I’ve been even quieter than usual as the last two weeks my free time was spent rapidly building props for a friend of mine called Preacher who for publicity and other reasons best known to himself was doing the Britains got Talent thing – oh and then there was sleeping. So I’m way behind on pretty much everything so may well go over stuff that’s already been covered by other people far better.
So as a fun place to start there’s the wonderful news that at least some of the corrupt or incompetent members of parliament are to actually face charges , something which will hopefully rumble on long enough to still be fresh in peoples minds when it comes to time to vote. Sadly of course it’s only four of them being charged so far even though 52% were found to have over claimed.
The four that have been charged are claiming that parliamentary privilege means they shouldn’t go to court but that instead accoridng to the 1689 bill of rights it should just be a matter for parliamentary authorities – but they don’t think they’re above the law oh no, of course not. We should also pay no attention that the three of them are using the law firm that usually represents Labour. There is of course the slight problem that if they can delay their day in court for long enough they may still get a rather handsome pay off, though of course if their colleagues so chose yet another bit of legislation could fix that.
The one thing that is making me suspect that they may actually all be incompetent rather than dishonest is the amazing video of Jim Devine explaining why he shouldn’t be charged. Also utterly failing to understand the difference between a budget and an allowance and the whole concept of false accounting. But then he does claim it was all OK because a whip told him so.
Meanwhile over at the Lords they can carry on troughing. As a final point the new body they’re bringing in to make sure we can’t complain in future when they feather their beds in this fashion is going to cost about six times the amount recovered from our MPs this time round – but just enforcing the rules as they existed and applying existing law would have been far too difficult and wouldn’t have allowed the government to be seen to be doing something.
