An Echo?

The Standards and Privileges Committee has published a document from a Tory MP who told them: ‘My blog is 70% fiction and 30% fact. It is written as a tool to enable my constituents to know me better and to reassure them of my commitment to [her constituency].’ She also said that, ‘I rely heavily on poetic licence and frequently replace one place name/event/fact with another.’

This disclosure came as part of a sleaze investigation that cleared the MP of abusing the Commons expenses system but found that she had ‘misled’ voters.

The Commissioner said that the MPs blog, ‘gave information to its readers, including [her] constituents and party supporters, which provided a misleading impression of her arrangements as a Member of Parliament for the constituency’.

MPs, 70% fiction, 30% fact, poetic licence?

Is this an echo I hear?
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Those MPs Again!

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The MPs expenses scandal rumbles on with the news that the Tory shadow chancellor has been ordered by the Parliamentary Standards and Privileges Committee to repay monies claimed which were unintentional and ‘relatively minor’.

It’s not the sum to be repaid that caught my attention, for it was only £1,936. It was the size of the man’s £450,000 mortgage.

One of the many things that have angered people about MPs expenses, and the news that so many of them had their fingers in the till, have been the revelations about some of their life styles.

Most of us have a vague idea that the MPs representing us are honest local folk with more or less average lives as, indeed, I expect the majority are. But those living in houses worth £450,000 or more, have moats, bell towers and duck houses - some of whom have been caught out enriching themselves at the public’s expense - not only seem to be living in a different world, but are.

My father-in-law stopped voting Labour when he learned many years ago what was left in the will of a Labour politician. He had no faith from that moment on that any Labour MP with that amount of cash and property had any links with ordinary folk.

And he was spot on in my view about all such MPs regardless of their party!
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