Trick or cheat: MPs expenses

After constantly avoiding questions about expenses on Andrew Marr yesterday, political correctness champion Harriet Harperson has today been reported as saying she thinks its okay for MPs to continue to employ family members on expenses. She also stated that she believes that stopping MPs that live in London and its commuter belt from having taxpayer-funded second homes is unfair.

It seems now that MPs are not obliged to accept the recommendations of Sir Christopher Kelly and that a small group of senior, expenses-tainted MPs are to appoint a new “Independent” Parliamentary Standards Authority to decide which of his recommendations, if any, will be implemented. Clearly the appointment of the boss of this “I”PSA will be a fiddle to get someone in to let MPs off the hook.

Following this, we have had smug-looking Tory MP David Wilshire claiming that the treatment of MPs is a witchhunt like that suffered by the Jews during the Holocaust. If only. Criminals like him, Margaret Beckett and Jacqui Smith should be put in a fucking gas chamber but instead they’re probably inducted into an exclusive club within Westminster called “The £100k Club” for every MP that has stolen more than £100k of taxpayers’ money and got away with it.

Dodgy Tory Nadine Dorries has also claimed (pun intended) that this treatment is a “McCarthyite witch hunt” and that MPs are close to suicide. Good. People like her that employ their children on £28,000 per year as a fucking secretary deserve to be put under pressure.

Back on to Harman for a moment, though. In her second comment about second homes for London MPs, if there was no benefit or profit gained by MPs for having them then why would they care about having two properties within a few miles of each other? As we know looking at the likes of Geoff Hoon’s property portfolio, MP’s make vast profits from these homes: in fact every penny of expenses spent on a second home is like an extension of the MPs salary.

That is not what expenses should be for: they should be to cover what you have spent in order to do your job, not to put into a nice little property piggy bank that can be flipped with your family home to renovate it at the taxpayers’ expense and then sell for a small fortune when you retire.

Liberal leader Nick Clegg has the right idea on this one: let the MPs do as they do now, but when they are no longer a Member of Parliament the second home is sold and all monies go directly to the public purse. It has been said that because he didn’t say this when he became an MP that it is nothing more than a publicity stunt, and to be honest when it comes to the crunch and he stands to either pocket several hundred grand of cash or pay it all to the treasury, I suspect he will opt for the latter former (oops).

My view on this is to take it a step further and have the public purse buy them a house of their choosing within a certain price range which is then sold when they are no longer a MP. This has to be cheaper in the long run than paying mortgage payments every month, and at the end when the house is sold there could be a tidy profit for the taxpayer and not the MP.

I’m not too bothered about whether MPs employ family members or not. The only issue I have is the amount of salary paid, whether said family members are actually doing the job they are supposed to be and whether it actually is a job in the first place or just a vehicle to extract taxpayer pounds.

I’ve already mentioned Nadine Dorries employing her daughter on £28k because she couldn’t get a job anywhere else, but then you have Margaret Beckett employing her 80-odd year old husband on £20k per year plus all associated expenses of travelling the world with her. Apparently a secretary can be paid up to £39k within the rules. What a load of bollocks.

It’s time they stopped going through the motions and weeping their crocodile tears on camera: a proper solution to this systematic creaming off of taxpayers cash to fund the champagne lifestyles of supposedly honourable members needs to be implemented. They asked Sir Chris Kelly to make recommendations and then rubbished them all, setting up a self-interested, biased umbrella of MP’s to hand pick the “I”PSA which will no doubt reject any reform. It’s time for disgraced MPs to go now and its time for all MPs to lose this secretive salary boost from property and expenses.