The furor in the British parliament over the spending debacle has added fuel to the fire now burning as the country faces its worst economic crisis in modern times, with the public treasury exposed for a decade or so.
Perceived overseer of a legion of so-called swindlers, Michael Martin was forced to resign as Speaker of the House of Commons due to MPs’ expenses and is the first speaker to be expelled since 1695.
The anger is boiling over at the moment, as MPs have been caught with their hands in the cash register and will henceforth be banned from ‘flipping’ their designated second homes to milk the Commons appropriations system.
David Cameron, the Conservative leader, has stopped using the Extra Cost Allowance for furniture, household items and food, the kind of “extras” that have so outraged the public since the Daily Telegraph published the details.
It is suggested that the claims are not technically illegal, although among all kinds of dubious spending that MPs have claimed include swimming pools, chandeliers, horse manure and moat cleaning. But is it?
In a statement, the Crown Prosecution Service and the Metropolitan Police said: “Due to the increase in subsequent complaints received by the Metropolitan Police, the Commissioner and the Director of Public Prosecutions have jointly decided to convene a panel to assess the complaints with in order to decide whether criminal offenses”. investigations should be initiated. A panel, made up of officers and a senior CPS attorney, will begin a series of meetings next week.” Read, whitewash. No minister will ever see the inside of a courtroom when it comes to this scandal.
Although Prime Minister Gordon Brown has outlined plans to dismantle what he described as Parliament’s “gentleman’s club” by handing oversight power over all aspects of MPs’ pay, spending and pensions to a new independent statutory regulator, says he is “angry and dismayed” by the scandal when he was there “flipping” with the best. He even put his apartment in his wife’s name so he could reclaim his Fife home, while living in a house of grace and favor in Downing Street. He also paid his brother £6,577 for “cleaning services”.
In fact, this one goes straight to the top, as Chancellor Alistair Darling is one of six MPs said to face a police investigation into his spending. Another prominent minister who could be the subject of a Scotland Yard investigation is Transport Secretary Geoff Hoon, who is alleged to have built up a £1.7m property portfolio with the help of the spending system while he lived free in a ministerial apartment. London Minister Tony McNulty claimed £60,000 for a house in which his parents live.
Then there is Jack Straw, none other than the Secretary of State for Justice, accused of claiming the full cost of the council tax back even though he received a 50% discount from his local authority. Since then he has returned the difference. Lord Mandelson, the business secretary, paid for improvements to his Hartlepool home in the months following the announcement that he would resign as MP. One of the worst offenders, Hazel Blears, the Communities Secretary, claimed three different properties in a single year, spending almost £5,000 of taxpayers’ money on furniture in three months.
A staggering claim by Tory MP Bill Wiggin was £11,000 for a phantom mortgage he never had. Then there is the ridiculous claim of a Conservative MP who was forced to resign after using taxpayers’ money to protect ducks in his garden pond. Or from Ruth Kelly that she claimed thousands of pounds in expenses to pay for the damage caused to her house by the floods, even though she had a building insurance policy at the time. No wonder Labor is now with the almost unheard of UK Independence Party (Ukip) in a recent poll.
A couple of lower-level MPs have been forced to resign, but the public wants much more than a mere suspension. Gordon Brown is facing a cabinet revolt after Hazel Blears and other top figures took a defiant stand against moves to swap or demote them in his upcoming reshuffle. A comment on The Guardian’s website reads: “I want Bears fired and jailed for fraud.” But there are rules for the taxpayers who paid for this voluntary extravagance and others for parliamentarians, it seems.
Take the case of Hazel Blears. Miss Blears paid more than £13,000 in capital gains tax after it emerged she had designated a property as her second home for expenses, but told a different story to the taxman to dodge the bill when she moved from House. On this subject, Gordon Brown said: “Hazel did not break any rules or laws [she did if her tax return was incorrectly filed; it’s called tax evasion]. But what he did was unacceptable. [illegal, if she evaded Capital Gains Tax]. She came to me, we talked about it and she gave me my money back. [when under current disclosure rules, the fine for non-disclosure is £5,000, plus the penalty for tax evasion if found guilt by HM Revenue & Customs].”
In addition, Transport Secretary Geoff Hoon is also under fire for not saying whether he paid capital gains tax when he sold his second home, while building a £1.7m real estate empire with the help of the taxpayers. He could also fall into the range of filing a falsified tax return if this turns out to be the case.
Let’s imagine a scenario in which The Great Train Robbers said they were sorry and that it would not happen again; It was an honest mistake to steal the £2.6m, but now we’ve paid it back. Oh well, that’s fine then, you can go free. Or the case of three illegal immigrants who masterminded Britain’s biggest visa scam and bragged about how easy it was to fool the Home Office, then admitted it was just another “honest mistake” and here’s the money back. Or, if an ordinary man, who is said to represent Labour, with a laugh, embezzled expenses of such magnitude from his company, he would be jailed. But the fact that the company is the government and members of the government committed the crime, there is no one to press charges. Or is there?
The Daily Mail has backed a move to bring to justice MPs whose flagrant abuse of spending and is joining forces with the Taxpayers Alliance to launch a campaign for “private prosecutions of MPs and ministers who have pocketed thousands of pounds off through dishonest statements. Despite overwhelming evidence of a culture of lopsided spending claims among MPs, they say “legal experts believe it is highly unlikely that the police and the Crown Prosecution Service will bring criminal charges against any of them.” “.
Finally, this brings me to the novel by Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky, who in Crime and Punishment focused on the mental anguish and moral dilemmas of Raskolnikov, an impoverished former student from St. Petersburg who formulates and executes a plan to kill a hated and unscrupulous. lender for his money, thus solving his financial problems. In this parallel, perhaps Dostoevsky’s message was one of future political nihilism in a distant country?
If governments can commit murder with impunity, as in the case of the Iraq war, where the general public was given the use of fictitious information to justify the murder of supposed enemies of the state, then why not the individual? This, I think, is one of the many messages that Dostoevsky wanted to convey.
Neither George Bush nor Tony Blair will ever be dictated to for the Iraq war. In the same way, an individual who commits murder, for reasons similar to Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov, who argued that he was ridding the world of an evil and worthless parasite, will be jailed for life. But by some tangled paradigm of human nature, those “honorable members” of the British parliament who deliberately falsified their expense claims will be pardoned not just by themselves, the police and the judiciary, but by the people themselves.
