Catpaw – diary of an angry cat

I wrote earlier that it may turn into a hot, contentious summer in the UK. The first salvo by the public was launched tonight by British newspaper The Daily Mail and the Tax-Payer’s Alliance. They began a campaign to prosecute Members of Parliament over the expenses scandal. The Mail wrote:

… eminent lawyers believe that the actions of some ministers and MPs are blatant enough to warrant prosecution for offences which can carry a jail sentence of at least a year for anyone found guilty.

They believe the MPs could and should be charged under either the 2006 Fraud Act or the 1968 Theft Act. If this gains support then there will be a lot of very, very worried politicos in that country.

Another casualty of the “We can Expense Everything” scandal was former Minister of the Environment, Elliot Morely for claiming £16,000 for a mortgage that didn’t exist. That’s $28,531 Canadian dollars for the what the press has dubbed the “phantom mortgage”. Mr Morely had fully paid off his mortgage in 2006, but continued to to submit for reimbursement for another 18 months. He chalked it up to sloppy book keeping. But this doesn’t wash. He was asked to justify this claim and submitted, as proof, his bank debit charges for the monthly amount of £800.  Astonishingly enough, the office in charge accepted his bank statements and dropped its request for proper paper work on the mortgage payments. The error should have been spotted at that point, how many people simply forget they’ve paid off their mortgage?

Morely has been removed from the post of Climate Change Envoy and has been suspended from the Labour Party. There are calls from within the Labour Party to have him permanently booted. Although he has already paid back the money and issued an apology, speculation is growing that he may yet face criminal charges.

On the Tory side of the shame game, Conservative MP Julie Kirkbride, wife of the aide sacked by Conservative leader Cameron earlier in the week, was on the receiving end of a very ticked off constituent’s outburst. An angry voter expressed his rage at the pair’s expenses by lobbing a brick through her office window today. Tory MP Alan Duncan’s very manicured lawn, courtesy of public funding, was vandalised by someone who scratched a large £ sign on it. He billed so much for his lawn care, even his own gardener questioned the amount.

To further the disgrace, 2 Labour Peers, Lord Taylor of Blackburn and Lord Truscott, have claimed the dubious honour of being the first Members to be suspended from Parliament since 1642 for breaches of the Parliamentary Code of Conduct. Who knew it existed?! Certainly not the current crop of MPs or Lords. They were suspended for accepting payments for influencing proposed laws in an earlier scandal labeled “cash for laws”. The rot of entitlement and corruption is so deep I wonder if it will ever be rooted out.

Ah, the whiff of scandal drifting across the Atlantic! Smell that? It’s the compost from the UK House of Parliament as the expenses scandal keeps hitting the fan. The right to be reimbursed for reasonable expenses should not be questioned. It’s the egregious abuse of the expense system that has the British Isles in an uproar. British MPs have expensed every they could possibly think of. Nothing was too small or too large, from the inane expenses of packets of biscuits and tampons to gluttonous extremes of house flipping and tax evading. The Labour party leadership has suggested the problem lay with the system (heaven forbid anyone be held accountable for their own moral lapses). They went further saying the MPs were simply not being paid enough and perhaps a pay increase would solve the problem.

Take Labour backbench MP Austin Mitchell as a fine case in point. Among his claims for asprin, lemons, ginger crinkles, you will find malt whiskey, security shutters for his home (although whether they are true security shutters is being debate), a $5,000+ redecoration of his secondary residence and a $2,136 reupholstery job on his sofas because they were “stained with Branston pickle, whisky, and gin”. As justification for his expenses he went on to say “It’s pretty hard work and can’t be done without allowances. Let’s have a sense of proportion and some common sense. We could start by understanding what the job is about”. Hmmm I think the public is saying just that – let’s have some common sense about the expenditures. The MPs are so afraid of spending their own money, they have no qualms about putting in for everything. The British public should be reassured that Mr Mitchell finds the entire expense debacle amusing and went so far as to offer to donate the old sofa covers.

And there in lays the heart of the problem. The MPs just don’t get it. They do not understand why the public is upset. To actually come out and say “Let’s have a sense of proportion and common sense” while demanding to be paid for every tiny aspect of your life, displays a marked lack of understanding of the problem. Perhaps a packet of biscuits or two wouldn’t be too much to ask, if consumed in the space of a busy work day, but it wasn’t just one or two small items – it was a continous demand to be reimbursed for everything. The MPs never entertained the notion their salary was for living on. There is an expectation the MPs (or anyone else for that matter) will spend their salary for rent/mortgage, food, heat, entertainment when it is personal and expense the extras that are required to do their job. House flipping, grocery shopping and sofa recovering does not fit the category of expenses.

With scandal after scandal rocking the UK, this may very well turn into a long, hot summer of protest if the MPs don’t remember where they parked their common sense and moral compasses.