James Cleverly: He was once described as “the Tories’ go-to eejit when they need someone to tweet absolute nonsense or defend the indefensible”. It seems they no longer feel the need to defend themselves in that way.
It seems James Cleverly’s time at the top is finally running out – and it can’t end soon enough, in This Writer’s view.
Mr Cleverly simply isn’t smart enough to hold a top job in government. Besides, with Boris Johnson as prime minister, we don’t need two idiots with their feet in their mouths at the same time.
Apparently, some think this is harsh treatment after Cleverly presided over a heavy defeat for the Labour Party – but that had very little to do with him.
It seems he’ll be replaced by expenses cheat Maria Miller, who disgraced herself in the Department for Work and Pensions before she disgraced herself over money. It may be that she has learned her lessons in the nearly-six-years since that happened; draw your own conclusions.
Also for the chop, it seems, are many of the women Johnson appointed to make himself look like an equal-opportunities boss, in the run-up to the election.
Business Secretary Andrea Leadsom, International Trade Secretary Liz Truss and welfare boss Therese Coffey (who made a fool of herself by saying food banks were a perfect way to deal with poverty) are apparently on the way out, with sexism apparently on the way back in.
It seems the only way Johnson can be described as supporting equal opportunities is negative:
Members of his own government are just as likely to get the bum’s rush as the rest of us.
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One law for them…: This image appeared on Twitter, summarising how the law treats MPs in comparison with the rest of us.
How strange that John Bercow would want to make himself an accessory to MPs’ fraudulent expenses claims!
It seems the Speaker of the House of Commons has ordered that details of all MPs’ expenses, claimed before the system was reformed in 2010, should be shredded.
The decision will have come as good news for Members such as George Osborne, who made a cool £1 million off the taxpayer from expenses payments made to cover a mortgage on open land in his Cheshire constituency which he claimed he was using for Parliamentary business.
(The bad news for him is that Vox Political holds copies of relevant documents and will certainly launch another attempt to have Osborne prosecuted, if the opportunity presents itself. Oh, and the Daily Telegraph – which has a complete record of claims made under the former system and used it in a series of reports that shocked the nation and led to the system being reformed, a matter that has now become a two-edged sword.)
Bercow’s reasons for burning the books are a mystery. According to the Telegraph, weakling standards watchdog Kathryn Hudson has been dealing with multiple allegations raised by constituents. Now she is able to tell them that their concerns cannot be investigated due to lack of evidence.
This is not good enough.
In fact, it is worse than the original, scandalous system. At least, with that, it was possible to find out who had claimed money and why; that is no longer the case.
The Telegraph article tells us that the Commons’ ‘Authorised Records Disposal Practice’ lays down guidelines about the length of time for which records may be kept. Thousands are stored indefinitely in the Parliamentary Archive. The pay, discipline and sickness records of Commons staff are kept until their 100th birthday. Health and safety records are kept for up to 40 years.
How long are records of MPs’ expenses kept until they are destroyed? Three years.
Why such a short period? “Data protection”.
Why does this only apply to MPs’ expenses and not to the other matters? No answer.
We know why, though, don’t we? It’s in order to cover up the wrongdoings of the most corrupt Parliament in living memory.
We know that the government has been legislating to ensure that money is drained from the poor and needy into the hands of the rich and the powerful corporations they run, in return for generous donations to the Conservative Party (arrangements for the Liberal Democrats are not known to this blog).
Who knows what backbenchers have been doing in the meantime? They’ve certainly been living the life of Riley while some of us have had to struggle simply to secure the state benefits that we have spent our entire working lives subsidising – and many others, having been denied those benefits for spurious reasons, are no longer with us as a result.
Still, considering the limp punishment handed down to Maria Miller, who between 2005 and 2009 claimed £90,718 in Parliamentary expenses for the mortgage and upkeep of a south London house that was occupied, not by herself, but by her parents, there is no reason to believe any of them would have received a just and proper punishment.
(She was fined £5,800 and made a half-hearted apology – not to the taxpayer, but to Parliament, after a committee of, you guessed it, MPs overruled the standards commissioner’s recommendation that she be made to repay £45,000.)
If any other citizen (who did not have the right business- or class-based connections) embezzled that much money, they would be jailed for a lengthy period of time – in fact we have recently seen cases in which people who were reduced to stealing from supermarkets or food banks, after the DWP sanctioned their benefits, have been jailed for unduly lengthy periods. Yet MPs are, essentially, let off the hook.
The problem is: They’re above the law.
There won’t be any justice in this system until the whole mechanism for investigating allegations against MPs – of any kind – is handed over to the police, where it belongs.
And not just the Metropolitan Police, who are nearby and may end up facing their own corruption allegations. Perhaps it is best that the responsibility be handed between forces on a rota system, in order to minimise the opportunity for underhandedness.
No MP would ever vote for that, of course. In a perfect world they might but, in this one, all that is required to buy their silence is peer pressure. In a perfect world (again) the electorate would be able to hold MPs to account with the threat of being removed from their seat at the next election, but we know that this does not happen in practice. Some ex-MPs who were disgraced in the last expenses scandal will be standing for election again next May.
Perhaps the best way forward would be to pursue Bercow, for ordering the destruction of the files, and the weakling Hudson for allowing them to be destroyed.
Alternatively, the Telegraph could make its files publicly available, and we could all carry out investigations of our own.
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Who do you bank with? This piece of public opinion was picked up from Twitter [Author: Unknown].
Isn’t it a shame that on of our national Sunday newspapers has chosen to disrupt everybody’s enjoyment of our Easter eggs with a specious attempt to expose abuses of food banks and make operator the Trussell Trust look hypocritical?
Isn’t it also a shame that the Mail on Sunday didn’t make a few inquiries into the procedure for dealing with people who turn up at food banks without having been referred?
The paper’s reporters and editor could have, at least, opened a dictionary and looked up the meaning of the word “charity”.
Under the headline, ‘No ID, no checks… and vouchers for sob stories: The truth behind those shock food bank claims’, the paper today (April 20) published a story claiming that Trussell Trust food banks are breaking their own rules by allowing people to take food bank parcels without presenting a voucher from an approved referrer, and that they are allowing many times more than the maximum permissible number of repeat visits.
Unfortunately for reporters Simon Murphy and Sanchez Manning, both situations are – in fact – allowed, because food banks must be flexible in the way they deal with individual cases. They would have known that if they had done their homework – as yr obdt srvt (who’s writing this) did at several meetings on the organisation of food banks here in Powys.
The paper’s investigation claims that there were “inadequate checks on who claims the vouchers, after a reporter obtained three days’ worth of food simply by telling staff at a Citizens Advice Bureau – without any proof – that he was unemployed”.
It turned out that this person had to fill out a form providing his name, address, date of birth, phone number and the reason for his visit before an assessor asked him why he needed food bank vouchers. In contradiction of the introduction to the story, he explained – not simply that he was unemployed, but that he had been out of work for several months and the harsh winter had left him strapped for cash and food. He said his wife had left her job and was not earning and that they had two children. These lies were sufficient to win food bank vouchers.
What the report didn’t say was how the details given by reporter Ross Slater would have been used afterwards. The CAB would have booked him in for a further interview with a debt advisor, to which he would have had to bring documentary evidence of his situation. When he didn’t turn up, he would have been identified as a fraud. The food bank would also have taken his details, to be fed back into the referral system. Job Centre Plus would have picked up on the fact that he isn’t unemployed. From this point on, he would have been identified as a fraud and refused further service.
You see, it is true that food banks run on a voucher system, but that is only a part of the scheme. The questions asked of people who need vouchers are used to ensure that they get the help they need to avoid having to come back – that’s why they’re asked. They also weed out abusers like Mr Slater.
If the paper’s editor had looked in a dictionary, he might have seen charity defined as “voluntary provision of help to people in need, or the help provided” in the first instance. However, reading further, he would have seen “sympathy or tolerance in judging” listed as well. It seems the Mail on Sunday would have no such sympathy and would have deserving cases turned away to starve.
It is telling, also, that the paper had to go to Citizens Advice to get its evidence. Far more food bank vouchers are handed out in the Job Centre Plus, where all a citizen’s circumstances are available to advisors. But not one word is said about the fact that the vast majority of food bank referrals are for people in real need and not newspaper reporters.
The paper also stated: “Staff at one centre gave food parcels to a woman who had visited nine times in just four months, despite that particular centre’s own rules stipulating that individuals should claim no more than three parcels a year.”
It continued: “Individuals experiencing severe financial hardship are able to claim food vouchers but there are no clear criteria on who should be eligible. Once received, the vouchers can be exchanged for three days’ worth of food at an allotted centre.
“The Trussell Trust has a policy that an individual can claim no more than nine handouts in a year, but undercover reporters found this limit varied in different branches.”
No – it is far more likely that it varied according to the circumstances of the person who needed the help. Rigid rules, such as one that limits people to only three visits, mean those who need the most help would be cut off while they still needed assistance. People working in food banks would be aware of who these were, and would be more likely to be tolerant towards them.
Meanwhile, the other support services – Job Centre Plus, Citizens Advice, Social Services and so on – would be working to help them. With some people, it simply takes longer. It should be easy for anyone to think of reasons why this may be the case.
This may also explain the situation in which a worker at a Trussell Trust food bank said people “bounce around” locations to receive more vouchers. The assessment system is a way of monitoring these people and determining whether they need extra help.
It is not true that the criteria are not clear – the paper is misleading with this claim. Food banks, the charities running them, and referring organisations all have to agree on the circumstances in which they permit people to receive parcels. You really can’t just walk in the door and expect to get a free handout. That’s why the questions are asked and forms filled out – they will check up on everybody.
Another claim – that “volunteers revealed that increased awareness of food banks is driving a rise in their use” is unsubstantiated, and is clearly an attempt to support the government’s claim that this is the case. But it is silly. Of course starving people will go to a food bank after they have been told it exists; that doesn’t mean they aren’t starving.
And the paper wrongly said the Trussell Trust had claimed that more than 913,000 people received three days’ emergency food from its banks in 2013-14, compared with 347,000 in the previous financial year. This is a misreading of the way the charity records its work, as the Trussell Trust records visits, not visitors. It would be hard to work out exactly how many people attended because some will have visited just once, others twice, a few for the full three times, and some would have required extra help.
The claim that many visitors were asylum-seekers is silly because food banks were originally set up for foreign people who were seeking asylum in the UK and had no money or means of support.
Of course it would be wrong to say that nobody is trying to abuse the system. There are good people and bad people all over the country, and bad people will try to cheat. Look at Maria Miller, Iain Duncan Smith (Betsygate), George Osborne (and his former paddock), Andrea Leadsom’s tax avoidance, Philip Hammond’s tax avoidance, Charlotte Leslie who took cash to ask Parliamentary questions – to name but a few.
The Trussell Trust has agreed to investigate the newspaper’s allegations – but it is important to remember that these were just a few instances of abuse, and only claimed – by a newspaper that is infamous for the poor quality of its reporting.
Nothing said in the article should be used to undermine the vital work of food banks in helping people to survive, after the Conservative-led Coalition government stole the safety net of social security away from them.
UPDATE: Already the Mail on Sunday is facing a public backlash against its ill-advised piece. A petition on the Change.org website is calling for the reporter who claimed food bank vouchers under false pretences in order to make a political point to be sacked. Vox Political has mixed feelings about this – it targets a person who was sent out to do a job by others who are more directly to blame for the piece, but then he did it of his own free will and this action brings all newspaper reporters into disrepute. Consider carefully.
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Congratulations are due to Green MP Caroline Lucas, who walked free from court today after criminal charges against her were overturned.
She had been charged with obstructing a public highway and a public order offence, during high-profile anti-fracking protests last summer. Neither offence carries a prison sentence – the maximum penalty for either charge would have been a fine of up to £1,000.
District judge Tim Pattinson said the prosecution had failed to satisfy him that Lucas had “the requisite knowledge” about the Section 14 order being in place.
On the obstruction charge, he said he did not hear any evidence that any actual obstruction of a vehicle or person was caused by the protest.
It is good for British justice that Ms Lucas was acquitted – but bad for British justice that she was taken to court in the first place, most particularly because the case contrasts so strongly with that of disgraced former cabinet minister Maria Miller.
Miller claimed tens of thousands of pounds of taxpayers’ money under false pretences. You can call that fraud, if you like (maximum penalty: 10 years’ imprisonment).
Did she go to court? No.
Because she is a member of Parliament, the financial irregularity was investigated by a Parliamentary body, the Commons Committee on Standards. Rather than take the advice of the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner, who recommended that Miller pay back the full amount, the committee ruled that she should return just £5,800 and apologise to Parliament for obstructive behaviour during the investigation.
Surely everybody can see the double-standard here?
The least we can learn from these two stories is that the law absolutely does not treat everybody equally.
Ms Lucas was arrested, detained at Her Majesty’s convenience and now she has faced trial for the offences alleged against her. This MP, who opposes the government in Parliament, was then acquitted after a fair trial and has the support of the general public in this matter.
Miller was accused of a far more serious crime than Ms Lucas but has not been arrested, has not been detained, and has not been tried for the offences alleged against her. The then-government minister was whitewashed by her colleagues and only resigned because of a public outcry against the decision.
What conclusion can the public draw, other than that government MPs are effectively above the law?
David Cameron’s government can only redeem itself with two actions: It must remove Parliament’s right to investigate claims of financial irregularity by MPs and placing this duty firmly where it belongs – with the police and the Crown Prosecution Service.
The other action?
Obvious, really…
Maria Miller must face a criminal trial, charged with fraud.
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Tory right-whinger Peter Bone is the latest MP to face questions over his expenses.
The inquiry will focus on expenses relating to the upkeep of his second home between 2005 and 2009. As such, the investigation will be carried out using the system that was in place before it was reformed after a string of scandals in 2009.
Both George Osborne and Maria Miller had their expenses examined under this system, so we can expect Bone to get away with any wrongdoing as well.
From evidence that has emerged in the Osborne and Miller investigations, it is clear that the pre-2009 investigation system was completely useless except as a way of whitewashing MPs’ reputations.
Of course, Bone is a frequent contributor to Prime Minister’s Questions, where he often claims to have been prompted into making a query by his wife.
In the unlikely event that he is found guilty of a misdemeanour, will he be blaming that on Mrs Bone as well?
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You would think that, in the week of the Maria Miller scandal, the Conservative-led Coalition would spurn any contact with people or organisations responsible for financial irregularity in connection with the government – right?
Wrong: Here’s G4S.
(You really need to be playing the Soundcloud clip – above – to get the full effect of this article. The song is the G4S anthem ‘Securing Your World’; it is sub-Bon Jovi cheese that sets you up perfectly for the facts about the firm.)
G4S is the company that famously failed to meet the terms of a contract to provide security guards for the 2012 Olympic Games in London. This was a brutal embarrassment to our privatise-everything Government because it had to call in public servants – the Army – to do the work instead.
Not content with that cock-up, in July last year the Serious Fraud Office launched an investigation into G4S after it was alleged that the company was overcharging for the electronic ‘tagging’ of criminals in England and Wales. It was claimed that the company was charging for people who were in prison, outside the UK, and also for people who were dead.
It seems highly unlikely that there was any danger of this last group absconding.
The company agreed to pay £109 million back to the Treasury, which is as good an admission of guilt as any. G4S breached its contract; in fairness it should have paid back all monies provided to it by the UK government.
That was last November. Now – less than six months later – Francis Maude wants us to believe G4S has cleaned up its act and is worthy of our trust once again. Seriously.
For this reason alone it is worth checking whether Mr Maude has shares in the company.
Our government of crooks couldn’t wait to get back into cahoots with this company of crooks, could they? Delaying new contract bids until the start of the 2014-15 financial year was as much as they could manage.
If you ran a firm that behaved in this manner, you would face civil action for breach of contract and possibly criminal action for fraud – profiting from false claims. You would most likely be barred from ever bidding for such contracts again, and possibly even from working in the same industry for the rest of your career.
Yet here’s G4S, Securing More… well, you can read the headline.
It all bodes well for Maria Miller. Accepting her resignation, we are to understand, David Cameron made it perfectly clear that he would have the fraudster back in his Cabinet just as soon as he possibly could.
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Face the facts: David Cameron has been sucking up to Hindus, Jews and now Christians because he wants religious people to vote for his Conservatives – in the same way Satan, the great deceiver, tries to lure the righteous into sin. If he worships any religious figure, it is Mammon, the personification of greed.
Perhaps he’s had a breakdown in the wake of the Maria Miller scandal.
Visiting Christian leaders were no doubt amazed to hear the leader of the most evil British government in decades telling them he has been doing “God’s work”.
David Cameron told them his Big Society concept – the vain attempt to get volunteers to do for free what public sector workers did before he sacked them all – was invented by Jesus of Nazareth, in Roman-era Israel.
If you think that’s a warped vision of Christianity, try this: He said, “Christians are now the most persecuted religion around the world. We should stand up against persecution of Christians and other faith groups wherever and whenever we can.”
Trying to start another war, David?
He won’t be fighting the Jews, it seems. Only last month he delivered a strongly pro-Jewish speech to the Israeli Knesset (their Parliament), supporting the religious slaughter of animals to make Kosher meat (in the face of calls for more humane methods) and rejecting calls to boycott goods produced in Israeli settlements like the occupied West Bank.
He even mentioned the fact that he had a Jewish great-great grandfather, although the Daily Mail reported, “he made no mention of reports that he may be descended from Moses”.
Cameron has also prostituted himself for the Hindu vote.
But let’s get back to his claim that his policies come from Christ himself. On the day Cameron finally accepted Mrs Miller’s resignation, he had nothing to say about the choice of music accompanying his Easter reception in Downing Street (Ave Maria). Instead, he told Church leaders that, if they believe there are obstacles preventing them from doing more to support his failed pet project, they should think of him as “a giant Dyno-Rod”.
And why not?
If anything in this country deserves to be flung down a drain, it’s David Cameron.
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Having resigned from the Cabinet, it seems the fraudster Maria Miller is entitled to a payoff totalling £17,000 – equivalent to three months’ ministerial salary.
This means that, as punishment for behaviour that, anywhere else, would lead to a criminal conviction (if not imprisonment), she is to receive a payment that not only negates the £5,800 she had to pay back, but includes an additional £11,200 – nearly twice as much again!
Other MPs are urging her not to take the money but it seems likely that she will.
And people wonder why we doubt her in her displays of contrition.
She’ll be laughing all the way to the bank.
Meanwhile, David Cameron is left to stew in one godawful mess. Not only has he been exposed as a critically weak leader, but this affair has shown that a Conservative-led government makes crime pay.
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Going (unpunished): Maria Miller has made a huge profit from her misuse of taxpayers’ money while in public office. Now is the time for her to face a criminal investigation.
Maria Miller resigned as Culture Secretary today (Wednesday) – after nearly a week of hanging on by her fingernails in the hope that everyone would suddenly forget that she fraudulently claimed mortgage interest on a south London house that she wanted the authorities to believe was her second home (when in fact it was her parents’ first).
During that time she has managed to reignite public disgust at the many expenses scandals in which Parliamentarians have been revealed to have been involved since the Daily Telegraph first lifted the lid on them in 2009.
She has also managed to undermine public support for comedy Prime Minister David Cameron, whose continuing support for her has shown just how weak he must be. He needed Miller because she was a woman in a predominantly male Cabinet, state-educated in a mainly private-school Cabinet, and an avid supporter of Cameron himself in a government that is beginning to realise that he’s a dud. In supporting her, he showed just how precarious his hold on the leadership really is.
Of course, she also generated a huge amount of hatred towards herself. Remember, this is a person who used taxpayers’ money to pay for her parents’ house – a building which she subsequently sold for a profit of more than £1 million.
Miller is not the first Cabinet member to make a million with taxpayers’ cash either – stand up George Osborne, who formerly had us paying for a paddock, a house and other scraps of land in his Tatton constituency on which he falsely claimed expenses, saying they were vital for the performance of his duties as an MP. He later sold the lot for around £1 million, having spent not a single penny of his own on the property – it all came from the taxpayer.
Osborne was protected from prosecution by the Parliamentary Standards Authority – a body that appears not to be as independent as it claims.
Now is the time to report Miller to the police.
A Parliamentary inquiry is not the same as a criminal investigation and it is important for her case to be tested in a court of law. This woman was part of a government that has had no qualms about using the law to take taxpayers’ money away from people who needed state benefits in order to survive; now let us see how she fares when the law turns its attention to her.
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According to the BBC, Maria Miller reckons she is “‘devastated’ that she has let her constituents down”.
Oh really?
Is that why her apology to Parliament – which was for behaving badly towards the inquiry into her fraudulent expenses claims, not for making the claims themselves – was so short and contemptuous? She trying to cope with the shame of letting everybody down?
I should bleedin’ cocoa.
Miller should try to bear in mind that we weren’t all born yesterday and most of us have a decent IQ; we don’t have time for these flimsy efforts at self-justification.
She committed a crime.
Let’s remember as well that this is a woman who, as minister for the disabled, co-presided over a benefit assessment system that has led to thousands upon thousands of deaths: the hated Work Capability Assessment.
Shall we list the devastation caused by that little policy?
Well, too bad. We can’t because the government is too lily-livered and cowardly to release the figures. There is no more obvious way of telling the public that these people are trying to hide serious – by which I mean grave – crimes.
So Miller can take her talk of “devastation” and blow it out her ear.
The BBC report adds that David Cameron, Britain’s weakest Prime Minister, has continued to support his culture secretary. Cynics have said this is because she is both female and state-educated, and he needs examples of both in his primarily male, privately-educated and extremely, obscenely rich, Cabinet.
It has also been suggested that she is extremely loyal to Cameron and, for a weak leader, this must be handy too.
The Beeb also says former Commons Speaker Baroness Boothroyd has claimed Miller should resign as a matter of “honour”. Fat chance.
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