Disgrace and favour

The Welegraph is publicising that the new Speaker of the House of Commons, John Bercow, is having his grace and favour apartment refurbished at a cost of £20,000 to…. go on… who could it be….

Yeah, us again.

Harman after creating a new secret expense and paying it to herself

This man is supposedly meant to be cleaning up politics, enforcing transparency within the expenses system and a load of other things that wont happen. He has already demonstrated that he is utterly pointless, weak and a failure.

Only last week, politically correct hero Harriet Harperson and her colleagues managed to implement, via the back door, a £25 per day bonus for MPs that stay at their second home. She’s called it a subsistence payment, because clearly having your mortgage paid, all your bills paid, all your luxuries bought, your house modernised, your garden landscaped and a free house at the end of it from which you bank 100% of the cash isn’t enough.

Well, no, it does replace the flat £400 per month that MPs were given for food, except for this new expense you don’t need to produce any receipts.

The cynic in me believes that this was the MPs’ way of implementing a 12% tax free salary increase without all the negative publicity that goes with announcing an actual salary increase.

It never ends. The crocodile tears flowed whilst many MPs were on the rack, but as ever with politics we have all forgotten about it. They are all off the hook. The ones that are stepping down are still getting the £70,000 golden goodbye. The ones still in are still claiming thousands in interest on their second mortgages.

But back to the grace and favour property that John Bercow has the use of. Apparently the previous speaker, Michael Martin, spent a cool £1.7million of our money on renovations, gardening and security between 2000 and 2008. So you’d think it would be in pretty good order after that, wouldn’t you?

I am sick of reading about MPs frittering public money away on luxuries for themselves. They are still self serving. Their snouts are still in the trough. The expenses system is still horribly opaque and thats only because MPs want it to be. Do everyone a favour and vote your MP out when the general election comes round, whichever party they are in.