IT services. He had provided two invoices for professional services from an IT consultant when in fact the services had not been provided or charged for.

Chaytor was given unconditional bail and will be sentenced on January 7th.  His barrister James Sturman QC told the judge,

"There is no loss to the public purse. Any sums claimed have been, or will be, repaid."

Chaytor originally denied the charges but change his plea, having failed in a court bid to argue that expenses cases should be heard by Parliament, not the courts.  In sentencing I hope the judge will not simply take into account Chaytors guilty plea but will consider the protracted and expensive way he has fought to avoid this charge also the case of Andrew Gibson who I blogged on some weeks ago.

On January 7th 2011 it won't just be David Chaytor in the dock.
Best Wishes
Will

Chancellor Osborne and his worthless piece of paper

After Labour had lost the last election but before the coalition took office the then Chancellor Alistair Darling signed the UK up to participation in the EU bail-out mechanism.  It is costing us six billion pounds just for the Irish bailout.  We all know that Portugal, Spain even Belgium and Italy are all possible candidates for bailouts. Asked whether the UK will have to participate in these future bailouts George Osborne is short of straight answers, he blames Alistair Darling for our current involvement in bailing out euro countries and emphasizes that he has blocked our permanent participation in this bail-out mechanism from 2013. He is unable or unwilling to say whether the UK will be helping in future bailouts before the 2013 deadline.

Treasury officials insisted that the UK had been tied into the fund by the previous Chancellor Alistair Darling in the final hours of the last Labour Government. Treasury sources also confirmed that the deal agreed by George Osborne in Brussels on Sunday night will mean that Britain would be freed from any obligation to financial rescue measures for euro countries after 2013.

We should be in no doubt the 2013 deadline isn’t worth the paper it is written on. The question is whether we will be bailing out Portugal, Spain, Belgium and Italy in 2010 or 2011. To be quite candid I will be surprised if the euro still exists in it's current form in 2012 never mind 2013.

I sometimes think that signing worthless pieces of paper must be a trait for British politicians.
Best Wishes
Will

Dream on... Mary Honeyball takes it quite literally



Mary Honeyball


Labour MEP and author of one of the UK's top twenty left wing political blogs (currently rated at 14th) Mary Honeyball writes that the economic crisis is beginning to make her feel that the UK should be in the eurozone.  Unbelievable and without a trace of irony these are her exact words.

"The crisis of the euro has shown in very graphic terms that the UK is in Europe and cannot ignore what happens in other EU member states when it comes to their economies. Britain has ended up paying out a very considerable sum of money. I doubt if it would have been any more if Britain had been a fully signed up member of the euro zone.

The last Labour government, it is true, refused to take Britain into the Euro. I have always been in favour of joining the single currency and, I must say, am once again beginning to feel vindicated that my point of view is the best one for our country."

I know its a terrible cliché but you just couldn't make it up.
Best Wishes
Will

Dream on; it is too late to wake up now, the nightmare is about to start.

Eire a country with a population of just over four million is about to receive courtesy of the EU and the IMF an eighty billion euro bailout. That works out at €20,000 for every man, woman and child in the Republic of Ireland. How can they possibly pay it back? The UK’s contribution to the bailout is eight billion, that will mean everyone and I mean everyone living in Ireland will owe the UK taxpayers €2,000.

The UK is not doing this because we love the Irish, but because UK banks and in particular RBS and Lloyd's - which are largely owned by the UK taxpayers - are owed €140 billion by Irish banks. Unbelievable but true, every man woman and child in Ireland owes UK banks about €35,000 each! Just imagine what that figure is if instead of considering the whole population we considered only those who are economically productive: no children, no students, no retired people, no unemployed and no one on sickness or invalidity benefit; it is a depressing thought. What happens if we consider only those who work in the wealth generation part of the economy, the private sector and remove public servants? The answer is that we would probably have a nervous breakdown; as we are talking about a debt per wealth generating individual of €80-100,000.

How stupid were the UK government to take on that liability by bailing out the UK banks? How stupid are they intending to be, by throwing another eight billion euro at the problem? The answer I think is incredibly stupid. Simply put, the Irish cannot repay that size of loan.  If that wasn't bad enough UK banks have a similar level of exposure to Spanish banks.

Thanks to our UK banks and their bailout by the UK taxpayer, we have been sucked into propping up the euro currency. Today there is real concern that the euro currency will fail, it is not idle speculation; it is a very real possibility. I believe it is a real probability. What is certain is that there is more, much more, pain and hardship on the way.

I for one simply cannot understand how it is that two years after the banking crisis first started there is still no clear division between high street retail banking and the casino world of investment banking.

Best Wishes
Will

Them and Us

The Guardian reports on the case of Andrew Gibson, 49, a budget officer in the Parliamentary Fees Office.  He has been jailed for nine months after fraudulently claiming nearly £6,000 in fake MPs' expenses claims.  The offences came to light during the inquiry into MPs' expenses.  He can have no complaints about his conviction or sentence.

It is worth spending just a minute reminding ourselves of what was happening in the Fees Office.  Day after day, week after week, Mr Gibson was processing claims for everything from luxury goods costing thousands of pounds (£8,000 flat screen televisions) to trivial claims (Kit Kats, Jaffa cakes and scotch eggs) and the truly bizarre (moat cleaning, floating duck houses and mole removal).  He knew that MPs were on the fiddle, but that was no excuse for him to join in.

Some will wonder if Mr Gibson was given the opportunity to repay the money and walk away with no further consequences, as so many of our MPs seem to have been allowed to do.  Others may wonder when the long arm of the law will catch up with the MPs as it has with Mr Gibson.

One ordinary Joe soap was caught up in the expenses scandal, he defrauded the public purse of £6,000 and he is behind bars, as he should be.  Over two hundred MPs were caught up in the expenses scandal, together they defrauded the public purse of more than £2,000,000 and most of them were let off scott free, some of them are still MPs today.  For many it will seem like one rule for them another rule for us.

Unfortunately it is now old news; consequently nothing will happen.
Best Wishes
Will

Nadine's attack on scrougers lacks credibility

Nadine Dorries MP for Mid Bedfordshire has been blogging about a constituent of hers who has tweeted 35,000 times in six months. Many of this persons tweet relate to nights out and drinking, yes you guessed the constituent is unemployed but seems to spend no time at all looking for work.  I whole heartedly agree with questioning whether this person should be receiving benefits but believe that Nadine's attack lacks credibility; here's why.

As a society we failed to clean up the Houses of Parliament following the expenses scandal. How can we expect benefit scroungers to take fraud seriously when so many of our MPs are guilty of expenses fraud? There is basically no difference they are both helping themselves from the public purse.

It is an absolute prerequisite for good governance that our elected representatives are honest.

Miss Dorries is the MP who defended the now discredited old expenses system and claimed that the expenses were really part of their salary and therefore an entitlement. She accused The Telegraph of launching “McCarthyite witch hunts” against MPs and suggested that the prospect of having their expenses published had left many of them “beginning to crack”.

To many her rant against scroungers will seem like just a laughable case of the pot calling the kettle black.

MPs lacking the moral authority to deal with social issues; that is the real cost to taxpayers of failing to clean up Parliament.
Best Wishes
Will

Sorry seems to be the hardest word

Did anyone notice how many times the word "sorry" occurred in Ed Millibands speech to the Labour Party Conference.  I listened carefully to the whole speech and didn't hear it at all.   I checked on the Internet there I found a count of various buzz word used in his speech; Generation 41 times, New 34, Responsibility 22, Society 15, Immigration 6 Journey 5, but sorry didn't appear once.

Towards the end of his speech Ed talked about Labours journey back to power; this is what he said;

"This week we embark on the journey back to power.
It will be a long journey involving hard thinking for our party.
We do not start that journey by claiming we know all the answers now.
We do so by setting a direction of change. "

He is wrong "setting a direction of change" is the second step of their journey.  The first step is to say sorry; until Labour do that their journey will not even have begun.
Best Wishes
Will