Gordon Brown's own expenses

Gordon Brown has laughably told the Andrew Marr programme that "what I've seen offends my Presbyterian conscience".

Until 2006, Gordon Brown declared a flat in Westminster as his second home for the purposes of his allowances - despite having the use of a taxpayer-funded apartment in Downing Street.

As Chancellor, Mr Brown declined to live in the grace and favour flat he was entitled to at Downing Street, instead charging the £650-a-month mortgage interest payments, utility bills, council tax, telephone expenses and television licence for the Westminster property to his Commons allowances.

How was this best value for the taxpayer?

And then in 2006 he designated his Fife house as his second home. "By doing this, he was entitled to claim most of the running costs of the detached property in North Queensferry, Fife, including a gardener and cleaner, and carry out extensive repairs and redec­­­oration at public expense."

Gordon Brown thought it was fine not to use the apartment, but to make taxpayers pay his second home expenses instead. That did not offend his Presbyterian conscience.

Best value?

MPs imposed on local authorities a requirement to get 'best value' when they were tendering contracts.

What thought did the thieving MPs give to best value for taxpayers when they were chiselling out their expenses?

Many claims were immoral. But they didn't even try to get best value. Thus Mohammad Sarwar claimed for phone calls to Pakistan. Doesn't he know about free calls over the internet?

Politician expenses in the States

A piece in the Wall Street Journal turns up a few random examples of questionable spending by federal politicians.

But what's striking is the size of the allowances.

House members get a government expense allowance of $1.3 million to $1.9 million a year. Senators get $2.9 million to $4.5 million. The disparity is based on several factors, with lawmakers whose home states are far from Washington, for example, typically receiving more to cover their higher travel expenses.

That doesn't mean our own expenses issues are just small potatoes.

David Cameron's expenses are rightly in the frame. On a Lisbon treaty referendum, on 'climate change', on the morality of Alan Duncan and Francis Maude - the green wimp doesn't get it. Did he ever make a brave decision in his life?

What is lawful is appropriate

With this phrase moral pygmy Bill Cash condemned himself out of his own mouth.

Is there no morality additional to the law? Not according to Bill Cash, who sees nothing wrong with charging taxpayers for flat rental to pay to his daughter when he had a property nearer to the Commons than hers - and apparently unoccupied.

Sleazy Bill Cash thinks it's fine to make taxpayers poorer than him pay rent to her. Why was this value for money for taxpayers? Why was it morally right? Oh I forgot, "what is lawful is appropriate".

David Cameron says Bill Cash has serious questions to answer. Actually he has one question to answer: when are you going to pay back our money and stand down?

But keep-the-gravy-in-the-family Bill Cash is not the only family member involved. Daughter Laetitia Cash is an A-list Tory candidate. She took the money.

Laetitia Cash was up to her neck in it. She should be struck off the candidates list.

Morally speaking, Bill Cash and Laetitia Cash are expenses thieves.

UPDATE - Bill Cash has told the BBC that his son was living in the Pimlico flat at the time, rent free. This won't do. Taxpayers still had to shell out to the advantage of the Cash family - and Bill Cash still sees nothing wrong in that at all, unless he broke the rules.

Bill Cash seems to have no concept of any moral dimension outside the law at all.

Resign!

Iain Dale toadies

Iain Dale has just been on The World at One toadying to Julie Kirkbride following her announcement that she's standing down, with no acknowledgement of the case against her at all.

According to him, she did nothing wrong and has been hounded by the media.

Excuse me, she connived with her unlamented husband to claim for two second homes between them. If he is a thief, so is she.

She had to go. Also gone is any credibility Iain Dale had as an objective political commentator.

Cameron still in denial

David Cameron just doesn't get it. Asked recently on The World at One why he opposed the Lisbon treaty, he replied that there's hardly anything in it about climate change, which is what Europe should be concentrating on. That sounds startlingly old fashioned.

And in the Commons he's been talking of state employees having to learn to do more with less money. That wouldn't begin to address the depth of the UK's economic mess. They'll have to accept that they'll be doing less - with very much less.

For all his alleged intelligence, it really starts to seem that David Cameron just doesn't get it.

And coverage of his reform proposals is notably sceptical, as Richard North points out. Especially dismissive is Simon Jenkins.

If he wants to be believed, he should say specifically what he will do - with timescales. Commentators are pointing to the wiggle room Cameron has handed himself. To get some credibility he must voluntarily box himself in, with concrete measures and timescales.

As I posted earlier, Frank Field is at least making concrete proposals for parliamentary reforms.

But Cameron's proposals on greater autonomy for local councils look meaningless, just as his words on a possible referendum on the Lisbon treaty look incapable of bringing any results.

He appears to have a gimlet eye on political plausibility. In a fast moving non-financial crisis it's not hard to outdistance the plodding Brown. But Cameron's reform agenda is looking threadbare already.

Scrutinising legislation

In considering how the Commons needs to change, Frank Field asks

Given the volume and importance of the swathes of European legislation, how can the Commons get real and devote what perhaps might be one or two days a week, to debating, deliberating, changing, and if need be, rejecting European legislation?

It's a good question, one which all those who tout themselves as reformers should provide an answer to.

Cameron on expenses at PMQ's

Cameron pointed out the irrelevance of an audit of old receipts. Voters aren't interested in whether claims technically complied with the rules at the time - they want to know whether the claims were acceptable morally, which no audit can tell us.

Doubtless it will be expensive and slow and achieve very little.

Cameron also suggested abolishing the communications allowance. Paul Waugh has calculated some Tories' usage of it - it's an amount worth saving.

Brown was left flat footed. Cameron broadened the debate into reducing the cost of politics, and suggested cutting the numbers of MPs (a policy he's already proposed). Again Brown just ploddingly defended the status quo. He looked slow and tired.

So come on, shadow cabinet - publicly give up your communications allowances from today!

More public spending?

So Gordon Brown's solution is to pay independent auditors to trawl back through past years' receipts to check that all claims were within the rules.

The man seems to have no regard for costs. And how long would all that take?

Much better and cheaper just to publish them all on line and let public opinion be the judge.

But MPs will doubtless favour the dearer and less embarrassing option.

Too late for Phil Hopeless

Phil Hope has agreed to repay over £41,000 in expenses. He says

I have decided to try to restore the trust and relationships I have with my constituents.

I am returning all of the money that I have claimed for fittings, furniture and household items that I received over a five year period - the sum of £41,709.

With a majority of only 1,517 at the last election he was probably dead meat anyway.

He says, "This issue has fundamentally changed the view people have of me and that is something I cannot bear". Get used to it, Phil, we now know you for the schemer you are.

House of Commons still blocking FoI requests

Heather Brooke, the freedom of information campaigner, explains that

I’ve noticed a new excuse being used by Speaker Michael Martin and the House of Commons authorities when dealing with freedom of information requests.

More on heather's blog.

David Cameron has not done enough on expenses

Several good points are being made about second home allowances.

First, should there be second home allowances at all? Would a London halls of residence do? But then what about ministers, based in London most of the time?

If there are no halls of residence, can poorer MPs afford a London base if they can only claim for mortgage interest, utility bills and council tax? Maybe they'd just have to rent.

The amount of mortgage interest claimable should be capped. David Cameron's second home is unnecessarily big and so is his mortgage.

The Lib Dems are right that MPs should not be able to profit from subsidised homes. The definition of 'profit' is an accounting issue but the principle is right. So paying capital gains tax on any profit is just an interim measure. Cameron would find this hard to get through his toffs, but justice demands it, especially when the country is facing retrenchment.

Gordon Brown living on immoral expenses

The Telegraph drew back from criticising Gordon Brown over the cleaning bill for the London flat, saying there was no suggestion of impropriety.

Of course there is. Brown is claiming second home allowance for what is clearly his main residence while having grace and favour accommodation.

Gordon Brown is being immoral. He should stop claiming at once, and pay back the immoral expenses he has claimed so far.

The House of Commons Commission

We keep hearing of this shadowy group, which seems to be constantly behind the curve on expenses. After Mr Speaker Booby treated Kate Hoey and Norman Baker so disgracefully, the Commission at their meeting that evening was said to have given him a standing ovation.

So who are they?

The Speaker, Sir Stuart Bell MP, Rt Hon Harriet Harman MP, Nick Harvey MP, Rt Hon David Maclean MP, Mr Alan Duncan MP.

Sir Stuart it is who has been scuttling round the studios being ridiculous. A few days ago on television, for instance, he accused the Telegraph of "dealing in stolen goods".

Surely he cannot have gone freelance. Behind the scenes, then, have the representatives of the main parties been holding back reform?

P.S. The chargesheet against Mr Speaker Booby is set out by the Mail here.

MPs' expenses - 2

Rather than the relaxed view of Matthew Parris, this blog shares the indignation of Peter Oborne, Richard Littlejohn, and Max Hastings.

The government has shed any moral authority. Specifically, so has Brown.

There is a place for police investigations. Not into the leak. The information was due to be published months ago, publication was in the public interest - the courts had already said so - and no jury would convict a leaker even if a charge could be prepared.

If this time the Metropolitan Police engage half a brain, they will be able to follow this reasoning and should tell the Commons authorities a leak enquiry would not be a sensible use of police time.

Of course the house shufflers should have been sacked. Brown would have lost his Communities Secretary (Blears), his Transport Secretary ('Tike' Hoon) ... oh, and his Chancellor. And ... oh dear, his Prime Minister. But who would he put in their place? Whose hands are clean? Not Margaret Beckett's. not Caroline Flint's.

Maybe Hilary Benn and Ed Miliband have clean hands, but they have the policies of a fruitcake. What a legacy.

Parliament debauched, the economy debauched - what a calamitous legacy.

MPs' expenses - 1

This blog joins the disgust at the MPs' expenses revealed, rejecting the complacent view of insider Nick Robinson that worse things happen abroad so it's not worth worrying about.

The Telegraph's summary reveals some MPs systematically and deliberately plundering the pockets of taxpayers, most of whom are far poorer than they are. It shows airy contempt for their constituents.

And if this is how they treat taxpayers' interests in the relatively small matter of their own expenses, how carefree are they when it comes to their spending departments?

Credit to Heather Brooke for her determination in getting the receipts published, against resistance by Speaker Booby and his MP mates, including their legal action funded by taxpayers. Credit to the Telegraph for publishing the information after repeated delays by Parliament

The Telegraph reports bunching of claims towards the annual expenses year end, and claims submitted for expenditure on the wrong properties.

Now, as backbenchers, MPs are people whose job is to get best value for taxpayers. If they wanted to get rich they should have done something else. The rules defence is not a defence. The rules set a maximum. MPs' moral obligation is absolutely clearly to give taxpayers best value.

For instance, the rules seem to allow MPs to claim for food when they are away from their first home. Goodness knows why, as they each have only one mouth (though in many cases a pretty big one). The rules allow these claims, but no MP should have claimed for food. Nonetheless they do, bulimic fatty Prescott among them. He climed the maximum of £4,800 a year. Not satisfied with his grace and favour pad at Admiralty Arch and country house at Dorneywood, this contemptuous oaf designated what is clearly his main home, at Hull, as his second home, so that he could charge taxpayers to maintain it.

We are paying for Gordon Brown's constituency home while he has the grace and favour apartment at 10 Downing Street. Disgusting, man with the bent moral compass.

Alistair Darling and Geoff Hoon have shuffled their designations of first and second homes to their advantages. Disgusting. Known previously as Buff-hoon, perhaps in future he will be known as Tyke-hoon. Hoon is using taxpayers' money to make property profits.

Greedy Margaret Beckett has made ridiculous claims for her old cottage while having a grace and favour apartment in London. Again disgusting.

Hazel Blears claimed for three different properties in three years. During both the past two financial years she has claimed the maximum allowable amount, to the pound. According to Diane Abbot, Bleary sees herself as a Barbara Castle figure. No longer. Greedy and grasping.

Rich Shaun Woodward submits tiny claims and received £100,000 to help pay a mortgage he didn't need.

Greedy Caroline Flint has chosen to designate as her second home the property which brings her most in expenses.

It is no defence for these people on the make to bleat about the rules. They besmirch politics. Heaven knows what else there is to know about them.

Impassioned post on defence waste

Don't miss Richard North's impassioned post about the waste of lives and money taking place in Afghanistan.

Frustrated by the focus on MPs' expenses, he catalogues recent losses of life there and sets out a sorry catalogue of high spending on useless equipment.

The (Vector) vehicle has now been withdrawn - £100 million pissed up against the wall for a useless killer of men. And just three newspapers bother to report it, in short, down-page items. None of them tell us it was a 6kg mine. The minimum specification for a Level I MRAP is protection against 7.5kg. If the MoD had bought decent vehicles, the man would have lived.

Yet The Daily Mail report has as its headline, "MoD vows to 'learn lessons' after death of soldier ….". And the "lesson" is? The same day that the US Army rejects the International MXT, after failing the mine resistance test at the Aberdeen proving ground, the MoD orders 200 at a cost of £120 million.

The MoD is pouring money down the drain. It is spending £93,000 each on dune buggys - the US forces buy theirs for $18,000. We fly Harriers which take 60 manhours maintenance per flying hour, compared with a quarter of that for an F-15. It is planning to buy Lynx helicopters for £14 million each. The comparable US helicopter is lighter, faster, can carry more, costs less than half that amount and is available off-the-shelf. We can have our overpriced garbage in 2014.

Yet this is not debated in the media and it is not debated in Parliament.

The media disparage the blogs, but they should be picking up a defence expert like Richard as a freelance contributor.

As to Parliament, it is incredible that ambitious defence spokesmen with half a brain show so little interest in what Richard has to say. For all that the hypocrite Brown called for questions on policy in PMQ's, when asked for a debate on a defence issue he replied that Parliament had just had its annual debate on defence. This answer would be a scandal if MPs had done anything with the opportunity. As Richard pointed out at the time, they didn't.

I've been blogging about decisions which must be looming concerning what place in the world Britain can afford to maintain in future. It would be ironic if our strategy was dictated by the costs of incompetence in services procurement.

Or maybe that is the sensible approach, since such baffling incompetence seems bound to continue.

A preposterous leak enquiry

So the Commons authorities want a police enquiry into a leak of information which they were going to be forced to release in a few weeks anyway.

The police should tell them they have better things to do with their time.

Another one bites the bullet

The Labour government take us for fools. They pretend the Conservatives want to cut state spending merely because they are hard hearted - as if the calamitous government debt didn't exist.

Vince Cable and Frank Field say politicians must acknowledge the size of the problem and start a debate about strategic priorities.

The NIESR has warned that it will be near-impossible to rein back public debt to an acceptable 40% of GDP until 2023. The options open to government for achieving this are all, in varying ways, unpalatable.

The state pension age could be raised to 70, reducing pension costs while increasing tax revenues; the basic rate of income tax could be raised from 20p to 35p in the pound; or government spending could be cut by a tenth.

Now Lord Lawson has suggested British troops leave Afghanistan as a way of cutting government spending.

The Afghan mission was "wholly unsuccessful", he told the BBC, and unjustifiably costly given the cuts in public spending needed in the future.

On the same day we had articles from Max Hastings and Irwin Stelzer, doubtless as a result of Pentagon briefings, about the shortcomings of the British army in Iraq and Afghanistan, discussed by Richard North.

As Stelzer points out, these are the sorts of debates the country will have to have. Our finances mean we just can't go on as we are, however much Labour want to shove our heads into the sand.

We could chop Ed Miliband's pointless green initiatives too.

Even all this would only be a start.

In praise of Hazel Blears

That's a theme of much journalism today, reporting plucky Blears writing in The Observer. Plucky Blears advocates selling policy in plain words while talking of "meta-narrative" (no, me neither, maybe she just speaks plainly when she's talking down) and oddly thinks that

The recession has tilted public opinion throughout the developed economies towards the idea of active, interventionist governments.

Batty Blears is being feted for her soundbite "YouTube if you want to" - which is of course is a pale echo of Mrs Thatcher's "You turn if you want to..." but without the punchline. She also claims to see "swagger and arrogance" in David Cameron - who has plenty of defects, but not those.

This dismal piece of work has brought Batty Blears headlines. She's now had to issue a declaration of loyalty to Gordon Brown - doubtless written as she ducked flying nokias - and attracted comment from such charismatic personalities as Alan Johnson and Jack Straw, who surely agreed with every word.

Batty is being lauded as a plucky chipmunk. But she governs as a centraliser. It's her department which issues strategy papers to local authorities inviting them to make laborious applications for grants to be spent in exact compliance with central norms.

Doubtless the robotic chirpy chipmunk considers herself well-intentioned. In her ceaseless parroting of the New Labour line she has carved herself a niche as a pint size John Prescott who can do sentences. And boy does she think well of herself.

This old fashioned puffed up parrot is well past her squawking date.

Any praise of Hazel Blears is overdone.

P.S. Hazel Blears' piece turns out to be even more dismal. Etan Smallman has catalogued some of Batty's own YouTube pieces.

Thieves & hypocrites

There's some excellent detailed professional journalism about today.

The Sunday Times exposes Baroness Uddin as a thief. They've cased the flat concerned and got detailed quotes not only from residents of the block but even from a plumber. I wonder if council tax was being paid. Previously she was a community activist and coucillor in Tower Hamlets. Was Baroness Uddin a thief before? The SNP are right to be contacting police as well as the Lords authorities.

The Sunday Herald has allegations about a Labour MP, Jim Devine, and his mileage expenses. If he did give his office manager the rest of the £11,000 due, why is he negotiating a compromise agreement with her? And if he's whiter than white, why did a Labour concillor get so disgruntled after working for him for a day?

Relish the News of the World's prose as it reports on David Miliband's elevation to grand panjandrum as he instructs his staff to look him out a private plane. They "expose the VANITY and INSANITY of Miliband's decision to hire a private jet". Miliband (as the NoW refers to him) has incidentally also been a preacher of green practices. Most green preachers are hypocrites, and Miliband's self-importance has now overwhelmed him. The NoW has done a thorough job showing how scheduled services are available to his destinations - cheaper ... and greener if you believe such tosh.

When we asked the Foreign Commonwealth Office to disclose the cost, we were told it was not available to the public. "It may be something that could come out through the Freedom of Information Act," suggested a spokeswoman.

Is this Gordon Brown's transparency?

But never fear, the House of Commons has decided to censor some of the most important details of MPs’ expenses claims due to be published this summer. Would this be the Speaker's doing, by any chance? This is a cover-up - literally! Watch for a reaction from the journalist Heather Brooke. Is this Gordon Brown's transparency? Meanwhile, MPs should defy this temporarily cosy cover-up and publish their receipts with the full details.

The people demand accountable transparency. Here's another issue where politicians are putting themselves on a side which is both unpopular and immoral.

What an average burglary costs the police

Northamptonshire police say the average cost of a burglary to them is around £3,300.

How can this be? Police usually do so little work on a burglary and they solve so few.

So how many front line hours does £3,300 represent? What do they achieve? Can this be good value for money?

Perhaps it would be more pertinent to ask how many backroom hours this represents.

However did Northants police arrive at this big number?