Articles with the Tag house of commons

We’re Not Having It, Either

Sleaze, UK politics
Published on

noifsnobuts-1

If anyone’s looking for tips on how to move ahead investigating our MPs and their expenses, this old post of mine from 2008 has some good ideas:

I now want the Action Squad to co-ordinate a new drive against the hard core of ‘hard nut’ cases.

That car of theirs? is the tax up to date? Is it insured? Let’s find out.

And have they a TV licence for their plasma screen? As the advert says, ‘it’s all on the database.’

As for their council tax, it shouldn’t be difficult to see if that’s been paid

And what about benefit fraud? Can we run a check?

How could any MP object to such investigation? Those aren’t my words, those are Home Secretary Jacqui Smith’s in a speech by to the 2008 ‘Anti-Social Behaviour: We’re not Having It‘ conference.

Of course she was admitting to using the power of the state to harass individuals because they behave in ways the government disapproves of or finds politically inconvenient, not because they’re committing any crime.

But we’re told that if you have nothing to hide, you’ve nothing to fear, so I’m sure Honourable Members, especially Labour Members , won’t mind such close scrutiny at all.

Golden Shred

Corruption, Life under Capitalism, New Labour
Published on

Given their historic ability to maximise opportunities for optimum personal benefit, it seems unlikely that Tony Blair would have failed to take the full quota of parliamentary allowances whilst in the Commons and at Downing St. Cherie wouldn’t let him.

No doubt when they claimed expenses it was entirely within the rules. Both Blairs are lawyers, and who better to abide by rules than a pair of lawyers?

Tony himself says he’s a “pretty straight kinda guy”, so I’m sure he’d be quite happy, in the spirit of transparency suddenly abroad, to publish past claims as an example to current MPs on how to make expense claims with integrity.

From 2001 perhaps, to pick a year at random; I’m sure his 2001 claim is a model of its kind.

But oh, what a shame. There appears to have been a nasty shredder accident. How terribly unfortunate that we should be denied the benefit of Mr Blair’s expertise.

Can We Get The Pitchforks Out Yet?

Corruption, New Labour
Published on

I used to regularly come across disgraced rookie MP Shahid Malik at AntiNazi League national meetings. I was gobsmacked when he was elected MP in 2005 – he was a bumptious, egotistical, gladhanding arse even then.

Well, he’s an even bigger bumptious, egotistical, gladhanding arse now. But greedier.

Sky News presenter: Can I ask why a £800 massage chair is so important to you?

Shahid Malik: You see, I’d have more respect for you if you were honest about the figures. You know full well it is £730.

Malik’s rise from obscurity to Labour’s National Exec to the Commission For Racial Equality to neophyte Labour MP to the Dept for International Development to Justice Minister, in the short space of four years, has been astonishing; this even though questions were asked by his local paper about exactly how it was he was elected, for which he unsuccessfully sued the paper for libel. It was expensive too. I wonder who paid his costs?

He’s denying wrongdoing now as well. Will he sue the Telegraph? And will his suit have the same, lame result as before?

Is It Balls Or Not?

Corruption, New Labour
Published on

uncertain

All this week it’s been rumoured in UK political blogdom that the known troughers and married Cabinet Ministers Education Secretary Ed “So what” Balls and Treasury Secretary Yvette Cooper were so worried about public reaction to that greed being exposed that they’d obtained an injunction to stop the publication of their expenses; the implication being that despite the dishonesty that had already been exposed to public disgust, there was an even worse crime Labour’s golden couple were trying to hide. Which of course leads one to ask the inevitable question, “What! Worse than this?”

So have they or haven’t they got an injunction? The press have been remarkably quiet on Balls and Cooper this week, considering their past history, so reports that they’d obtained an injunction haven’t seemed at all unlikely, though impossible to confirm.

Now it’s rumoured they have applied but they haven’t succeeded:

Balls Fails to Prevent Expenses Revelations

News reaches me that Brown protégé Ed Balls has been fighting a rear-guard action to prevent publication of the expenses he and his wife Yvette Cooper have been claiming over the last few years. Rumours have abounded for a while that the Daily Telegraph had a devastating story on the couple but I have been informed that Balls sought a High Court injunction to prevent the Telegraph publishing what it knows.

This morning the High Court rejected Balls’ pleas to cover up his expenses record and I am told that therefore there will be a very damaging story published shortly. Balls has been suggested by some to be Gordon Brown’s preferred successor and if he is damaged goods it will further reflect badly on the Prime Minister’s judgement.

‘News reaches’ him from where? How does a Reading conservative have an inside track on Labour? Has the Councillor a mole in Downing St, or is his source in the High Court, or one of the chambers acting for the couple? If not where are these rumours coming from? Of course it could just be a deep Labour plot, an attempt to nobble Brown’s anointed successor Balls ahead of any leadership battle – hence the propagation of the story in Tory-leaning blogs. You can say virtually anything in a comment thread.

I don’t expect source-revealing. I’m not just nosy (well, I am, OK I admit it), merely trying to pin down whether the injunction story’s true or not. Obviously if the source is a court official, Councillor Willis can’t name names – contempt and all that -but ‘news reaches me’ is just a little fuzzy.

So I reluctantly have to conclude – because I do loathe Cooper and Balls, who personify everything vile about New Labour in one easy to hate package – that at the moment the whole injunction story’s still just a rumour.

Damn. It could have done for them politically for once and all. One can only live in hope.