After the Sir Thomas Legg audit uncovered a number of over-claims by MPs and some over-payments by the accounts department - both of which should be repaid regardless of whose fault they were – he rejected pressure to widen his audit to look again at the flipping of second homes for financial advantage.
This means some MPs will be allowed to keep the often large sums of money they have made on the property market.
It has also been revealed that some MPs standing down at the next election are withholding information from Sir Thomas in the hope they too will not have to pay anything back.
Yet some MPs are still complaining that the public don’t understand them. According to the Daily Telegraph one Conservative MP has compared the treatment of politicians over their expense claims to the plight of Jews in Nazi Germany.
Sir Christopher Kelly’s report came out in the middle of all this proposing to fundamentally change the flawed expenses system. Then, Sir Ian Kennedy, the newly appointed £700 a day head of the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority, announced he had "no obligation" to accept the proposals!
Meanwhile in the Members’ Tea Room Sir Nicholas Winterton slapped a women MP’s backside while she was queuing for lunch, and another Tory grandee, Sir Nicholas Soames was reported to have acted like a pig in a trough.
According to Bristol MP Kerry McCarthy “One was seen to waltz in, grab meat from the buffet with his bare hands, stuff it into his mouth and waltz off again. Another – slapped a shocked female Labour MP on her bottom.”
You really couldn’t make it up, and we have only been back a month since our long summer break away from Westminster.
It is incidents like these that have seriously damaged the reputation of Parliament and some fear it may never recover. I really hope that isn’t true. It is my view that when it can command public confidence our Parliamentary system is the best in the world.
With the challenges of market failure, climate change and the growing threat of a nuclear weapon exchange within an unstable Middle East and Indian sub-continent, our papers and news programmes should be full of debate and ideas on these issues. Instead the whinging and whining of a small number of MPs fills the column inches.
Prevaricating over the recommendations Sir Christopher Kelly has proposed, or amending or delaying their implementation, is not going to restore the trust of the public. In its absence forces not accountable to the people will exercise a disproportionate influence over decisions that affect our lives and possibly our futures.
Restoring confidence to our system of Government has to be the priority and if Kelly is asking individual Members to make sacrifices or forego benefits it is a very small price indeed compared to what is at stake. We now need Sir Ian Kennedy to act and not hint he might reject Kelly’s proposals.
Most of those who put themselves forward for election do so for altruistic reasons, not for what they can earn from it. It is those who seem obsessed with the remuneration available whose motives should be questioned. I hope those MPs currently obsessing about proposed changes will now put a sock in it.
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The Lisbon Treaty has been ratified and a new set of rules to take account of an expanding European Union of 27 Member States will now be put in place.
A vote on a complex treaty was always going to present a Government with more problems than the simple principle of whether this country should be a member of the EU. After all if people vote against a Treaty, which part of it does the Government seek to renegotiate with the 26 other Member States? Twice now this has been the conundrum that Ireland has faced due to its constitutional requirement to hold referenda on Treaties.
Many have voiced the opinion that had we had a vote on the Lisbon Treaty a no vote would have been a vote against the UK remaining in the EU. If that is so why not have an honest “in” or “out” referendum in the first place? I was pleased to hear UKIP Leader Nigel Farage come round to this point of view when he clarified in an interview that his Party now wants such a poll, and not one on Lisbon.
The Conservatives have also changed tack ditching David Cameron’s “Cast-iron guarantee” of a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty. Perhaps they could now join the Lib Dems and UKIP in wanting a simple 'yes' or 'no' poll on our membership of the EU?
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Politicians are free to ignore advice, but to sack those who give it because it contradicts their opinion, that’s bad government.
The resignations of Government drug advisers following the sacking of Professor David Nutt, are damaging, not just in this instance but to the integrity of scientific advice across Government.
It is absurdly thin-skinned to suggest that a critical editorial in a peer-reviewed journal involves campaigning against Government policy. If ministers behave like this, no self-respecting academic will want to advise them.
The most convincing recipe for bad policy-making is for politicians to insist on scientific advice that meets their prejudices rather than the facts.
If Churchill had taken that view when listening to his principle Scientific Officer, Lord Cherwell, we could have lost the war. Scientists must be able to tell truth to power.
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