Sunday 10 May 2009

Fill your boots


MP's expenses:
I've just been looking at the list of expenses from the parliament website. One striking inclusion (partly as he's the second entry) is that Gerry Adams claims the working away from home allowance. Fine you might think what with lots of cold water between his constituency and Westminster apart from the fact he's never taken up his seat; "they work for us shows "no appearance at Westminster.

My MP Joan Ruddock can't claim an allowance as Deptford is only 25 mins (you know the average distance everyone else lives from work) from Parliament although handily her (ex)husband who she lives with (it seems) is an MP for Aberdeen so their home in South London gets paid for that way. The sort of arrangement that if it involved diddling the housing benefit would have everyone up in arms.

Another minor point is the cost government computing £1,200 each year to lease 5 computers and 2 printers so 5 grand to lease some pc's for four years. Central government computing being so hapless that if you asked them to get someone round to look at your hard drive, you'd get back from work to find both Steve Job and Bill Gates in your fronts room and after eye watering bill your hard drive would still make that clicking noise and not boot up all the time.

None of this would matter so much if the same MP's from all sides had not got us involved in needless wars, not kept an eye on the banks, produced sustainable transport and Housing policies, wasted millions on make us less free by introducing ID cards, and wasted billions on PFI schemes. Presumably the likes of Hazel Blears was to busy moving house all the time to run the country morally and ethically.

4 comments:

al_uk said...

As an employee of UK plc I would like to hope that we get people becoming our executives who are of true world class. Men and women who will lead this country through the world market place so that we maintain our successful place in the world. to do this they must by paid a competitive wage so that skilled and talented individuals enter politics instead of business. Many politicians I believe are not in it for the money. We seem to have created a system that doesn't pay them well enough and allows them to claim a wide range of expenses. Everything that has come out seems to be within the rules even if not the moral rules. I think we should pay MPs more and cut the range of expenses to a bare minimum. I worry that if we make the rules too tight then we will either get people entering politics who couldn't get posts elsewhere or politics will become only the preserve of the independently wealthy.

BLTP said...

I largely agree AL except Hazel Blears moved house 3 times in a year and we bought her a new telly every time she also told one story to tax man and another to parliament.
the NI secretary has 7 homes and still claimed 100K. The spirit of the law is thing not the letter.

The one good thing about mps compared with senior bankers is that we can vote them out with modest pension.

al_uk said...

I think that now the expenses will be published on a regular basis it will hopefully mean that they will think twice about what they claim, or it will make them more secretive.

Cocktails said...

Although I do see al_uks argument, it still irks me that backbenchers think that earning £60k a year means that they are underpaid. I manage to cope on considerably less than that and I suspect that most of the country does too.

I might also be more open to the idea of higher pay if they ever turned up for their jobs. Other than at PMQ the House always looks strangely empty...