The inane editorial staff at the Telegraph continue to throw away through poor targeting the great story they have purchased. They insist on leading on political targets who have not really done anthing wrong. Yesterday it was Gordon Brown and his cleaner. Today it was Phil Woolas and his panty-liners, which seem to cause the boys at the Telegraph some behind the bike sheds sniggering. Woolas claims he deducted the non-eligible items on the receipts from the claims. I used to do this myself – when travelling on business I would regularly submit restaurant receipts and deduct the wine on the claim form.
Given that the system is rotten and MPs were allowed food, cleaners etc which they should not have been allowed, Brown and Woolas did nothing with fraudulent intent.
The problem is that there is genuine wrongdoing here which I believe is criminal, and which the Telegraph just mixes in with the panty sniggering trivia. The morally disgusting and quite astonishingly ugly Margaret Moran is a prime example of the switching or flipping of second home to be able to claim expenses.
How Moran was able to claim on a second home which was neither in London nor in her constituency, I do not understand at all. But plainly her designation of a house in Southampton as her second home was purely to claim the renovation costs on an existing family property. Moran joins Jacqui Smith and Baroness Udders in the clearly criminal category, however supine Commons staff may be.
These people are self-serving scum. I am truly sick of being told on the mainsteam media that MPs are underpaid; that they are principled and talented people who could be earning much more elsewhere.
That may have once been true, but it is no longer. The vast majority of MPs are talentless career hacks. More than three quarters of them have never once voted against their party whip. Very few of them have ever had a proper job. The standard of blogging by the tiny minority who bother to keep a blog, is well below the general standard of political blogging in the UK. £68,000 is a perfectly fair reward for these drones. Some of them are more deserving of a jail cell.