Blackwashed, or how stupid does one have to be to be a member of the British Parliament?

Do you know the answer? I most certainly don’t. Is there a specific qualification in stupidity, a standard one has to attain before being considered for elevation to our benighted legislature? Is it the fault of the party machine, the leadership, or is it a local problem, attributable to constituency associations? Oh, there are so many questions and no answers.

I suppose we have come to live with their stupidity, to accept it as yet another irksome fact of life. But what I object to is when Members of Parliament assume that the rest of us are as stupid as they are. How else does one explain the whole expenses mess, the outrageous claims made on the taxpayer, in the first place? I suppose they thought they had got away with that, assuming that we would never find out that they were making criminally fraudulent claims for non-existent mortgages, as well as for kit-kats, porno, church collections and duck houses. But now they have compounded the offence by their new commitment to ‘openness’, publishing their claims online. Indeed, they are so ‘open’ that most of the details, the kind of information that would enable one to make the appropriate links, have been blacked out, or redacted, to use the favoured jargon word.

I suppose whoever is responsible for this was mindful of the words of Joker Brown, ‘The Best Man for the Job’, when he said that “Transparency to the public is the foundation of properly policing this system.” Black, it seems, is the new transparency. To have learned nothing and to have forgotten everything: now, that really is the measure of true stupidity!

Speaking of transparency isn’t it wonderful that the ‘Best Man for the Job’ decided that the Iraq inquiry should be held in secret? After all, what better way to get people to trust the objectivity of the final report on the lies, half-truths and dissimulation that took us into England’s worst foreign policy disaster since Suez? Oh, but it seems that he has already had second thoughts on that particular point, at least in the limited and half-hearted way that we have come to expect from this wretched man. Better the full truth than yet another whitewash…or should that be blackwash? :-))

Barracks for MPs-Flipping the Bird!

I read in today’s Telegraph that the most popular solution among voters to the scandal of MPs' expenses, to the problem of ‘flipping’ and second homes, is to insist that they all live in state-provided accommodation blocks: barracks, in other words! This was disclosed by Sir Christopher Kelly, chairing the Committee on Standards in Public Life, charged with looking in to the whole sordid business.

Yes, I quite agree, with security for the dear souls provided by perimeter fences and searchlights. What better solution?

Anyway, it delights me to report that Shady Shahid Malik, recently readmitted to the Government of the Living Dead as Communities Minister, is to be subject to further investigations over allegations that he broke the House of Commons rules on expenses. The cause has been taken up by John Lyon, the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, after a complaint was lodged by a member of the public. Apparently Shady, while claiming £6000 in expenses for his main constituency office in Dewsbury, was also claiming an extra £200 a month for ‘additional office space’ in the three years between 2005 and 2008. And where was this ‘additional office space’? Why, it was the downstairs of his Dewsbury house!

This is a foreign country; we do things differently here. No, we don’t take to the streets like the people of Iran. Our revolutions, when they come, are quiet and inexorable, but no less compelling, no less dramatic.

Watt Tyler, Where Are You Now?

Yes, you’re tired of the expenses scandal; I’m tired of the expenses scandal; we are all tired of the expenses scandal, but we must not allow this issue to die by a process of lethargy and exhaustion. That’s what Joker Brown, ‘The Best Man for the Job’, is relying upon. One would have thought, though, that he would have acted with a little more skill and political acumen in playing the game of time and opinion, but these are qualities the man clearly does not have.

The one thing that may have been to his credit is to get on top of the whole fiasco in the way that David Cameron has, even though his own MPs expenses claims are, for the most part, far more outrageous than those of the Labour benches. But he did not; it got on top of him.

Now, only two days after he emerged from his ‘vote of affirmation’, refreshed and renewed, he has reappointed Shahid Malik to the government. Malik stepped down last month as justice minister after revelations about his creative-and lucrative-living arrangements. Shady Shahid claimed a minimal rent for a three-bedroom house as his main home while designating his London property as his second home, allowing him to make off with an impressive £66,827 in three years, the maximum allowable. He also claimed £65 for a court summons for non-payment of council tax. My, what fools we mortals are!

Now Shady has been ‘cleared’ of wrong doing by Sir Philip Mawer, the Joker’s adviser on ministerial conduct. What wonderful news, one bright light on a dismal episode! Well, yes, it might be, except the Joker is refusing to allow Sir Philip’s report to be published. Is there anything this man can do right, anything at all?

Let me finish with two letters from today’s copy of the Telegraph which made me smile;

SIR, We know have the absurd situation of an unelected Prime Minister being nursemaided by a twice-disgraced former MP who, as an unelected peer, sits at the Cabinet table alongside other peers, one of whom, the new Minister for Europe, comes straight from Brussels. Cromwell would be apoplectic and so should we the electorate.

SIR, I am becoming increasingly frustrated by MPs, including Gordon Brown, telling me that, despite what I might feel or think, what I actually want is for them to continue the fight against the recession on my behalf, because I know they are the best people for the job. This wholesale nationalisation of public opinion is becoming very annoying.

Watt Tyler, where are you now we have need of you? Alas, all we have is Jack Straw. :-))

Two Cheers for the Telegraph, or the Ducks say Fuck!

I think The Telegraph has done a splendid job in exposing the sheer carnality of our beloved Members of Parliament despite what the absurd and muddle-headed Archbishop of Canterbury says. I read today in The Sunday Telegraph that Derek Conway, one of the most venal of the lot, claimed for office expenses on his family home in Northumberland, some three hundred miles away from his constituency! And, oh, yes, Sir Peter Viggers, who claimed £1,600 for a floating house for his duck pond, says that the ducks have shunned the blasted thing, which is now in storage. In other words, the ducks said fuck! He should hear what people on the street are saying; so should they all.

The Scandal of Parliamentary Expenses

Night after night this is appearing on the news; the gross corruption surrounding the issue of expenses claimed by members of the British parliament, anything from the cost of watching pornography to having a moat cleaned; yes, a moat! I’m a history student; my period of special interest is seventeenth century England, the period that saw civil war engulf the country, between Parliament on the one side and the King on the other. Parliament won. If the situation were repeated I simply cannot conceive of anyone taking the side of this ghastly parliament and the ghastly Labour government. So, to Gordon Brown and his minions I will repeat the words of Oliver Cromwell when he dismissed the Rump Parliament in 1653;

You have sat too long for any good you have been doing lately ... Depart, I say; and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!