Jesus wept. I tip my hat to the Telegraph for dragging this one out for as long as they possibly can. The latest revelations are pulling former Ministers and Tory backbench grandees into the row, and frankly they're taking the piss as much as the rest have really.We have the former agriculture minister, Douglas Hoggg, submitting a claim for his moat to be cleared. The mere fact he has a moat is enough to make the average bod roll their eyes, but to ask the same average bloke to pay for its upkeep? Then there was a piano tuning he had done? Do they not earn enough to pay for this out of their own pocket?
Sir Michael Spicer had nearly £10,000 on gardening. James Arbuthnot, the Conservative chairman of the defence select committee claimed for his swimming pool and has announced he will be paying the money back. You shouldn't have taken it in the first place! I bet you wouldn't be doing that if you hadn't been caught!
Rather sad to say the former shadow home secretary, David Davis has been named as claiming £10K on home refurbishing. Whilst David Heathcoat-Amory claimed £380 for horse manure. What a shit. The Marquess of Lothian, Michael Ancram claimed £14,000. THe man has three houses worth £8 million for Christ sake. Why? Bastard. Fat bastard.
Apparently CCHQ is telling the media that they should talk to the individuals, so they've been hung out to dry from the centre clearly. Am too angry about the lot in the picture right now to say anymore.
Read more here.
13 comments:
I am a Conservative Candidate in the County Elections. I have to canvass tomorrow. I will be taking flack for a bunch of pricks who claim more in expenses for their food than I earn all year. Twats. Thanks a bunch.
Hear, hear, Dizzy. The old guard who defied reform and wanted all this to continue quietly can all go. We don't need them. The reverse is true. We need them to go. This is horrible and shameful - they have shamed us - and we have to take it on the chin and start afresh without them.
I have just vented my spleen at some length (at 00:16) on ConHome and hope CCHQ are reading it, for there are a lot who feel as I do.
Amputation of gangrenous limbs is vital. Now. Or Brown survives and the Tories are moribund, neither of which can be allowed to happen.
Cameron has never been more powerful than he is today -- if he dares to dare.
I actually feel quite ill. 4 days of raging impotent anger, with no let-up is making me sick.
Can I claim for it?
The whole damn system is corrupt. Get rid of all of them, Ill probably vote UKIP now anyway. Screw Labour and Screw the Torries.
A Government should work for its People, Not vice versa.
What the hell do these people use their wages for? It's time for a clear-out. Dissolve parliament and lets start again.
Come on people are you really telling you did not know this was going on, did you all really think people come into politics to do good. Blair proved this to be bull shit.
The fact is political leaders turned a blind eye to it for donkey years, it was allowed to carry on because people did not know, of course under the Freedom of information a mole or what ever, we have now found out.
But a shock nope disappointed well a bit, but greed will always come forth with such open rules.
I'm beginning to think Sharia might not be such a bad proposition, after all we can't hang the thieving bastards, but a few hands getting chopped off might be a lesson to the rest of them to behave!
Dizzy, Heathcoat-Amory did not submit a claim for horse manure. Horse manure was an unclaimed item that appeared on a receipt that Heathcoat-Amory submitted - the claimed items on that receipt were NOT horse manure.
This is the problem with the Telegraph having the unedited receipts - they don't have the fact that various items on said receipts were 'struck through' by their submitters.
Heathcoat-Amory did claim thousands of pounds worth of gardening costs, though. Within the rules, but still a tad too far.
If Cameron really wants to demonstrate that the Tory Toff image is truly dead and buried, he needs to get rid of all the Squire-ocracy that has been defrauding the taxpayer in order to maintain their country estates.
The Michael Ancrams + Heath-cote-Amory's belong to the past .... consign them to the dustbin of Parliamentary history and replace them with 'normal' people who have succeeded at their 'normal' occupations and truly want to serve their country.
These claims for expenses simply cannot be justified, they are outrageous. I may be wrong but they certainly appear to me to be outside the "rules."
Just what kind of idiots does the the Fees Office employ that they sign off on such claims?
Yes, Robert @ 07:55. I am saying that I did not know. I did not know that senior MPs were grossly and immorally abusing the allowances system without as much as a qualm.
Of course I expect venality in humankind. I am not a socialist and do not nurse stupid fantasies of human perfectibility. The concept of original sin ('every man has his price', and woman in Mrs Blears's case) strikes me as much more realistic.
I am a lifelong grass root and foot soldier, delivering Conservative Party leaflets, voting and latterly campaigning on the net. I had hitherto thought that some of the people for whose election I have worked and voted had at least some semblance of a conscience, and if not that, shame. The shock is realising that this is not so.
I am not criticising the MPs who, respectful of the electors, used their legitimate allowances properly and with restraint.
I am outraged at 'professional politicians' (what a cursed class) abusing public trust to play the system to their personal advantage and our great disadvantage, knowing that their actions were immoral and straining to hide them from their employers - us.
Perhaps the millionaire Maudes, Ancrams, Hoggs, and Woodwards are so accustomed to handling their large private fortunes that a few tens of thousands extra here and there on their personal income are just petty cash, margin of error stuff, nothing to trouble the conscience. After all, old chap, the rules say… etc. Oh, please.
Perhaps the Blearses, Hoons, Darlings and Ballses (no, not the Ballses, they are as pure as the driven snow as any court injunction will tell you) have become so used, since 1997, to handling millions, billion, now trillions of public money, that comparatively minuscule top-ups to their personal incomes... ten thousand here, twenty thousand there... have become equally negligible. To them, possibly. Not to me. As for leeches like Moran, words fail me.
Charging pensioners, millions of whom are drowning in financial worry, for the upkeep of swimming pools? Charging their housekeepers’ wages back to those housekeepers through their taxes? Profiteering again and again to build property portfolio and avoiding the taxes they impose on the rest of us while hypocritically denouncing the use by others of the very ‘tax loopholes’ which they themselves assiduously exploit in secret?
Should I not be shocked?
Let them know how shocked I am. Let the shattering reverberations of my shock and anger, and that of millions like me, in turn shock these disdainful, unscrupulous miscreants. Let them be shocked rigid with fear, shaken into grasping the reality of what they have done to us and the depth of our rage.
Let them dread meeting us on the constituency streets. Or resign.
@Robert.
No, I and probably the the vast majority of the public did not know this was going on. And, unless Ms Brooke had not done what she did, then we'd not know now.It matters not a hoot whether the offenders be Labour or Conservative.
They should all be forced to repay the money which they have 'troughed', issue public apologies , have the whip withdrawn and be deselected by the Contituency they "represent".
Get rid of these old farts.
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