Crisis? What Crisis?

The Foxes In The Henhouse

Bloody Lawyers, Corruption, Crisis? What Crisis?, UK politics
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Over the past few days multiple pundits have referred casually to the House of Commons Commission and the Members’ Estimate Committee without bothering to explain what it is they do, or more importantly who they are. The first is in charge of the regulation of the House; the second’s in charge of MPs remuneration and expenses and was accused of bias from the start:

A review of MPs’ perks and expenses has been condemned as a stitch-up.

The panel picked by Commons Speaker Michael Martin to carry out the investigation is dominated by politicians tainted by sleaze or who have campaigned to keep allowances secret.

So I thought I should take a look at who’s currently on this committee and who, if any of those tasked with keeping their fellow members honest has got clean (ish) hands themselves.

The score? Not good: only 3 out of 5:

    Rt Hon Michael J Martin MP (Labour ): The Speaker’s been spending hundreds of thousands of pounds trying to stop the details of the expenses claims being published: he spent £1,400 on chauffeurs to drive him to his constituency job centre in Glasgow (60% of children in his area live in “workless households”) and to Celtic football stadium; he employed his wife and daughter both on the payroll for an extra bite at the cherry:

    On top of his £137,000 salary, he has a pension estimated to be worth £1.4m, and the best rent-free apartment in London. His wife was earning £25,000 a year in the first years of his speakership, and his daughter until very recently worked as his constituency secretary. His son, Paul, eased gently into the Scottish parliament, earns £50,000 a year. And, even though he has a primary home fully paid for by the taxpayer, Michael Martin claimed £17,166 last year in housing allowance on his home outside Glasgow, which is mortgage-free.

    Rt Hon Harriet Harman QC (Lab) : Clean so far as is known apart from that one dodgy donation.and a few pesky clerical errors. But that’s largely due to an accident of geography rather than innate rectitude. Harriet’s answer to accusations of corruption? Blame Derek Conway. To be fair, she has voted for pay and expenses reform. But then she can afford to, on over 140 grand a year plus expenses (Which she helps to set the level of. Neat.).
    Sir Stuart Bell (Lab): Sweeper-under-carpet-in-chief and Church Commissioner. Fought disclosure of expenses tooth and nail; currently trying to have the administration of MP’s expenses and pay privatised, so as to exempt it from the Freedom of Information Act so we can’t see how completely lax he’s been and string him up.
    Rt Hon Nick Harvey (Lib Dem): In 2008, Harvey told his fellow MPs: “The public believe—quite erroneously, in my view—that our allowances are excessive, that there are irregularities in the way in which Members claim those allowances and that the systems in this place are lax. I repeat that those are not my views”
    Then why did he say this?

But even the three committee members with (currently) clean hands themselves. McClean, Harman and Harvey, don’t think they or their greedy colleagues have done anything wrong; they’re either tribally loyal to party, like allegedly bipartisan Leader of the House Harman and Tory Chief Whip McClean, or complacent, like lone Lib Dem Harvey. It’s not MPs, it’s the system, they cry.

But they control that system: they could have stopped it. They didn’t. Better to kick it into the long grass and hope it goes away. It hasn’t.

I was always taught as a good churchgoing girl that tempt somebody to sin was a worse sin than the one incited. Harman, Martin, McClean, Harvey and Bell allowed their colleagues steal from the public. They turned a blind eye; they even participated. They’re just as guilty as their greedier colleagues, if not more so.

MP’s Expenses Leak ‘Very Small Beer Indeed.’ Bzzzt! Wrong.

Corruption, Crisis? What Crisis?, Culture, New Labour, UK politics
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So said the BBC’s chief political commentator and Brown-noser Nick Robinson on the Today programme this morning about the publishing of leaked, unredacted receipts for cabinet MPs expenses by the Daily Telegraph, 2 months ahead of their official release with key details (ie the damning bits) redacted by the MPs themselves.

Robinson has got this one spectacularly wrong. I certainly don’t think it’s small beer and I doubt fellow voters will either.

But to describe it so is classic Robinson. If any one reporter in mainstream British political media is complicit in the normalisation of politicians’ licensed dishonesty it’s Robinson, whose modus operandi at the BBC has been to focus on internecine parliamentary gossip while fastidiously, and despite the rising stench, ignoring the festering corruption right underneath his nose.

Here the Telegraph describes some of the everyday, mundane corruption; it promises there’s much more to come.

Because MPs can claim up to £24,222 each year for their second home, some MPs appear to go on spending sprees at the end of the financial year to “use up” what they have not already claimed.

Some also appear to take advantage of rules which allowed them, until recently, to claim up to £250 in any category without submitting a receipt, resulting in a rash of claims for cleaners, gardeners and repair bills which came in at £249 per month. And because MPs can claim up to £400 per month for food, with no need for receipts, some put in claims for precisely that amount every month, even during the recess when they are not expected to live at their “second” home.

Other tricks of the MPs’ trade come into play when they decide to step down from Parliament, with some arranging expensive building work on their homes just prior to leaving the Commons before selling them on at a profit. Others are thought to avoid capital gains tax when they sell their “second” homes by telling HM Revenue and Customs that the property is, in fact, their main home and hence is exempt from tax.

Robinson says the the public have outrage fatigue, and that they’ll essentially just shrug at today’s revelations. I don’t know who of the public he asked; perhaps he could’ve asked someone who’s just been made redundant with the prospect of living on sixty pounds a week benefit what they think. I know what I’d think about the man in charge of setting those benefits claiming one and a half times my monthly income, from public money, just for food that they didn’t even need – or even necessarily buy:

James Purnell has come under fire today for claiming £400 a month on food expenses. It is believed that the information has come about as more receipts are leaked to the press. The Daily Star also claims the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions and Stalybridge and Hyde MP claims for his council tax and utility bills. The receipts are to be released to the public in June.

It really does smack of hypocrisy that it was James Purnell who recently admitted on the Sunday Politics Show that £60 a week Job Seekers Allowance wasn’t enough to live on, but those with families could earn up to £400 a week with tax credits (see video above) to pay for cost of living expenses such as food, rent and utility bills etc. Yet he claims £400 a month on food alone.

Under rules set out by the house of commons, MPs don’t have to submit receipts for groceries, but they are able to claim up to £400 a month under the second home allowance. According to the Daily Star, James Purnell tried to claim £475 a month on his groceries, but this was rejected.

That’s without even mentioning some of the smaller items for which MPs’ve claimed reimbursement. One female Lib Dem even had the gall to claim for a 2.50 eyeliner pencil from Boots . She probably bought it to gussy up for an interview with with Robinson. Boy wonder David Miliband, touted as PM, claimed almost £200 for a pram for his adopted child – it was rejected, but that illustrates better than any other claim the entitlement which MPs feel.

I’m going to spend my morning reading; much as I loathe the Telegraph as a newspaper, and leaving aside my outrage at the substantive issues, to the Westminster scandal junkie and blogger an unprecedented info dump like this is not small beer at all. It’s a gift, a gigantic box of succulent fresh cream truffles and license to eat every single one.

Victory for the Visteon workers

creative direct action, Crisis? What Crisis?, Unions
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Socialist Worker reports that the factory occupations by Visteon workers who were sacked in March without redundancy pay or pensions have been succesful:

Visteon workers have won a major victory against one of the biggest and most powerful multinational companies in the world – Ford.

The workers used to be employed by Ford until 2000 and were sacked at the end of last month. Ford tried to avoid its responsibilities, claiming that it owed the workers nothing.

But workers’ action has forced Ford to offer hundreds of thousands of pounds in redundancy packages. Many workers will get £40,000 or more. It is one of the biggest payouts that Ford has ever offered.

[…]

“The threat of taking action to Ford was the turning point. This offer sets a new benchmark too – if Ford try to sack workers elsewhere they won’t be able to just do it and give people nothing.

“People can see now that if you put up a strong enough fight you can win. This is a victory for workers and it’s about time we won something.”

Around 600 workers across plants in Enfield, north London, Basildon in Essex and Belfast have been fighting back since the end of March, when they were sacked with no notice, no redundancy pay or pensions.

Socialist Worker also managed to find out that shutting down those factories was not due to the economic crisis so much as something the Visteon management had already planned to do eight years ago !

The fightback against the Visteon sackings shows workers’ self defence is possible, that strike and other action doesn’t need to be just a meaningless ritual on the part of the unions to get a slightly bigger scrap from the bosses’ table but can actually force them to meaningful concessions, that you can actually win the fight. With redundancy threats and bankruptcies looming in many other companies, this is good news. If only the union leadership was as militant.