Posts Tagged ‘ MP’s expenses ’

Mad bad world?

Here’s another pair of stories guaranteed to make you want to tear your hair out: Conservative MP Patrick Cormack wants Members’ salaries to be doubled (in exchange for giving up the second home allowance), while over at the Ministry of Defence auditors have been unable to locate £6.6bn of resources and equipment which the Ministry [ READ MORE ]

Speakers & expenses

Oh dear – the ladies and gentlemen in our Houses of Parliament still don’t quite ‘get’ honesty, integrity, frankness and accountability, do they? Yes, MPs’ expenses have been put online, more than a year late, as the Times rightly points out, but with all or most of the other private details on the documents “redacted” [ READ MORE ]

Top posts for May

For the sake of a little diversion, here are my five personal favourite stories out of all the ones I covered in the last month. Enjoy! What’s that coming over the hill, is it a rise in university fees? Train fares MPs expenses Guns don’t kill people, banning them does Story behind a picture And finally, a little item to [ READ MORE ]

A new age of transparency?

As with most scandals, the gigantic fuss caused by the MPs’ expenses revelations that have already claimed several scalps in all 3 main parties, and look set to claim several more (if only by virtue of some MPs preferring to jump rather than being pushed and standing down at the next general election), is slowly [ READ MORE ]

Tory sleaze

I’ve had a fair amount of private criticism from readers of this blog that I have a tendency to focus too much on Labour errors and misdemeanours, and thus implicitly give the Conservatives an easy ride, while completely ignoring the other parties. The latter is merely a function of Westminster being what is called in [ READ MORE ]

The REAL honourable ladies and gentlemen

OK, so not all MPs are fleecing the taxpayers with expenses claims for lightbulbs, gardeners and moat dredging: the BBC has come up with a roll of honour of MPs from the two-and-a-half main parties who have claimed little or nothing for second homes and the like: Labour: Martin Salter, Celia Barlow, Geoffrey Robinson, Kelvin [ READ MORE ]

Will Mr Speaker please stand down?

Douglas Carswell, Conservative MP for Harwich and Clacton, has tabled a motion of no-confidence in the Speaker of the House of Commons, Michael Martin, about which he is logging regular updates on his rather impressive blog: the original post here, update 1, update 2. There will probably be many more as it goes on – [ READ MORE ]

MPs expenses

When it isn’t smear emails offering some hard evidence of endemic Westminster sleaze, it’s what the blogs have called “troughing” – elected representatives from all shades of the political spectrum not only making one set of rules for the country and another for themselves, but also lining their pockets with multiple layers of the taxpayers’ [ READ MORE ]

Fleecing the taxpayer

Just back from winning (for the first time) the jackpot at the pub quiz at the Old Black Horse pub down St. Clement’s, Oxford. Depending on whether anything got won last week, myself and my team are either due £30 or £400. Either way, it’s a couple of pints gratis, and a sum that NO-ONE [ READ MORE ]

Gordon Brown’s moves

Well, we all saw the YouTube video of Gordon wittering on about MPs’ expenses and the somehow even worse alternative solution he was going to replace them with. But in actual fact, Gordon was giving us subtle demonstrations of his inebriated-uncle-at-a-wedding dance moves, which TheCrownBlogspot has managed to distil out for us, to the tune [ READ MORE ]

Can’t take criticism

Oh dear. It seems like Gordon Brown hasn’t been given an easy ride by the watchers of his YouTube video on MP’s expenses. You know, the one in which he randomly grins as though someone off-camera keeps holding up a weak joke on a piece of card every 30 seconds or so… Only 4000-odd views [ READ MORE ]

Libertarians and banking regulation

Samizdata has a particularly thoughtful post by Jonathan Pearce on the effect of banking regulations on the structure of the modern Western financial market (with particular concerns to those of the USA and UK). Particularly interesting is the observation that counterfactual opining about how the old regulatory systems like the Glass-Steagall rules would have prevented [ READ MORE ]

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