Troughers To The Bitter End

In tomorrow's Mail on Sunday and Sunday Times, two stories reveal just how venal former Labour ministers are. It simply beggars belief that these four, Geoff Hoon, Patricia Hewitt, Margaret Moron (sic) and Stephen Byers will almost certainly escape at the very least some form of criminal investigation for corruption.

One other thing is certain, unless the Tories get tough on this issue and threaten to seek prosecutions for what amounts to the worst sleaze probably in modern British history, we, the long-suffering public, will simply never know to what extent we have been comprehensively fleeced by the most corrupt and disastrous regime we've ever experienced in Britain.

Cameron, if and when he wins, had better be genuinely 'whiter than white' or I guarantee that this time around there will be bloody hell to pay. He needs to be concentrating on making sure any government he leads is unimpeachable by reviving the principles of collective and ministerial responsibility which have withered and died under Blair/Brown; that any future parliament is beyond reproach by making sure any pocket-lining MPs forfeit their office; and that the sins of the past, especially by these Labour criminals, are not simply forgotten, by resisting any pressure for an amnesty. I'm sure Gordon Brown would be pleased to return the favour given half the chance - but that's not the point.

This should be one of the major focuses of a new Cameron government, and definitely not woolly headed, watermelon carbon taxes that will severely damage the economy, justified on the basis of a now pretty thoroughly discredited scientific theory, itself a trojan horse for a socialist agenda.

Nothing less will do.

I Agree With Guido

I agree with Guido insofar as, if I understand him right, parliamentarians should be forced to make a choice upon their election: you're either an MP (and therefore a public servent) or a corporate type on a promise (and therefore something else) - and never the twain shall meet. You must not, in other words, be connected to any private company in any way whatsoever for the duration of your office. Seems like a no-brainer to me.

As for secret slush funds and Brown denials, while I feel sorry for Tim Yeo - I think he really believes he did nothing wrong, at least in the sense of breaking any parliamentary interest declaration rules (and we all know how wonderfully immune to MPs' fiddling parliamentary rules are, especially after the expenses scandal) - I certainly don't for Brown, who, as always, with this secret and illegal slush fund, was only ever serving his own interests, which always take absolute precidence over those of his political comrades, parliament's and everyone else in the entire country's. And always have. Yeo might be reprimanded, though that should be up to the electorate. But Brown should be jailed!

Anyway, for those of you who might not know how to use YouTube yet, and will therefore have to wait until Monday for this feast of televisual Guidoese political gunpowder, I've performed the complex and onerous task of cutting and pasting the embed code to my blog, just for your viewing pleasure:


Seriously, though, I think this Guy News thing gets better every week.

We Are Not Amused

The Speccy's Lloyd Evans pretty much sums-up the impact - or lack thereof - of the most inadequate, partisan and self-serving Queen's Speech I think any of us have ever had to listen to. The Queen herself hardly seemed amused and with old lefty trolls like Denis Skinner loudly remarking that the current, hopeless Sergeant at Arms' legs were "better than the last one", you get a rough idea of just how contemptuous quite a large portion of the PLP is of Britain's parliamentary traditions. It was no accident, too, that the most glaring omission from Brown's outpourings (for that is what this was) concerned the small matters of the expenses scandal, Whitehall reform and the NHS. Conclusion? They just don't really care. All they do care about is trying to get re-elected. Newsflash, Gordon: it'll never happen on the strength of that meagre offering. The Spectator:

Even before the Queen had trundled back to Buckingham Palace, Mandy had let the cat out of the bag. Speaking on BBC News he said of the Gracious Speech, ‘All these laws are relevant … and achievable. It will be for the public to decide whether they want them or not.’ There you have it. The greatest power in the land admits the Queen’s Speech is Labour’s manifesto.

The response to the Gracious Speech is an enjoyably ragged parliamentary occasion, full of ancient traditions and even more ancient jokes. Frank Dobson proposed the Humble Address and spoke with pride about his Holborn constituency where the anti-Apartheid movement had been born. He met Mandela briefly after his release from prison and encountered him a second time when, as newly elected President of South Africa, he addressed a joint meeting of parliament. Mandela tapped Dobson on the shoulder. ‘You do remember who I am, don’t you?’

Seconding the Humble Address, Emily Thornberry announced how pleased she was to have been abused by Quentin Letts in the Daily Mail. It proved she’d arrived. He called her ‘scrumptious’ and ‘very county’. But Ms Thorberry corrected that impression and recalled her family’s eviction from her Guildford home by ‘bowler-hatted bailiffs’. Her single mother struggled on benefits and later became a Labour councillor – unusual in Tory Guildford – but the Conservatives were good enough to name a street in her honour. ‘Thornberry Way runs from the sewage works to the dump,’ she smiled. ‘Thanks.’

Over to Dave. He called the Gracious Speech ‘a Labour press release on Palace parchment.’ It was full of glaring omissions. No immigration bill. No sign of the promised regulations ‘to transform the culture of Whitehall’. And no mention of the NHS. This led Dave to deduce that ‘the NHS is not a priority for this government.’ That made Labour MPs very cross indeed. One leapt up and dared Dave to match Labour’s guarantee that cancer patients will be able to see a consultant within two weeks. Dave wriggled out of that one without quite making the pledge. He was then asked how he planned to maintain the army’s strength. This was bizarre. Labour MPs were acting as if Dave were installed in Number 10 and he had popped down to the house for his first PMQs.

Dave moved to Gordon’s record on employment. ‘The only jobs he has created are for his cronies,’ he jeered. He poured scorn on the ‘government of all the talents’, many of whom have taken ermine and moved to the Lords. ‘Never have so many stoats died in vain. Forget about jobs for the boys, it’s stoats for the goats.’

The most embarrassing omission in the government’s programme was the Kelly report. Cameron challenged Brown directly. ‘If he brings forward legislation to implement the rest of Kelly we will help take it through parliament.’ Brown stared down and pretended to fiddle with his papers. Dave tried again. ‘No one will understand why this vital work isn’t being done in this parliament.’ Would the Prime Minister accept Tory help? Afraid not. Gordon suddenly discovered he had something of vital importance to whisper into Batty Hattie’s ear. Dave swung a spotlight onto this Olympic display of dithering. ‘They’ve run out of money, run out of time, run out of ideas. And, we’ve just seen from the Prime Minister, they’ve run out of courage as well.’

Brown managed to raise the tone from low political knockabout to the loftier region of international relations. Afghanistan was on his mind. President Karzai had offered 5,000 troops (he didn’t specify ‘extra troops’) to hold ground recovered from the Taleban. And Karzai would soon introduce ‘an anti-corruption task force’. That sounds ominously like a new way to collect old protection money. Within NATO, Brown was pressing for ‘fairer burden sharing’ between the allies. Slovakia would shortly announce a doubling of its troop deployment.

When he moved on from the Queen’s speech, Brown relaxed a little and had some partisan fun with Dave’s proposals on inheritance tax. Labour rallied behind him, cheering with wild desperation like drunken sailors being kicked out of a party.

When Nick Clegg stood up there was an unseemly exodus from the chamber. The monarch, he said, had been asked to give ‘a fantasy Queen’s speech’. He questioned the need for yet more laws from a government which has already put over 500 measures on the statute book. ‘Legislation is Labour’s comfort blanket.’ Their proposals were full of superficial gestures. One example, a new measure against child poverty which ‘sets a target but doesn’t put a penny in the pockets of a struggling family.’ In the end, this was a Queen’s Speech written not on parchment but on rice paper.

"Never have so many stoats died in vain." That was good. In fact, most of Cameron's robust assault on Labour's "press release on Palace parchment", which I've just managed to watch, was good to very good - and sometimes excellent.

When all is done and dusted, however, and Labour's pathetic policy posturing (no action will be forthcoming on any of it from incapability Brown - and thank goodness for that) there is only really one question left for the electorate: what shall we do with the drunken sailor(s)? The rest of the lyrics to that wonderful old shanty provide the answers. They do not make pleasant reading for Brown's lame duck administration, which is now, surely, beyond salvation.

Praise the Lord!

MPs Need To Earn Our Money

A new take on the expenses scandal by Andrew Alexander in the Daily Mail this morning certainly interested me. Briefly, from what he says, the majority of MPs are basically under-worked idlers leading cushy daily lives at the taxpayers' expense - and that's before their profiting from the long-abused old system of extra remuneration, particularly in the area of mortgage interest relief and house flipping, is taken into account. Even their passing, as, Alexander points out, various overpaid knights of the realm are hired ostensibly to get tough on abuses, will not impact on the soft furnishings and long holidays that is an MP's current happy lot. The article itself has much more to say on these subjects than this, of course, and is rather more complex and nuanced than I've given it credit for in this little summary, so it is definitely worth reading it fairly closely.

The row over MPs' expenses has gone from scandals to shambles in a few months.

Perhaps Gordon Brown and David Cameron really believed they could exorcise the abuses by calling in outside grandees.

But recruiting three knights from the ranks of the Great and the Good has led only to dispute and confusion.

Sir Thomas Legg's examination of past expenses may have usefully highlighted some gross and even criminal irregularities.

But he has also formulated some odd, retrospective rules of his own, which almost make you feel sympathy for MPs.

We also have proposed new rules about expenses from Sir Christopher Kelly, chairman of the Committee on Standards in Public Life - some ideas sensible and some naive.

Our next knight, lawyer Sir Ian Kennedy, heads the new Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority, charged with implementing the Kelly plan.

But he says that he has ideas of his own and will consult widely, even using Facebook - which is like looking for advice in a saloon bar.

Could the confusion get worse? Yes, it could.

A fourth knight has charged into the melee. Sir John Baker, formerly head of the Senior Salaries Review Board, thinks that matters could be sorted by increasing MPs' basic pay from £65,000 to £100,000.

Do not fall for this, the most dangerous idea of all based on the scarcely sane notion that full-time politicians would improve our lives. Sadly, this belief has considerable public appeal.

Having observed MPs closely for 40 years, let me underline the basic difficulty about salaries and expenses. It lies in backbenchers effectively having two part-time jobs.

The first is as local representatives, which requires them to live in their area or have a second home there.

The second part-time job is as a legislator at Westminster. This need not be onerous, but does require MPs making themselves available on a difficult timetable.

A second home is thus a reasonable expense in a job that in any case is always at the whim of voters. Unfortunately, the system has been discredited by abuses.

Properly policed and, above all, transparent this need not be so. We do not need Kelly's complicated plan for hotel costs or variations thereof.

Transparency is the key to containing expenses, not complex new rules. MPs know that abuses will lose them votes if publicised - as they now can be.

But once one has conceded the two homes difficulty, we should appreciate that the minimum requirements of MPs' two part-time jobs still do not add up to one full-time job.

Those who believe that Members are overworked as legislators need only tune in to the parliamentary TV channel to observe acres of unoccupied green leather.

Tackle MPs on this and they insist that they are busy at other things, not least dealing with their postbags.

But this can be conscientiously dispatched in two hours a day. Moreover, MPs these days have an office and personal staff that can deal routinely with many problems raised by constituents.

We might also remember when MPs plead overwork that Parliament sits for only two-thirds of the year and that the working week there can be brief.

They are obliged to turn up on Monday, though often not until late in the day. They may well be away before too late on Thursday.

Helpful whips and the use of pairing arrangements make the week anything but onerous.

Yet many MPs claim to lead exhaustingly busy lives.

Some zealots do. But Parkinson's law, about work expanding to fill the time allotted, applies in Parliament as elsewhere.

Put any group of politicians together and they can always busy themselves arguing, chatting and scheming - nothing wrong with that, but not something for which the taxpayer should be generous.

The notion that an ordinary backbencher's job is other than part-time is quite a recent invention.

Cynics will note that the rising call for full-time pay has precisely matched the devolution of legislation from Westminster to Brussels - less work, more pay!

Outside work is not just possible but also desirable if Members are not to get even further out of contact with the real world.

There are many activities in which MPs can earn extra income, for example, journalism, law, business, accountancy and authorship.

If an MP tells you he can't find work in any outside capacity, you have to wonder why he is fitted to be a legislator.

Unfortunately, there is a growing hostility to such work from Brown and Cameron - from Brown because the Tories get more of it and from Cameron because he thinks the public dislikes it.

However, both of them also have easier party management in mind. MPs with no trade or employment to fall back on if they lose their seats are simpler to control.

This unhealthy dependence is backed by Kelly, who proposes that Members should do outside work only within 'reasonable limits' and tell their voters about it at election time.

A more woolly-minded formula is impossible to imagine. It makes you wonder if we are really making any progress at all.

Fascinating stuff, but I disagree with at least one point. While it is certainly plausible for Brown's Labour shower, given, for instance, his political vulnerability to critics from within his own party, I'm not totally convinced that the 'easier party management' argument entirely explains David Cameron's acquiescence to the ban on MPs' contract work for a couple of reasons. First, most Tory MPs had already agreed to stop contract activities long before Legg published his extraordinary report and seem if not comfortable then certainly resigned to Cameron's new order; indeed, many fully accepted it appreciating that given the public outcry it needed to be done. The smart ones needed little convincing so the 'easier party management' outcome was incidental, at least for the Tories (not so for Labour, of course).

Second, it is highly unlikely that Cameron had an ulterior motive for bringing forward new rules for his party to obey. He was genuinely eager to clean up his party's act and so he took the lead early on in the scandal and did just that, unlike Brown who has characteristically dithered all the way through and now looks the feeble, rudderless, dishonest and discredited "leader" many of us have known him to be for some considerable time. However, it is certainly the case that, as Alexander intimates, thanks to that dithering and because he is just too damn tribal and arrogant to listen to the leader of the Opposition, the resulting reforms to the way MPs must conduct themselves in public life - and the amount of work they are burdened with (or not, as the case may be) - the subsequent parliamentary reforms have Brown and his useless ministerial clan's mucky fingerprints all over them. They are already starting to look like a typical, awful Brown fudge. If past experience is anything to go by, pretty soon they certainly will be a shambles as Alexander says - and a total, disastrous, Labour shambles to boot.

But this will simply be one more mess for the Tories to clear up after Brown's trainwreck government is finally booted out. When Cameron comes to tackling it, however, he needs to make absolutely sure that his reform package includes one, key sentence: "MPs must earn, and be seen to be earning, taxpayers' money". The impression that while the rest of us work as hard as we can in our struggle to make it through Brown's bust, our elected representatives remain pampered and lazy will not be removed by abolishing second homes for London MPs and the tearing up the John Lewis list. I also believe they should do what they have been elected to do, namely, serve as a Member of Parliament representing the constituency that elected them and not 'advising' private companies under any circumstances. The fact that we actually need these new rules to force them to do their jobs strikes me as a very convincing reason for why we desperately need a large influx of new and willing blood in parliament, too!

The main point for me, however, is that I believe Cameron does understand these arguments and frustrations. It's one of the reasons why intend to lend him my vote at the General Election - and you should too. If he gets it wrong, we can always send him the way of Brown, after all. That's what's so good about democracy.

Expenses Reform Backtracking: The Cambell Connection

Just been listening to Radio 4's news on the way back from a little trip and was surprised (or, perhaps, wasn't surprised one little bit) to hear that Sir Ian Kennedy, friend of Alastair "David Kelly's Death Made Me Depressed" Campbell, no less, and appointed head of the flash, new independent committee charged with monitoring MPs' behaviour and finances in future (but is laughably answerable to - you guessed it - a committee of MPs) has begun to backtrack on the other Kelly's reforms. That was a long sentence, I know, but I do tend not to brake for the corners when I'm miffed. And I am miffed. This is looking like an all-too familiar New Labour balls up, with the wrong man placed in charge of the wrong solution to a problem that has one cause: people with no integrity - who need to be replaced en masse with people that do.

Anyway, the Torygraph's Benedict Brogan blogged something on the suspicious link between Kennedy and the still-lying, cretinous Campbell earlier on. It's quite interesting if only for the fact that liar Campbell, reduced now, or so we are led to believe, to the role of pisspoor, poisonous Labourist blogger, has anything to do with this scandal in the first place.

Alastair Campbell has produced a typically robust response on his blog to the Telegraph’s coverage of his friendship with Sir Ian Kennedy, the new expenses supremo. That the big-brained head of IPSA, the body charged with sorting out the expenses mess, thought the French were capable of producing Skylab must remain one of the great bafflements of the age.

What is more worrying, and should be studied closely by anyone with an interest in the way Parliament is addressing the challenge of cleaning up the expenses system, is the overnight revelation that Sir Ian has decided to challenge the Kelly recommendations. Sir Christopher Kelly’s committee reported on Wednesday with a list of recommendations for making the system more transparent and credible. The party leaders endorsed the report and asked for it to be implemented in full. The public appeared to react positively to it, and even if some MPs griped anonymously about its reommendations, most wisely accepted that it was a good piece of work that would help draw a line under this sorry affair.

Except Sir Ian has other plans and I gather has briefed some of my colleagues on what he envisages. You can read carefully worded accounts of what he has to say in the Telegraph, Guardian and Mail. It’s supposed to be hush hush apparently, but unless I’ve missed something I can’t see we should revert to the lack of transparency that allowed this scandal to develop in the first place. Specifically, Sir Ian believes he has a statutory right to conduct his own review of MPs’ pay and allowances, and intends to do so. He will have his proposals in place for the next Parliament. Apparently he doubts whether MPs can be made to hand over any capital gains or dismiss family members from the payroll. IPSA needs to be rigorously independent, but I imagine the party leaderships will be disappointed to discover that what they thought had been settled by Kelly is being reopened again.

Old New Labour habits of corruption and cronyism apparently die very hard. Utterly pathetic.

Hat tip: Prodicus

Old Grinners, Part 1

One wonders how many of these venerable political veterans are actually going to make it to the next election, let alone keep their seats by fighting in it. Mind you, quite a few of them have been found with snouts firmly planted deep in the trough during the expenses scandal, so they're already treading water until the arrival of the first gold-plated pension cheque that will signal the blissful, foggy forgetfulness of retirement has finally begun. And how they've earned it! Douglas Hogg will finally be able to build that drawbridge he's always wanted, for instance. And Margaret Beckett won't have to pretend her main residence is a caravan for tax (evasion) reasons any more (even though it is).



Groovy. The one I'm most impressed with is John Horam MP of the Labour, SDP and Conservative parties. What a tart! Now that's a career politician. We shall never see his like again. Er...

PS: The YouTube channel from which this is nicked is one of my favourite nostalgia wells. You can find it here.

The Challenge for Cameron

This is what I call top-class political journalism. Clear, cogent, cohesive and devastating. Another journalist seems to have finally understood the true scale of the damage set to be inflicted upon Brown and Labour by a country that has, quite simply, had a bellyful of them. It's worth the read...

They have no idea what is in store for them. Not really. When Labour convenes in Manchester for its annual gathering next September, its members will look back on this week's conference in Brighton as another era, another country, another world. Gordon Brown will be gone, David Cameron will be in No 10, and a new Opposition leader will be telling his or her flock not to despair – or, more accurately, to stop despairing. Factionalism, introspection, recrimination: these will be the hallmarks of the wrecked movement that once carried all before it as New Labour.

But that moment lies ahead. For now, the governing party is too busy ensuring that it will lose the general election to think of what life will actually be like once defeat is in the bag. Charles Clarke pops up to perform his constitutional role as the man who urges Gordon to go, for health reasons or something similar. Baroness Scotland, the Attorney General, is fined £5,000 for employing a Tongan housekeeper illegally – with the magnificent twist that she is in breach of a law she herself steered through Parliament. Baroness Vadera, one of Gordon's closest advisers, quits as a minister. Gordon himself, apparently shunned repeatedly by the President, is initially reduced to meeting Barack Obama in a New York kitchen, thus bringing a whole new meaning to the phrase "kitchen cabinet". The polls strike hammer blow after hammer blow to Labour's morale. David Cameron may not have "sealed the deal" with the public, but Gordon Brown most certainly has.

The entirely predictable corollary of these pre-conference fiascos is epically unsubtle positioning by the principal leadership contenders. Alan Johnson, whose false modesty is now starting to grate, admits that he's "not willing to rule myself out for all eventualities in the future". I'll bet he isn't. In a Guardian profile yesterday, Ed Balls was reported to have mumbled to a seven-year-old who asked "if he wants to be prime minister… that he would, if asked, adding that someone has to do the job". Again: you don't say, Ed.

Meanwhile, in New York, the other Ed (Miliband) told Mary Riddell in The Daily Telegraph yesterday that "I just think for me to start speculating about [the leadership] is a distraction and a bit presumptuous." Another big fat "yes"! Pressed on rumours that the PM might stand down before the election, the best Miliband could muster was: "I don't think that's going to happen. I don't think it would be right. Honestly." Not exactly a passionate oath of loyalty, is it? If I were Gordon reading that, I would mutter "Et tu, Ed?" into my porridge. Or perhaps just hurl the porridge against the wall, as seems to be the Prime Minister's preferred method of expressing mild irritation these days.

Mr Miliband's pre-conference mantra is that "there's no future for Labour in not being a party of the middle classes". This is true – indeed, it is obvious to the point of banality – but it is odd to hear Mr Miliband of all people say it, given that, for the past decade, he has been one of the most outspoken advocates of what he calls "fair taxes". And what Mr Miliband calls "fair taxes" is what the rest of us call "being fleeced" and "having less of our income left to us by the rapacious state to spend on our families". In his interview with The Sunday Telegraph today, Mr Brown claims that Middle Britain is top of his list: "These are the people who I identify with." Again, could have fooled us, Gordon. If the Brownites think that they will win over the electorate by reinventing the Blairite wheel at this late stage, they are in for a shock.

As, indeed, is the whole Labour movement. The shock of defeat lies not only in the loss of power, terrible as that undoubtedly is. A party driven from office must expect a whole array of traumas, great and small. For a start, the political landscape on the morning after the election is utterly transformed, and makes all pre-electoral prophecies instantly redundant.

The sheer scale of Labour's victory in 1997, the consequent tininess of the Conservative parliamentary party, and the absence of Michael Portillo from the Tory leadership race: none of this could have been foreseen at John Major's final conference as leader in Bournemouth in 1996. Most Conservatives knew they were heading for defeat. But it was 22 years since the Tory party had lost an election. It had forgotten the rank smell of failure, the ashen taste in the mouth, the sudden experience of irrelevance.

Irrelevance is at the heart of it all, and it is this that should most frighten Labour as it gathers by the sea. A party in power, no matter how divided, no matter how exhausted, no matter how useless, is still interesting: its exhaustion, its infirmity, its lack of trajectory are important because they affect all of us as citizens. If John Prescott is rude about Harriet Harman, it is a story. If Tony Blair is reported by Adam Boulton to think that Gordon Brown is a "quitter", that's a story, too.

Labour has grown used to the limelight, and has forgotten that nobody has a right to the public's attention. It is a paradox that the longer a Government lasts, even as it suffers cellular damage and approaches invalidity, the more convinced it becomes that its beliefs are obvious, that its arguments are plain common sense, that it does not have to win the battle daily. Philip Gould, Blair's chief pollster, used to quote approvingly the belief of the US strategist Dick Morris that, in modern politics, a government needs a "daily mandate". Plainly, Mr Brown believes no such thing. He exudes only contempt for his opponents and their policies, even though the polls suggest that Mr Cameron's personality and proposals have achieved considerable traction with the public.

The election of a Government does not represent a collective swoon before an ideological blueprint, but something much messier and more numinous: boredom with or suspicion of the other lot, intuitive enthusiasm for what the victorious party represents. That enthusiasm is provisional, probationary, and must be renewed constantly. Labour has completely forgotten this. It believes that Britain is a Labour country suffering a temporary bout of false consciousness. In fact, the opposite is true: after three general election victories, the scales have fallen from the public's eyes.

It will all look so different in Manchester a year hence. But let me predict this much about the week ahead at Brighton: Brown will give a decent speech, better than expected, which will include at least one killer punch (remember "no time for a novice" last year?). He will face down his internal assassins once more. The Labour Party will feel a little buoyed by its leader's determination. Then, it will disperse, go back to its constituencies – and prepare for Opposition.

All I would add is that contained within this piece is an implicit and powerful warning - for Cameron in particular and the Conservative party at large. If you unpack that warning, it might go something like this:
1. Do not take the power you will be lent for granted (again).
2. Do not lie to the people who gave you the job. Respect them by being straight with them.
3. Treat the offices of state which you will once more occupy - and the mother of parliaments - with respectful humility.
4. Seek that "daily mandate" and put it at the centre of your political philosophy.

Democracy is a continuum. Elections are merely the legal and essential expression of the need for a healthy democracy to change direction from time to time. The coming General Election, and the democratic change of direction we all so desperately crave that it will bring, is long overdue.

If Cameron follows these principles honestly and not as some sort of publicity gimmick or disingenuous 'triangulation' (stifling a debate by lying about your intentions, thus elbowing out any genuine antithesis), then there might be room for a glimmer of hope to emerge that British parliamentary democracy can become healthy once more, after the severe damage that has been done to it by years and years of Labour misgovernance and dishonesty and the daily abuses by MPs of every stripe of a system of remuneration that relied on their personal integrity to function.

If Cameron does this, he will have my vote until the day one of us dies. If he doesn't, he'll have one term and then, well, we'll need another "change of direction". We'll kick him out and continue our long, long search for a decent prime minister. (We might even give Boris a try!)

That's the challenge for Cameron. I think he's up to it. I hope I'm right.

Another Day, Another Disaster For Brown

TUC-Labour: "Britain Stitched-Up"

Aside from being utterly horrifying - just how much damage has Labour done to democracy in Britain! - this story in The Times is timed to perfection (Brown's about to grunt through his much-leaked, pathetic TUC speech) and potentially is political dynamite. It will generate a great deal of indignation, not to say indigestion, in people nationwide who read it over their Monday-morning Cornflakes.

Don't take my word for it, though. Read on and make up your own mind about whether you think the people who represent us in Parliament, however useless they might be, should at the very least be elected by us to that position, or professional civil servants with no public political affiliation. Labour has utterly corrupted that, just like they have corrupted everything else in Britain during their cataclysmically corrupt and incompetent period of power.

Just who the hell is in charge here?

Labour is funding trade union activity inside Whitehall with millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money, The Times has learnt.

Government departments are paying the salaries of dozens of union officials, some earning more than £60,000 a year, who do no work for the taxpayer.

The Conservatives expressed horror last night at the “cadre of union officials” embedded across Whitehall.

Ten departments have revealed that they employ 46 full-time and 87 part-time officials to work exclusively for the unions at taxpayers’ expense. Their salaries cost between £150,000 and £4.5 million per department. They are also given access to office space, computers and photocopiers worth an estimated £1.2 million each year.

A Whitehall whistleblower has told The Times that union officials spent time on “far-left political campaigns and making up false claims about the Conservative Party”. Civil servants are bound by impartiality rules.

The whistleblower also claimed that union officials are given promotions worth thousands of pounds, despite working outside their departments’ remits. The source added: “This is a two-tier system where ordinary civil servants work for a living and strive for years to get promotion, while political cliques in unions get their chums into taxpayer-funded jobs where there is no job.”

One senior official with the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS), Karen Abram, lives in Lancashire but has her travel and hotel bills paid by the Department of Health so that she can work in London. The department said that Ms Abram was a “home worker” and that her expenses complied with internal guidelines.

The disclosure, which comes the day before Gordon Brown addresses the TUC conference, has revived accusations that Labour has done favours for its union paymasters.

Several departments, including the Treasury, did not respond to requests for information, which means that the total value of assistance could reach £10 million a year.

According to Electoral Commission records, union donations accounted for £5.4 million, or 69 per cent, of Labour’s fundraising in the first six months of the year.

The scale of the union assistance has caused surprise. One union source said that in an ideal world, there would be one full-time official for every 2,000 workers. However, the Home Office has 83 full and part-time union officials for its 70,000 employees: one for less than every 1,000.

Francis Maude, the Shadow Cabinet Office Minister, said: “On top of office costs, it is now clear that the Government is bankrolling a cadre of full-time union officials across Government, costing millions of pounds a year. There needs to be full openness and transparency on these costs so taxpayers can know whether this is appropriate public expenditure and represents value for money.”

A spokeswoman for the Cabinet Office said: “Since 1996, departments and agencies have been able to set their own levels of trade union facilities time, but we do not collect this information centrally. Like many employers, civil service departments follow the Acas code of practice — time off for trade union duties and activities — when agreeing facilities with their trade unions.”

Senior union officials, including Paul Kenny, the general secretary of the GMB union, have regarded attempts by Mr Maude to uncover information about trade unions’ work in Whitehall, as a declaration of war [it damn well should be!]. He told The Times that unions were more heavily regulated than the banks.

The three unions that work inside Whitehall are the PCS, Prospect and the FDA (First Division Association).

Trade union representatives are in theory banned from interfering in the formulation of policy, although some officials suspect that this may take place informally. This was denied by a spokesman for the PCS. “Typically these individuals take up personnel complaints and negotiations with management. In some departments, this is negotiating and some take people on full-time,” he said.

(You can't touch me, I'm part of the union this Labour government.) Do they think people will be pleased about this? Do they seriously think that we don't know that they have debauched democracy with their insidious, endless hand-greasing and egregious, shameless use of union placemen to shore up their control of the civil service and the levers of power? Do they suspect they might have done something wrong here?

The answer to all those questions is, of course, "no". They have no idea how much fury this latest piece of evidence of the corruption that lies at the blackened heart of this Labour government will generate. Or how much further damage it will cause them.

They are that arrogant; they are that stupid.

How many more nails does Brown's coffin need hammered into it before we finally get to bury him, one wonders?

Bercow Can't Add Up

Bercow seems to think that he is going to be the star of the All-New Reformed-Parliament Show. So far, though, he has not struck me as the sort of person who will do anything other than an absolutely terrible job. He's full of what is clearly Labour reform spin and he sounds, frankly, dishonest. Why? Well, he can't even take it on the chin that his own party didn't vote for him. The Tories knew he was being forced on them out of Brownite spite - and the sums speaks for themselves. His vote count equates almost perfectly with the number of people on the Labour benches, combined with a few lefty Lib Dems. Young's votes almost exactly correlate with the entire Tory body count, combined with a few dozen moderate Lib Dems, a very few decent Labourists and a smattering of Independents. (The rumour is that three (mad) Tories voted for him.)

Watch yesterday's interview with Boulton (although the Bradby one was far better - but it's a hassle to rip). This turncoat idiot thinks he's some kind of minister. And a Labour one, to boot. Well, make your own mind up.


Then we have today's Telegraph report that the 'reform' these MPs have opted for is nothing of the kind, (as I humbly predicted yesterday). The 'transparency' promised will not be forthcoming. They've covered all their bases and protected their piggy backsides once again. Are we surprised? I think not.

But one thing is clear to me, and should be clear to everyone else: this is all Brown's work. Parliament is rotten, sure. But if you want to know what (or rather who) represents the diseased heart of that rot, then this Bill should provide final, incontravertible evidence: it is Brown. As the Heff says, Bercow is Labour's last insult to voters. Sure, he's Labour's last insult, but this Bill is not Brown's last lie. There will be many more of those to come in what will be the last months of his pitiful premiership. He lies. Through his teeth. All the time. That's just "what he does" - ably aided and abetted by the likes of Balls, Harperson, Woodward, Mandelson - and now Bercow.

Guido Fawkes has examined the government's new Bill in some detail and has written about it in what I think is one of his best pieces yet. These are his conclusions:

[It] is a stitch up, we don’t need more rules and self-selected regulators, we need reform of the expenses system, together with clarity, transparency and enforcement of the rules. The voters will kick out MPs if they can identify crooks, in this sense in a democracy voters are the ultimate regulator of politicians. This whole idea is ill-founded, we don’t need to intermediate democracy with another quango or committee, this approach has already failed.

We need only to empower voters with enough information so that they can determine the truth about those who seek to represent them. The truth is all we need, not redactions, not more quangocrats.

Amen to that. And it's a message that needs to be shouted out loud every minute of every day from now until the dissolution. Someone in that disreputable House will eventually listen, surely.

One thing we do know for sure, though, is that that person won't be John Bercow.

All he does is speaks.

Fake Reformers, Fake Reform

So the first Bercow 'big reform' is to cast off the Speaker's wig. This is a laughable, disingenuous gesture designed somehow to provide a visual representation of that 'clean break' the Berk referred to in his cringe-making speech yesterday. But if you take the wig off the man, all you are left with is the man - and this man is part of the problem. Dan Hannan:

...the hairpiece isn't simply a mediaeval relic. It's a reminder to its wearer it that his office is bigger than he is. It was a bad start when Michael Martin arrogantly refused the headgear. "It's just not me," he insisted, presuming to take the job on his own terms - an attitude which prefigured his eventual disgrace. Had the old boy slapped on the horsehair, it might have inspired him to try to live up to the role, to be a bigger man.

Tee hee. But through this first, empty act, Bercow's immediately fallen into line and begun to do precisely the kind of thing that Brown-Labour wants: distracting, fake iconoclasm motivated not by any genuine principle or sincere wish to modernise - or 'reform' - constructively a parliament that has been rendered rotten only by its current members' systematic abuse of its time-honoured traditions, but by a simple, dishonest desire to stay put. And they will do anything and say anything they can to that one end. As Peter Oborne said in a TV interview today, Bercow is the manifestation of the corruption that has crippled parliament. He was forced to pay six grand of evaded capital gains tax and over a thousand pounds' worth of dodgy claims for a personal accountant.

How can this man, along with all the other MPs now tainted by serious and proven sleaze, be trusted to reform the system? The answer is he most certainly cannot. The problem is, that question is part of the distraction. The fundamental point is this: forget trust - we're well beyond that - MPs, including Bercow, no longer have the moral authority to change or create law. For Labour to think that it can install its placeman in the Speaker's chair and carry on regardless is a (further) deep insult to the electorate. It is a travesty and the so-called reforms that will be generated consequently will be no more than meaningless windowdressing and a waste of precious parliamentary time.

It has already begun. Harriet Harperson's first announcement on reform is to table legislation making it a criminal offence (a criminal expense?) for MPs to fiddle their fees or fail to declare their interests punishable by 'up to a year' in stir. Have you stopped laughing yet? Aside from the fact there's no mention of existing legislation that covers the small matter of tax evasion - or of false accounting - here we have in your proverbial nutshell the contradiction that will confront this bankrupt government and the parliament it helped to corrupt: legislation like this would not be necessary if honourable members were just that, honourable. That they deem this legislation necessary merely proves to the public that they consider themselves untrustworthy. "Well, if they can't trust themselves with public money, why the hell should we," the public will rightly think. (I do.)

They will go around in circles, new Speaker in the chair he does not merit. They will make laws to constrain a future generation of politician who might well need no such constraint, given the inevitably far higher level of public expectation and scrutiny that new generation will accept it will have to endure. What's clear is that this government and this parliament were incapable of obeying the letter and the spirit of the rules they themselves partly created. They were also incapable of exercising judgment in the realm of propriety, both individually and collectively. There is therefore no reason for them to expect people to swallow the notion that they themselves, in some sort of "reflexive lawmaking", should be permitted to make a new law that forces them to obey the rules. We say: no thanks, you no longer have the right. Besides, it will miss its target because such a law is always contingent upon what those rules actually are and those rules are made by, you guessed it, MPs. You see? Going around in circles.

The old system might be flawed, but flawed or not its basic operating premise, that MPs are honest and honourable, is essential if we are to have real democracy. It requires a degree of faith on all our parts to be successful. An honour code is the only way our elected representatives can exercise the power we give them to supervise the sovereignty of parliament, thereby ensuring the continued health of the body politic. And therein we find the root-cause of the problem: one dishonourable MP can cause enormous damage to parliament and to that health. Six hundred dishonourable MPs, including the Prime Minister, and you have a severe crisis. And the longer they stay in parliament, the graver the damage they do, by the very fact of their continued presence. But it should be unsurprising to us that these people are reluctant to leave, regardless of this damage. They are who they are, after all: they don't care.

Bercow, with his fake iconoclasm, is merely another sign of that 'graver damage' to which I refer. This man is an insult to our intelligence, with or without a wig. He's the latest symptom of a decayed, diseased legislature. The chief carriers of the disease are Gord'elpus Brown and his gang of amoral Labourists. (Tory sleaze has become a mere secondary infection, incredibly.)

The cure? It's a purgative and it always works: a general election.

Diddums Brown

The BBC, unsurprisingly, is making a huge thing out of Brown's discomfort during the challenge last week to his illegitimate leadership. He says he was 'hurt', according to the Beeb. But the entire article amounts to no more or less than a Gordon Brown publicity stunt.

We pay for that. And that pisses me off.

I agree with Brown: he was definitely hurt by evidence that he's not only useless, but a trougher too.

He was hurt - just not badly enough to make him an ex-Prime Minister.

Unless this troubled man, Brown, is ejected from the office that he stole, Britain could literally 'go under'. As long as this Labour government clings on to illegitimate power, Britain is not a democracy. It's a dictatorship.

If you disagree then you are either dimwit Labour voting fodder, or you just do not appreciate the legitimacy of anger in ours, the vox populi.

"Brown Out; Labour Gone" is the only message that counts. I can't speak for anyone else, but I'm just about ready to act. Directly. I'm angry, see. I don't know about you, but I have had enough.

Brown Out; Labour Gone.

MPs' Council Tax Fraud

Tomorrow's expenses expose in the DT is probably the most gobsmackingly enraging of them all. More than 50 MPs have been over-claiming for Council Tax and pocketing the extra cash, most of them, surprise surprise, Labour. Not content with having all their utilities, mortgage interest and local taxes on their second homes paid for by us (why?), these troughers have gone a step further and actually submitted false tax claims.

Let's just remind ourselves of what the Department of Work and Pensions (you know, the department in which Kitty Ussher recently held a ministerial post, just before she entered the Treasury) says about people who try to cheat the benefits system:

Deliberately withholding information that affects your claim is stealing. That’s why we are targeting benefit thieves!

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) takes benefit theft very seriously. Although the vast majority of people who claim benefits are honest, those who steal benefits are picking the pockets of law-abiding taxpayers. In 2007-08 benefit thieves stole an estimated £800 million from public funds, that's why we are determined to catch them.

The government threats should not be taken lightly. There is no doubt that the government is serious about imprisoning benefit fraudsters - and that is what makes their hypocrisy so abject, and their fiddles so serious. That these thefts from the public purse are perpetrated by lawmakers is one thing, that so many appear to have been happy to misappropriate tax funds is quite another. Let's take a look at what the government says about tax fraud:

Tax fraud is when someone pays too little tax, or wrongly claims a tax repayment by acting dishonestly.The government can prosecute people who commit tax fraud, as well as anyone who helps them to commit the fraud.

As far as I am concerned, the redaction of the original document where these claims are revealed by MPs, who did not know that an uncensored copy would reach the press, shows intent. At the very least it demonstrates that many MPs felt they had something to hide and then tried to hide it. This fact alone merits extensive investigation. Simply repaying money because you've been found out is insufficient - and the police know that, so why are they not acting on information received?

All in all, though, this rotten parliament, as if this needs repeating once again, is morally bankrupt, has lost all authority to make law, is poisoned, paralysed and must be dissolved. Shout it out loud, folks. Every day from now until the dissolution. Many of these people are simply crooks and only a general election can rid us of them once and for all.

Pay Back

The Parliament website has published another list, according to The Times, this time of MPs who've felt the need to unburden themselves of our money. You can see it here. It's a surprisingly long list, given that we're talking about MPs.

There are some interesting entries (which we know about) from the titchy: Cheryl Gillan, Shadow Minister for Dogfood's return of £4.47 (presumably in Pedigree Chum coupons) right up to the really huge: King Labour Pig, Minister for [the] Health [of his bank balance], Phil Hope's monster hit of 42674.13 pound's worth of freshly laundered bills.

The total amount of troughed taxpayer cash regurgitated by the little piggies is £478,616.90.

Given that the amount pocketed, assuming a minimum of £80,000-worth of expenses per MP over 4 years, is around £52 million - but is surely much higher if take into account profits from the sale of flipped dwellings - this is simply not good enough as far as I'm concerned.

Individual MPs must ALL explain themselves to their constituents and be forced to stand for their seats in a by election.

There is, of course, a tried and tested mechanism for this already. It's called a GENERAL ELECTION.

Then we'd see some genuine "pay back".

We Can't Afford MPs

Nia Griffith: we own her crockery

Talk of public spending cuts is all very well but I'm seriously coming to the conclusion, after a brief scan of my and my nearest and dearest's various MPs' heavily censored expenses, that we simply can't afford them any more. If you want to cut public spending, instead of starting with schools and defence, why don't we start a little closer to home? Why not cut a few hundred MPs and then cap the salaries and abolish all the expenses of the remainder?

Why have I suddenly come to this conclusion? Because I'm bloody livid, that's why. My parents, both of whom are retired professionals, should be reasonably comfortable and enjoying their hard-earned rest from long and productive careers.

But they are not because of astronomical utility bills (no "deflation" there), astronomical local taxes (corrupt and inept local Labour government), astronomical food bills (no "deflation" there either) and diabolical public and health services that they invariably end up subsidising despite a lifetime of constant local tax, road tax and national insurance contributions by paying, for instance, for treatment they would otherwise simply not receive this side of 2012.

On top of this, I have now discovered that their Labour MP, ex-public school girl and Oxford educated former schoolteacher (and daughter of Welsh academic royalty) Nia Griffith, who is paid a small fortune anyway as an MP and PPS to Harriet Harperson, has all her household bills, council tax, mortgage interest and food costs effectively subsidised by my pensioner parents. Not only that, but also her second home's furnishings, fittings - even the china - was paid for by the taxpayer. It's impossible to gather from the document, which has been completely mutilated, whether she's flipped homes as well. Judging by some of her exes claims, I think I'd risk a flutter on that one.

Here's an example of what the taxpayer - you, me and my retired folks - paid to make Nia Griffith's second home, a home for which she has no doubt earned a tidy sum during the insane period of Brown's property bubble, just that little bit more luxurious:

I know, I know: they're all at it. Hey, I'm just holding this woman up as an example. Get over there and pick your own! There's hundreds to choose from and she is by no means the worst, hard though that might be to believe. Just someone - please - explain to me why Griffith, who does an average job in my parents' constituency at the best of times, or any other Member of Parliament for that matter, should not have to furnish her own taxpayer-subsidised second properties and pay for utilities, upkeep and council tax, too. Why, exactly, are my pensioner parents paying for her dishwashers, cabinet freezers and £300 pound china sets?

This might be old news, but it remains a very fresh resentment that is not going to go away until some or all of this money is paid back, perhaps out of the money these petty piggy thieves have made from the property boom, screwing the taxpayer from every possible direction in the process.

Tell you what, I wonder who'd give me a price if I wanted to bet that Brown kept the boom going just to keep the troughers and the flippers happy - and sod the country? Wouldn't put that past him, or them.

These are terrible, dark days for Britain. Hard to see when we will start to pull through as long as the 645 current incumbents remain. Why don't we just kick them all out and start again? They're our employees after all.

Small wonder we aren't getting our general election.

The Cameron Show

Slightly busy as I somewhat am at present, I've been a bit off the pace with events-political over the past few days. So imagine my surprise listening to PM in the car on the way home that Big Dave Cameron's Tories had, to use the expression of the programme, 'scored an own goal' by talking about cutting government spending. Surely not, thought I. Isn't it the case that both serious parties are planning cuts? Did my ears deceive me when Alistair Darling mentioned that he had cut spending just after the budget a few months ago? Didn't Fraser Nelson reveal the extent of those cuts - 7% wasn't it?

But no. These aren't cuts at all. In Brown's fantasy world of endless zeroes, by some, astonishing feat of mental gymnastics, this is 'investment'. Apparently, Tory realism and proposals for managing the decline in national output (Brown's bust) are 'massive Tory cuts in essential public services' while Labour's piecemeal fiddling around with shortfalls enforced upon them because they've run out of our money (they've even run out of borrowed money - now they're running out of printed money) aren't cuts at all. That's 'investment' in la la land.

I watched the exchanges between Brown and Cameron a few minutes ago on the interweb. Cameron wiped the floor with his delusional, monocular, has-been opponent. Why, then, does the media appear to think otherwise? I have to assume it's just blind prejudice. It was refreshing, therefore, to discover that I am not alone in my assessment of Cameron's performance. Lloyd Evans (solid name, that) thought so too:

Cameron stood up with a ready-made quip. ‘How pleased I am to see the prime minister in his place.’ Brown shrank physically at this, staring obsessively into his lap like an anxious schoolboy trying to magic himself out of danger.

Cameron explained that the Tories support the existing electoral system, ‘because you can throw out weak, tired and discredited governments.’ He asked if the prime minister planned to hold a referendum before the general election. Brown had flicked the switch by now, restoring himself to Gladstonian mode. He welcomed Cameron’s decision to discuss the issues and added sorrowfully, ‘there seems to be an element of self-interest in the way he is discussing policy.’ This brought the house down. Even the Tory whips joined in. So did the Speaker. ‘Tew noisy!’ he bawled which prompted more catcalls. He swivelled his massive pink trunk towards the Tories. ‘And I’m not getting much help from the chief whup!’

Cameron poured scorn on Brown’s apparent opportunism, calling it an attempt ‘to fix the rules before the next election.’ Brown flayed uselessly with the accusation that the Tories planned 10 percent cuts across the board and Cameron was withering in reply, calling Brown’s government ‘the worst in history’ whose ultimate legacy would be the mismanagement of public finances. This cheered Brown up. He unsheathed the most perilous weapon in his armoury. Tedium. ‘Let me read the figures for public spending,’ he said and reeled them off from memory. By the time he’d finished, my keyboard was smoking. Brown can hype faster than I can type. As an ultra-boring finale he repeated his mantra that the Tories’ only policy is to do nothing. This was more a skirmish than a full-blooded battle and I have a suspicion Cameron was expecting to face the Postman today not the Presbyterian.

That's what I thought I saw. The only problem I thought Cameron might have was deciding which bit of Brown he should stomp-on next. Or, as Evans the Blog puts it:

Cameron’s real problem is that the PM is now so weak he could barely put up a fight against Andy Pandy. How do you discredit an opponent whose friends can’t credit him? How do you finish off a man who is finished? How do you ridicule ridicule itself? He mustn’t make it look too easy and Cameron struck the right notes today. Anger, impatience, mockery – and a bit more anger. Exactly.

Exactly. From now on, folks, it's The Cameron Show all the way. Brown? Ignore 'im.

Update:
According to Fraser Nelson, the true Labour spending cuts have been revealed - inadvertently - by Andy Burnham on C4 news. You can read his piece here. John snow summed it up neatly in a question:

"There is no one who doesn't know the parlous condition of our finances. We have borrowed five times our own GDP. It beggars belief that there are not going to be swingeing cuts and all sorts of alteration to taxes to pay for that. How otherwise are we ever going to plug the hole in our finances? Surely what the Tories are doing is telling the truth - and what you're doing is trying to disguise it?"

The truth will out.

System Error?

I know some of the major bloggers have written about this already today (Iain Dale, for example) but none has really nailed Brown for the real motives behind his sudden discovery of reformist tendencies. On the one hand is his dishonest desire to distract people's attention from the fact that the system is not broken - if anything it worked perfectly in weeding out those members of parliament who are not fit for public service. On the other is his desperate wish to deflect people's attention from one of the key and most vital aspects of 'the system' that he wants to 'reform' (attack): when members of a government fail to live up to public expectations they must face the will of that public via a general election. But Gordon doesn't want one because he's scared he will lose it. Pathetic.

But there is another question that has been oddly ignored by most commentators: when did the expenses scandal morph into a breakdown in our electoral system? By all means fix the system governing MPs' handouts, but what has that got to do with how we choose our MPs? Since when will the abolition of the FPP system of voting solve the problem of crooks conning their way into government? The answer is, of course, it won't. As I said above, it is nothing more than a smokescreen. Only, that's not entirely true. Unfortunately, there's more to it, as Janet Daley pointed out a few hours ago:

Nick Robinson at the BBC is reporting that Gordon Brown will propose to change the Westminster voting procedure to an alternative vote system. If this is true, it is the most shameless attempt to rig the electoral process in living memory. What the "alternative vote" would mean is that it would be virtually impossible for the Conservatives ever to regain power. Labour and LibDem supporters could simply institutionalise their game of tactical voting: by always placing each other's party as their second choice, they would guarantee Left-liberal coalition governments forever.

Mr Brown apparently intends to present this as part of his response to the MPs expenses scandal - but the scandal had nothing to do with the way MPs were voted into office. It was about the way they behaved once they had been elected. (If there is any genuine scandal about the electoral system, it is the over-representation of Scotland at Westminister but somehow I doubt that Mr Brown will choose to address that outrage.) Reconstructing the electoral system so that a Lib-Lab coalition could never be displaced would be more likely to produce even more complacent arrogance in the political class.

What we are clearly facing is a desperate, discredited prime minister who knows that he can never be re-elected under the existing rules and so, in his last five minutes in power, is planning to lock his opponents out of office. This proposal never appeared in any Labour manifesto. It has no mandate. It is a bizarre attempt to distract attention from what should be the real debate about Gordon Brown's record, and the failure of his high-tax, high-spend policies. What makes me think that it was the brainchild of Peter Mandelson?

These people are trying to rig the system from top to bottom. No general election, no referendum on Lisbon, no accountability for members of the government accused of fleecing the taxpayer, vast ministerial powers turned over to unelected Peers and now, as if that wasn't enough, a plan to destroy an electoral mechanism that is, frankly, the only thing left that still stands between us and an eternity of socialist excess and failure. Brown and his pisspoor posse have poisoned every British institution they've ever touched and lied about the chaos they've left in their wake at every turn. Now they seek to destroy the last chance for our political salvation, too. Our solitary remaining hope? David Cameron. Oh dear.

Business as usual, then.

Troughing Brit Lawmakers: The US View

Difficult to argue with any part of this first class article from excellent American newsblog, Intermex Power:

Britain's New Revolution Expected to clean out House of Commons
By Richard W. Rahn

LONDON

Imagine reading a news report that "U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi resigned this morning, and it is expected that more than half of the members of Congress will either resign, choose not to run again or be defeated in next year's election."

This statement might seem to be a fantasy or a dream come true, but it is equivalent to the headlines the British public was treated to this past week. Effective June 21, Michael Martin will become the first speaker of the British House of Commons to resign since 1695 (a mere 314 years ago). The Times of London reports the expected "departure of 325 [out of 646] members of Parliament as a result of forced resignations, retirement, and defeat at the polls would represent the biggest clear-out of Parliament since 1945."

The trigger to wholesale slaughter of the British political class was a series of revelations by the London Daily Telegraph about the abuse of expense accounts by more than 170 members of Parliament (MPs). One wealthy member charged the taxpayers for cleaning a moat around his country estate. Another charged more than $50,000 for his extensive gardens, which included $3,000 for a floating "duck island." Yet another charged more than $120,000 for his second home, including tree work. And it goes on and on.

The Telegraph "has established that many MPs - more than 200 in total - who employ relatives have been able to claim extra expenses as a result of the arrangement." At a time when Britain is in an even deeper recession than is the United States (gross domestic product dropped at an annual rate of 7.4 percent last quarter), citizens are outraged by their high-living politicians and civil servants. Until recently, members of the British Parliament were paid very modestly by and European Union standards and had small allowances for staff and expenses.

However, since the Labor Party took control 12 years ago,many MPs have begun to look at their job as an entitlement (as do many in the civil service) rather than an honor and a duty. The just-disposed speaker, a former union leader, is famously quoted as saying, "I only took what I was entitled to" (ah, but by his definition).

Unfortunately for British Conservatives, the scandal has not involved just members of the Labor Party, but also some prominent Conservative MPs. A friend who was a conservative MP during the years of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher related to me how appalled and angry - like the British public - he was about the rise in double standards by the political class over the past couple of decades. Unfortunately, this is true on both sides of the Atlantic.

The following quote comes from a Brit (Robert Colvile), but could not the same comments be made about what is happening in the United States "It is the general feeling that there are people who are using our money to fund lifestyles far beyond the average voter's - and using their position to exempt themselves from the rules. Ordinary citizens are fined for sorting their rubbish incorrectly, or making an error on their tax return. MPs reconfigure the tax system to their own advantage. ... We are hemmed in by laws and regulations they are free to ignore."

The revolution taking place in the United Kingdom has occurred because people have the Internet and a new Freedom of Information Act that give them the ability both to acquire information about how the politicos spend their money and to spread that information to others. The British press also seems to have been a lot more aggressive than much of the mainstream media in the United States in ferreting out information about official wrongdoing and abuse.

Should not taxpayers have the right to know the details of the spending by each member of Congress, including each's office allowance, expense account and nonchargeable use of government aircraft, limos, etc.? Congress has just voted to require that we ordinary citizens use smaller and less safe cars in the name of combating global warming, but do you really think the leaders in Washington will give up their large limos? Mrs. Pelosi claims she needs a private jet to go back and forth to her district in California because of "national security." Have you noticed that the blanket national-security claim is often nothing more than a cover to provide privileges and lack of transparency for the political elite?

Have you wondered why the average federal employee in the United Statesmakes about 50 percent more per year ($75,000 versus $50,000) than the average private-sector worker yet has almost zero chance of getting fired and has a very rich pension and medical insurance program?

It is unlikely that Americans would enjoy the freedoms they have today if the British had not led the way with the Magna Carta (1215) and the Glorious Revolution of 1688. The day the British forced their speaker to resign was the same day (May 19) that the voters of California said no (by a 2-1 margin) to proposed propositions that would have led to more government spending and increased taxes but yes (by a 3-1 margin) to a proposition that prohibits elected officials from getting a pay raise when the government was running a deficit. (Is there any doubt that U.S. voters, if given a chance, would vote for the same pay freeze for Congress?) Will a new American revolution follow the British one in dethroning much of the political class?

It's nice to know the democratic rage is catching-on again worldwide. It's nice to know the visceral, powerful, righteous anger we, the people, currently feel for our venal, petty, dishonest incumbant political representitives has begun to rub-off beyond our borders. All of it can lead only to positive outcomes.

And to think: both directly and indirectly, we owe it all to Guido Fawkes. Astonishing. Baffling!