Economy

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

Corruption, Crisis? What Crisis?, Culture, New Labour, UK politics
Published on

john-lewis-list

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.

You Can Polder If You Want To. You Just Have To Want To.

Dutch politics, Economy, Health, Oh Those Crazy Cloggies
Published on 1 Comment on You Can Polder If You Want To. You Just Have To Want To.

nederlandtulpen_1
Should America follow the Dutch social model? Ask that of any US pundit, the conventional reply will be “Nooo, the socialism, it burrns! 52% tax!”

But just maybe, maybe they should think the unthinkable, says American exiled in Amsterdam Russell Shorto, in a fascinating article in the NYT magazine. Americans pretty much pay an equal amount in cumulative taxes, to much less effect:

…in talking both with American expats and with experts in the Dutch system, I hear the same thing over and over: American perceptions of European-style social welfare are seriously skewed. The system in which I have embedded myself has its faults, some of them lampoonable. But does the cartoon image of it — encapsulated in the dread slur “socialism,” which is being lobbed in American political circles like a bomb — match reality? Is there, maybe, a significant upside that is worth exploring?

It’s a biggish read but worth it as a primer on how the country works:

I spent my initial months in Amsterdam under the impression that I was living in a quasi-socialistic system, built upon ideas that originated in the brains of Marx and Engels. This was one of the puzzling features of the Netherlands. It is and has long been a highly capitalistic country — the Dutch pioneered the multinational corporation and advanced the concept of shares of stock, and last year the country was the third-largest investor in U.S. businesses — and yet it has what I had been led to believe was a vast, socialistic welfare state. How can these polar-opposite value systems coexist?

[….]

…water also played a part in the development of the welfare system… The Dutch call their collectivist mentality and way of politics-by-consensus the “polder model,” after the areas of low land systematically reclaimed from the sea. “People think of the polder model as a romantic idea” and assume its origins are more myth than fact, Mak told me. “But if you look at records of the Middle Ages, you see it was a real thing. Everyone had to deal with water. With a polder, the big problem is pumping the water. But in most cases your land lies in the middle of the country, so where are you going to pump it? To someone else’s land. And then they have to do the same thing, and their neighbor does, too. So what you see in the records are these extraordinarily complicated deals. All of this had to be done together.”

[…]

IF “SOCIALISM” IS THEN something of a straw man — if rather than political ideology, religious values and a tradition of cooperation are what lie beneath the modern social-welfare system — maybe it’s worth asking a simple question of such a system: What does it feel like to live in it?

Sholto answers that question by interviewing a number of other US expats, which is a bit lazy of him though he does admit it:

Indeed, my nonscientific analysis — culled from my own experience and that of other expats whom I’ve badgered — translates into a clear endorsement. My friend Colin Campbell, an American writer, has been in the Netherlands for four years with his wife and their two children. “Over the course of four years, four human beings end up going to a lot of different doctors,” he said. “The amazing thing is that virtually every experience has been more pleasant than in the U.S. There you have the bureaucracy, the endless forms, the fear of malpractice suits. Here you just go in and see your doctor. It shows that it doesn’t have to be complicated. I wish every single U.S. congressman could come to Amsterdam and live here for a while and see what happens medically.”

It’s not quite as simple as that – it’s all in Dutch, for a start – but close. I’ve experienced the health and social care systems of the US, UK and NL personally and up close, and the Netherlands’ is the one I’d go for every time. Once you get past the impenetrable bureaucracy, (which Shotto doesn’t really mention, but it is a massive obstacle) and the language/cultural issues, it seems to work on the whole.

It’s certainly rare to see anyone truly, visibly poor here, unlike in the US and the UK, and to be sick or disabled here is not the automatic life-sentence to poverty and exclusion it is there. Sholto goes on to back this up with numbers:

A study by the Commonwealth Fund found that 54 percent of chronically ill patients in the United States avoided some form of medical attention in 2008 because of costs, while only 7 percent of chronically ill people in the Netherlands did so for financial reasons.

Read more….

Enough said. Case proven.

Victory for the Visteon workers

creative direct action, Crisis? What Crisis?, Unions
Published on

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.