MP Expense Scandal Brings Tea Party Atmosphere to UK
British leaders got taxpayer-funded reimbursements for everything from dog food to mortgages.
In Britain in the middle of May everything — and I mean everything — has been wiped off the news cycle by a protracted expose conducted by the Telegraph about massive fiscal abuses by members of Parliament. At first it looked silly: MPs claiming for dog food and fertilizer manure on taxpayer’s money. (They are allowed to claim all manner of personal expenses as part of a longstanding scheme to make MPs’ lives more livable in their constituency residence as well as in their Westminster home.)
What has galled the average Briton is the emerging scope and range of expenditure whilst most of us are trying to hold onto our homes and feed ourselves in the worst recession since the Second World War. Every day one sees yet another shop being abandoned and boarded up; in London some local authorities are allowing charities and small groups to move into abandoned shop premises rather than let them become damp-ridden dumps. As this unfolds, members of Parliament are reported to have been claiming £18,000 for a bookcase and £6,000 for a wooden floor, while engaging in complicated “flipping” arrangements in which they received payments for switching homes every so often.
For example, Justice Minister Shahid (”martyr” in Arabic) Malik has had to step down from office — “until he is cleared” — because he is accused of improperly claiming the maximum allowance — £66,827 — on his second home in London whilst not reporting a subsidy for renting a home in his constituency of Dewsbury for £100 a week. Another MP, Elliot Morley, is accused of claiming a parliamentary subsidy of £16,000 on a mortgage he had already paid off. All of this at the expense of the long-suffering taxpayer.
Americans may say, “So what? Our politicians are ten times as corrupt.” Perhaps, as I am reminded of the late Mayor Daley’s “Vote early and vote often,” but that is the point: one of the things I have always admired about British politics has been the almost quaint transparency of parliamentarians of all parties and the admirable absence of billions of bucks needed to be elected. In recent years Tony Blair has come under fire for using Michael “Lord Cashpoint” Levy to raise vast sums for the Labour Party (some say the Blair family shredder is overheating right now), having been accused of handing out peerages to big donors. Others may say, “What about the corrupt bankers and the reckless billions being tossed at them?” Yes, there is anger about this as well, but what has upset so many Britons is the extravagance of their MPs when so many of these people — most particularly upper-class Tories — ought to indulge in these treats at their own expense. As the Guardian reported on May 15:
“I can see ordinary people going round with shotguns and shooting them all,” said a pensioner in this industrious Berkshire town. She was so enraged, she said, that she was tempted to shoot the speaker herself.
As this article goes to press the speaker of the House, Michael Martin, who engenders as much hatred and love as his American counterpart Ms. Pelosi, is being asked to resign or face expulsion: this would be the first removal of a speaker of the House of Commons in three hundred years, and it transpires that before 1709 seven speakers were beheaded!
Martin’s crimes are as follows: 1) blocking, over a period of years, the very revelations that the Daily Telegraph newspaper has now been exposing and 2) allegedly not informing the House that opposition MP Damian Green’s house was raided by police without a warrant. In the week of May 11 the speaker was accused by a former aide, John Stonborough, of reacting “extremely violently” as far back as 2003 at the suggestion that his decision to claim a second home allowance on his house in Glasgow while living in a “grace and favor” home in Westminster did not “look good.”
On the legendary BBC program Question Time, which saw American Ambassador Philip Lader reduced to tears after 9/11 by a hostile audience, an enraged studio crowd of May 15, 2009, booed the politicians on the panel. Wherever British MPs of all parties go in mid-May they are heckled; outside one MP’s home a neighbor dug a giant pound sign into his yard.
So, here I was about to say the Brits are not tea party types, but as this goes to press we may see the first beheading in three hundred years. Watch this space.
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Carol Gould is the Philadelphia-born author of Don’t Tread on Me: Anti-Americanism Abroad, Spitfire Girls, and A Room at Camp Pickett, a play about her mother’s experiences as a WAC in World War II; she has just completed films about black GIs and GI babies. Carol has been a panelist on BBC's Any Questions?, hosted by Jonathan Dimbleby, and is a commentator on Sky News, Press TV, the BBC World Service, and Five Live.
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11 Comments
1. Old Soldier:Forget a Teaparty – give us some old fashioned Anglo-Saxon bloodlust.
May 19, 2009 - 6:38 am 2. Gary Ogletree:Old Soldier, it may come to that if Dear Leader suspends the 2012 elections.
May 19, 2009 - 11:47 am 3. Bohemond:Ah, Gary: he won’t suspend them, he’ll just rig them. It’s the Chicago Way.
Ms Gould: let’s hope that in the next couple of years Americans can summon up the righteous anger our Cousins have mustered.
May 19, 2009 - 2:01 pm 4. Kevin:Sounds like a little anarchy in the UK may be in the offering. At least as far as house cleaning goes. Wonder how deep this will end up going? And if the rumors of the Blair family shredder is correct, probably on their fourth one if it’s made in China.
May 19, 2009 - 9:30 pm 5. Houdini:Hey they are just getting the government that they voted for. Do they have an outfit like ACORN in Britain if so maybe they need to abolish it as well as have some of these clowns expelled never to be able to hold a governmental office again.
May 20, 2009 - 6:22 am 6. FrancisT:The speaker has actually announced his resignation and various pols seem to be hoping that this means they can “draw a line under the affair”.
I don’t think this is going to happen and indeed yesterday at my blog – http://www.di2.nu/200905/19.htm – I quoted part of Cromwell’s speech to the Rump Parliament when he got rid of them at musketpoint. I think quite a large chunk of the British population feels the same way I do…
May 20, 2009 - 9:15 am 7. TomTom:allegedly not informing the House that opposition MP Damian Green’s house was raided by police without a warrant.
NO! That his Parliamentary and Constituency Offices were raided and correspondence and computers seized AND the Representative was arrested, his fingerprints and DNA taken and he was incarcerated in police custody for hours. That Police raided Parliament without a warrant (because they would not have been granted one)
May 22, 2009 - 9:32 pm 8. Mary Jackson:Compared with, say, Italy, let alone Middle Eastern or African countries, British MPs are squeaky clean. But so what? In those countries everyone’s on the fiddle and nobody pays tax if they can help it. In Britain, by contrast, anyone who fiddles their tax by as much as the cost of a sandwich faces fines and even imprisonment. Also, we are one of the highest taxed people in the world.
We taxpayers earn our money honestly, and pay everything we owe. To see it stolen and squandered by MPs – and all parties are equally to blame – is outrageous. No wonder we’re furious and cynical to boot.
May 23, 2009 - 5:59 am 9. peter james:Mr Blair may well have had his records shredded to avoid any discomfort, but there must be other bits of paper – bank statements,tax returns to the Revenue, hard disks and so on?
May 23, 2009 - 10:29 am 10. Carol Gould:the Telegraph has changed our political culture for the better, and forever, for which our eternal gratitude, but where’s Blair? We seek him hair, we seek him thair, but whair’s Blair?
Since writing this article I can confirm Francis T’s message that the Speaker of the House has announed he will step down on 21 June.
May 24, 2009 - 4:42 pm 11. M Henson:I think what is interesting about this continuing story is that the Tory ‘Daily Telegraph’ exposed the wrongdoing but the irony of it all is that the Tories are emerging as the worst offenders. Did the Telegraph really want to bring down so many Tories ? An ‘own goal…’
Hey bothers,
May 25, 2009 - 8:38 pmDon’t you all have a Monarchy? Where does the Queen stand on all this? Has she not the power of oversight when it comes to matters such as these? IF not; then what is the Monarchy good for?