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It’s the justifications for it. The latest is Tam Dalyell:
Mr Dalyell wanted to buy a set of 12 designer shelving units for the House of the Binns, the 200-acre estate in Scotland where his family have lived for almost 400 years.
He had accumulated a considerable library working as Labour MP for Linlithgow since 1962, and was able to make the claim because he designated one of the estate’s rooms his constituency office.
That’s the post tax income of the average working person in hte country. And he demands that much just for book cases? Worse, he demands it 2 months before he retires?
But it’s not even that. Here’s his justification:
Mr Dalyell said yesterday that all his expenses claims had been “absolutely justified”. He said: “I’m absolutely at ease with all of this … The bookcases were needed for all the Hansards I’d collected. I also do a lot of obituaries and wanted them to be in order. And indeed my political books.”
Why should we pay for his collection of Hansards? It’s all available online anyway. Further, so he does a lot of obituaries, does he? For which he gets paid by the newspapers he does them for? Why are we as taxpayers subsidising his private business?
These people just aren’t getting it, are they? I don’t think anyone thinks that MPs, just like anyone else doing a job, shouldn’t get expenses for what they have to spend to do their job. But the important words there are “have” and “job”.
A fancy set of bookcases for your second job, not the one you’re actually being paid to do as an MP, no, they don’t qualify. Why is it so hard for the political classes to understand this?
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UKIP’s rise of 12 points in the same week to 19% will send a shock through Tory ranks because most of those voters are Conservatives.
I’m unconvinced. No, not about the number, but about the all being ex-Tory.
We’ve been so inundated with calls that the overflow arrives in the press office. There’s an awful lot of people who would never, on tribal grounds, vote Tory who are now asking for signs, for posters, for UKIP.
It just ain’t just Tories, it’s a national upchuck.
Erm…..
Conservatives 41%, - 9
Labour on 19%
LibDems 19%.
UKIP 19% + 12
BNP 4% + 0
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From the Liberal Democrats euro election manifesto:
By combining our economic power, as we have done through the single market, Europe gets better trade deals around the world than if each country were to negotiate independently.
Clearly no one in the entire party actually undertands the point of trade. Here’s the most recent Nobel Laureate in economics explaining about trade:
An international economics course should drive home to students the point that international trade is not about competition, it is about mutually beneficial exchange. Even more fundamentally, we should be able to teach students that imports, not exports, are the purpose of trade. That is, what a country gains from trade is the ability to import what it wants. Exports are not an objective in and of themselves: the need to export is a burden that the country must bear because its import suppliers are crass enough to demand payment.
All of the “trade deals” that the EU negotiates, those that the Lib Dims are praising, are about our exports. Which, as a real economist points out, are not what trade is about at all. What we’re interested in is the imports and the price we pay for them.
And, as we also know, the European Union imposes taxes upon imports. 66% on those Chinese compact fluorescent light bulbs that they insist we buy, 60% on Chinese candles and all of the rest.
The point of trade is the imports and the European Union deliberately makes them more expensive. Thus we get very bad trade deals indeed because of our membership of the EU.
But then I’m expecting a Lib Dim to have some knowledge of economics when I say that, aren’t I? Some hope, eh?
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I thought we’d got to the point where I was immune to further revelations. I just couldn’t imagine that it would get any worse. I was wrong:
It can also be disclosed that, in November 2007, Mr Morley “flipped” his designated second home from the Scunthorpe house to his London property - and the dubious mortgage claims were never uncovered.
Mr Morley, a former government whip and privy councillor, was renting out the London property, which was designated as his “main residence”, to another Labour MP.
Ian Cawsey, a Labour Party vice-chairman, who was renting the house, said last night he was unaware that the property was also Mr Morley’s main residence. It is unclear where Mr Morley was actually living in London.
For four months after Mr Morley “flipped” his homes, the former minister claimed full mortgage interest on the London house and Mr Cawsey, who had designated the house as his second home, continued to claim £1,000 a month for the same property in rent. The rent money was paid to Mr Morley.
Incredible, isn’t it? Two claims on the same property? We pay the mortgage for him and then we also pay the rent that he pockets?
Isn’t it about time some people started resigning?
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It isn’t of course, just Brussels which wastes our hard earned tax money.
Taxpayers stand to lose £500million in a £1billion bail-out of the Olympic Village project after talks to secure private finance failed.
The athletes’ village for the 2012 Games has had to be nationalised after private investment dried up in the credit crunch.
Westminster does well enough at pouring it down the drain as well.
Time for a change really, isn’t it?
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Just a brief note on the UKIP fishing policy.
“The scandal of millions of dead fish being dumped back into the sea every year is now well known. Where British fishermen have landed fish rather than dump them, they have been prosecuted, ruined and in some cases imprisoned by our Government, acting for the EU, he said.
UKIP policy is for an immediate reinstatement of the UK’s 12-mile territorial waters, with all foreign fishing banned; and a further 200-mile Exclusive Economic Zone in which fishing would be managed by the UK to ensure proper conservation of stocks.
“Our waters hold 70 per cent of Europe’s fish, but we may not catch more than 13 per cent under EU rules,” said Mr Farage. “Every other EU member state - many of whom subsidise their fleets - is entitled to a share, even if they’re landlocked countries in Eastern Europe.
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One such joy is that one has to, of course, read all of the newspapers every day. Today’s interesting point is Peter Andre and Katie Price are to divorce.
No, I don’t know anything about them either but apparently it’s very important indeed.
Front page and 3 pages in the Mirror.
Front page and 4 pages in The Sun.
Front page and 2 pages in The Star.
Front page and a page in the Express.
The Independent has a headline:
Katie and Peter ask for privacy after split.
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Now isn’t this an interesting thing for a former Tory Cabinet Minister to say?
Lord Tebbit told Today: “What I am advising people is to show the major parties that it is the electors who are masters and the electors are extremely upset with their employees in the House of Commons and I said don’t vote for the major parties.”
As Nick Robinson points out:
BBC Political editor Nick Robinson said Lord Tebbit was choosing his words carefully in not endorsing a particular party - a move which would lead him being expelled from the Conservative Party.
But he said Lord Tebbit’s “extraordinary” intervention would be seen as an effective endorsement for the UK Independence Party, which campaigns for withdrawal from the EU.
A very effective endorsement as well, don’t you think?
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Nigel has a comment piece in the Daily Express today. Not online as yet (they tend to get stuff up later in the day on their website) and hard hitting stuff.
“Just as the clapped-out old Westminster parties did not want you to know about the expenses claims of their MPs so they do not want you to know what they’re actually standing for in this election. The Lib Dems want to continue turning the Westminster Parliament into a parish council, Labour if for more Gordon Brown no matter what and the Tories have been sitting on hte fence so long they’re in danger of getting impaled.”
Worth a read.
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If you’d like to see what could and would have happened to us if we’d joined the euro just have a look at what is going on in Spain:
The number of Spaniards unable to pay their debts has risen by 26 per cent to 2.7million in 2009, compared with the first four months of last year. During the same period 232,000 companies joined the list of bad debtors, a 67 per cent rise, according to AsNef-Equifax, a Spanish credit agency.
Bankruptcies are up 44 per cent in the first quarter this year against the final quarter of 2008, with the worst-hit sectors being services and construction.
Unemployment is running at 17.4 per cent, the highest in Europe, with more than four million on the dole. The European Union predicts that this figure will rise to 20 per cent by next year. Some Spaniards have to accept soup-kitchen meals to feed their families.
What has happened and is happening is quite simple. Being in a single currency inevitably means having a single interest rate. And that rate is going to be set for the majority, not for the needs of certain sectors of that currency area. Interest rates in Spain were too low for too long, setting off a huge construction and borrowing boom. Yes, very much larger than the one in the UK.
When it comes to an end, as all booms do (no, no one has abolished boom and bust) then there are several desirable policy responses. One can lower interest rates, one can deliberately devalue the currency for example. Or one can let the economy sffer through very painful deflation as Spain is doing.
For, of course, as members of the euro Spain cannot lower their interest rates nor can they devalue. Both things which we in Britain have done. Thus Spain’s recession is going to be deeper and longer than our own, for they do not have the room for policy manouvre that we do.
If we’d been in the euro our boom would have been more manic and our bust would be deeper than it already is. Thank goodness we didn’t join, eh?