Gordon Brown urges police to walk people home from cashpoint
UK politics
In defence of Andy Newman
I’ve noticed before that Andy Newman’s heart was in the right place, but that his political instincts every now and again are awful, which must be why he has been trying to defend the indefensible, viz 6,000 pound cleaning bill Gordon Brown paid his brother, by imagining some “alternative realities that the Tory press could have been be outraged about”.
It didn’t go down well.
People who normally couldn’t agree on the colour of the sky were for one glorious moment united in their desire to tell Andy how wrong he was. One hundred and twentyfive comments later and none of them went “hang on, I think he might have a point”… When so many people of so many different political backgrounds say you’re wrong, even those with the firmest of opinions might start to wonder whether their critics might have a point.
But not Andy.
A followup post explained his reasoning more clearly: “there are some genuinely scandalous aspects to how the expenses system has been milked; but there is also a large part of media driven moral panic. Is anyone really that surprised that the most powerful political figure in Britain gets his house cleaned at public expense? Paying a cleaner is hardly “having your snout in the troughâ€. Spare me the moral outrage.” We should “make no mistake, people who are being whipped up to see all politicians as on the make will be cynical that any political change is possible, and retreat away from political engagement.”
And suddenly I understood why Andy is trying to defend the indefensible and why Dave Osler is warning about “the danger of depolitisation”. It’s fear. Fear of populism. As John Emerson has argued in an American context, there’s a deep and innate mistrust on the left of the political instincts of the people when left to their own devices, a feeling that anything other than appealing to them through well reasoned appeals to the intellect is dangerous. In America this is ingrained through collective memories of the Ku Klux Klan, Nixon voting hardhats and the like while in a British context populism is largely associated with Daily Mail campaigns against paedos, asylum seekers and benefit cheats as well as the BNP seduction of the “white working class”.
Which is why whenever a political issue suddenly inflames large sections of “the public” the first instinct of a lot of socialists is not to use it and encourage it, but to dampen it down. We’ve seen it with the mass protests against the War on Iraq which had a lot of the liberal left worrying about whether our leaders would be swayed by the uninformed mob. We’ve seen it with the Respect experiment and the handwringing about whether decent socialists should have anything to do with “communal policies”, we’ve seen it with the endless debates about whether the strike at the Lindsey oil refinery was a “racist strike”.
Too many socialists, like Dave and Andy, equate populist anger with rightwing anger and therefore are uncomfortable with it. Which is why they want to dampen rather than strengthen this anger. You would expect socialists, who after all strive to completely destroy the current capitalist system and replace it with our own, to be pleased when the apathy of too many voters, alienated from a “political system that grants workable majorities to governments actively endorsed by just one in five of the people they govern” as Dave has it, finally turns to anger even if that anger is not quite ideologically sound. But instead we get the demeaning spectacle of Andy Newman an dDave Osler actually trying to defend this corruption. All because they fear the very people they supposedly fight for.
We socialists have a choice when confronted with justified public anger like this. We can either engage it, like our predecessors did or dismiss it because it doesn’t fit our ideological prejudices. If we chose the latter we’ll never again be more than a boutique movement.
The Foxes In The Henhouse
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 householdsâ€) 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?
- Rt Hon David Maclean (Con): Tory chief whip who told Parliament to “pay us more, because we take life and death decisions”
- Alan Duncan MP (Con) : claimed over £500 to have his lawnmower serviced, and tried to get more than £4,000 for gardening alone.
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.
Labour To MPs – Keep On Troughing, You’ve Done Nothing Wrong
Oink, Oink, Oink. So much for shame. Peter Riddell, The Independent:
A remarkable email, sent to Labour members by the Parliamentary Labour Party’s office and leaked to The Independent, says: “It would be easy for the public to gain the impression from this [media] coverage that MPs are generally claiming excessively or outside the rules laid down by Parliament, which is not the case.”
The briefing paper, from the PLP’s resource centre, insisted that the expenses claims disclosed in recent days enjoyed “the full approval of the parliamentary authorities”
[…]
Today MPs will launch a drive to restore public confidence in the system.
Good luck with that. Squeal, piggies, squeal!
MP’s Expenses Leak ‘Very Small Beer Indeed.’ Bzzzt! Wrong.
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.