H/t Sally ?!

Now I know you’re desperate!!

I see you studiously avoided answering the point though cjcjc.

Are you going to accuse me of being nasty towards the conservatives again? That’s become your everyday tactic of debate now.

Sorry, amusing as the poster is this just looks like an attempt to distract from Labour’s mishandling of the issue. Both parties have been equally corrupt but the Tories have at least admitted it.

And it’s Labour who has been running the Snitch on your Neighbour schemes.

I would have thought, Sunny, that you were the idealistic sort of journalist who woulld be tracking down a representative selection of the 600 odd MPs who are NOT troughing it instead of cynically commenting on the headlines emanating from the Torygraph in the comfort of your bed-sit. I say to all bloggers. Sop leaching off the dead tree press and go and find a story. Shock -Horror. MP NOT on the Fiddle.!!

Sop leaching off the dead tree press and go and find a story. Shock -Horror. MP NOT on the Fiddle.!!

I already pointed this out a couple of days ago! From the cabinet: Ed Miliband, Alan Johnson, Hilary Benn. And there’s many more ministers.

But there is justifiable anger over this issue and I’ll keep highlighting it until all the parties hammer out something new. Announcements today by Cameron that they’re going to pay back all the money they pilfered don’t count, because they still can’t figure out how to reform the system. Will the Tories now give up second jobs and concentrate purely on parliamentary affairs? I suspect not.

And it’s Labour who has been running the Snitch on your Neighbour schemes.

That was the irony I tried to put into the poster, Shatter – obviously I failed. Oh well.

I don’t want them to become just lobby fodder, do you?

More second jobs and fewer bad laws please!

It’s obvious there’s no pleasing some.

Either pointing out Tory hypocrisy as well as Labour hypocrisy is “unfairly attacking the Tories as worse” of “showing your bias”; or even covering the story at all is being “cynical”.

Here’s the facts: both parliamentary parties are full of corrupt scum MPs, especially their cabinet teams. Who is worse or deserves more criticism is a matter of opinion. Both have made dodgy claims, and the practice of ‘flipping’ is surely a criminal offence. I think Labour is worse, because they’re in government so they’ve had the power to change the expenses system and because they’re the ones who’ve been running the DWP anti-benefit-‘scroungers': but it’s a toss-up, because the Tories have been complicit in not passing reform on expenses, they use the same ‘evil poor’ rhetoric, and because of the moat claim.

Who really cares who is worse? It’s like arguing what’s better out of being shat on or pissed on from a great height. The point is, we should be seeking how to resolve this, not just in terms of giving the money back to the public purse (can you imagine a burglar getting off being sentenced because they gave the money back after being caught?), but also how we go about restoring public faith in the political system. Maybe that needs to be done through resignations, definitely needs criminal investigations, and also reforming the system. The debate should now move on to “how we can sort this out”, and hopefully how we can do so in time for the Euros – saw Nick Griffin on the BBC. I don’t want that man elected.

Also, we need to move the debate on, not to cover it up, but to deal with its fallout rather than obsess over its murkiness – in time for the Euros, and also because there’s another huge issue out there that we need cross-party support on:

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/05/12/obama/index.html

If we don’t come up with a proper way to (a) hold these corrupt MPs to account and (b) restore public faith in politics, then the damage might take years to repair.

(6): Sorry, Will – my mistake. Posting on my phone and the picture was unclear on this scale; also Sunny’s follow-up comments related to the Tories.

“Whatever happened to all the private sector experience regarding efficiency and value for money for the taxpayers?”

In the private sector if you waste money you risk going bust. In the public sector you have the (almost) bottomless pit of taxpayer funds. If they’d been in a private organisation they’d have had their arses kicked.

To be fair, Labour have been using the same argument about private sector efficiency to justify selling off public services to private companies over the last 12 years. Shows how much they’re all in the same cesspit.

Sorry – 2 posts ;could you delete the second? Your rebuttal is a fair point. On the subject of reform, the Green Book doesn’t need so much reforming as applying. As to what needs to be expensable , all trades and professions have arrangements with the Taxman as to what items apply to their special requirements. Sir Stuart Bells’ committee (sans Bell) could sit down with the taxman and amend the Green Book so that it complies with the Law. The vexed question of CGT etc. could be handled the same way. Staffing the Fees Office with Tax officials and Accountants would be a welcome step forward. Parliament HAS to face the fact that both Bell and Martin have shown themselves unfit for office and should be removed. It is unconstitutional for the PM to apply the power of the Executive to do this- the Commons fought long and hard against this, including a Civil War. There is no such thing as the Divine Right of the PM, however much he may wish otherwise.

“In the private sector if you waste money you risk going bust. In the public sector you have the (almost) bottomless pit of taxpayer funds. If they’d been in a private organisation they’d have had their arses kicked.”

Except if you are a private bank in which case you get bailed out, or you get to retire on a pension of £1.6 million a year. Or you are Ford motors in which case you also get bailed out to the tune of $120 billion. or General motors, or…………………………………..

Sorry, but the Right wing private sector goes bust argument is just bullshit. Socilaism for the rich capitalism for the poor.

I don’t want them to become just lobby fodder, do you?

More second jobs and fewer bad laws please!

do you actually think before you type right-wing talking points??

If someone is working for a company, how do we know they won’t be influenced by that? Where’s the separation? Gordon Brown’s brother works for a nuclear firm. Rather coincidentally this govt has been talking up nuclear energy relentlessly. How in the world is lobby influence supposed to decrease if an MP has outside interests? You sound confused cjcjc.

“do you actually think before you type right-wing talking points??”

Silly Sunny, of course he does not think before he writes. He just regurgitates right wing talking points from troll central. Fascinating how the trolls have been drilled in what to say. Almost Soviet like.

I feel the Tory lead jumping every time Sally posts.

And the answer to Sunny’s question – ignoring the ad hominem – is transparency.

Cjcjc would like a system similar to motor racing where MPs would appear with their sponsors logo plastered all over their suits. Before going on News night they would quickly put on their cap swith their latest sponsors name on it. They would take off their watch and put on the sponsors version for the cameras.

No conflict of interest there…….no siree!

By the way, is that short for Conservative Jerk, Conservative jerk, Conservative…… by any chance?

Except if you are a private bank in which case you get bailed out, or you get to retire on a pension of £1.6 million a year. Or you are Ford motors in which case you also get bailed out to the tune of $120 billion. or General motors, or…………………………………..

You suggest that since a handful of companies get bailed out, it cannot be true that companies go bust. Clearly, in general they can and do. Clearly, and without exception, public sector bodies cannot and do not.

@ Sally / 16 “Silly Sunny, of course he does not think before he writes. He just regurgitates right wing talking points from troll central. Fascinating how the trolls have been drilled in what to say. Almost Soviet like”.

Almost Soviet like? Like almost left-wing? Was this a Freudian slip Sally?

@ Sunny / 15: “If someone is working for a company, how do we know they won’t be influenced by that? Where’s the separation?”

Here’s a few thoughts:

1) Say an MP’s only source of income can be their MP’s salary (as you suggest): how do we know they won’t be overly influenced by the party machine? What if, as seems often to be the case these days, their only viable career is politics?

2) What if an MP has friends, family etc who aren’t MPs? How do we know they won’t be influenced by their views?

3) What if they had links to a Trade Union?

4) What if they’d had any other sort of job before being an MP? Or, indeed, if they’d been unemployed, or a student? Any of these things could have influenced them.

5) What if they have shares?

6) Would they be allowed to, say, publish a novel whilst being an MP?

I don’t see how this is a “right-wing talking point”. In my view it’s sad to see parties on all sides filling up with apparatchiks. We could do with some more independant people couldn’t we?

“Clearly, and without exception, public sector bodies cannot and do not.”

Governments can close them, cut or increase funding, replace the staff within them, replace leaderships. In a democracy the government themselves can be replaced, thus providing some incentive for running public bodies properly (or at least better than rival parties). Furthermore public sector bodies can, in theory, be made to compete with each other via internal markets, voucher systems and other market simulations thus bringing competitive forces into play.

Sally (18): Actually, I think it’s a damn good idea to have MP’s wear their sponsors logos. That’s exactly the kind of transparency we need.

Shatterface “Sally (18): Actually, I think it’s a damn good idea to have MP’s wear their sponsors logos. That’s exactly the kind of transparency we need.”

Well, that of course depends whether you agree with them having all these outside interests. I personally don’t agree. Why? Because they always want the ones that pay big easy money.

If they want to do outside jobs, and really, really (as they claim) want to have an idea of how the world works then there are plenty of things they could do that does not pay well. Work as a hospital porter a few days a week. Tories from rural areas could go pick sprouts to getter a better idea of how things work.

Funny, they do not do those sort things, so I take with a large pinch of salt all this stuff about “outside interests are a good thing” clap trap

I know many or most suspect that “Sally” is a Tory stooge, and one can only hope that this is the case. Imagine being that bitter and twisted in real life?

As I just posted in a lower thread:

I don’t understand people getting cross for saying the tories are doing better under this. The tories ARE doing better at this. Cameron apologised for what his MP’s did: Brown eventually apologised for “the system” while labour sent people about to tell the media that is was all within the rules and that was just dandy. Furthermore, Moran and Blears (and Hoon if he didn’t pay CGT) remain the worst cases. They are now both paying the money back, while at the same time claiming they didn’t do anything wrong and acting like its an act of nobility.

Lib dem expenses are now out, and only one really compares. Only a couple of especially bad cases to deal with- simply using the expenses is a story in a couple of cases where it wasn’t for the other parties. The telegraph includes with most of them that they are being paid back already, so that leaves labour well behind.

The Lib Dems won’t really be able to take more of a lead on this than the tories, especially since a number of senior people are implicated (if in minor ways). However, it leaves labour looking very, very bad. You can say everyone else abused the system as much as anyone else till you are blue in the face (though I would argue labour was a bit worse but stuff the lot of them yes)- but everyone else had the good sense to say sorry and promptly give the money back while labour told everyone it wasn’t their fault. The public will not forgive that quickly.

Planeshift

The point that was originally made was that inefficient companies go bust. Inefficient public sector bodies don’t. Internal markets do not change that. Elections don’t change that. Cuts to funding don’t change that.

Actually I think the shit has hit the fan as far as the Lib Dems go. Trust Lembit Opik to give the public a stick to beat his party into their place in the “all of ’em are at it” Hall of Shame:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/mps-expenses/5314613/Lembit-Opik-forced-to-pay-for-own-2500-plasma-TV-MPs-expenses.html

Trying to claim a plasma TV when the HoC was in recess and just days before he could potentially have lost his seat… my word.

More:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/mps-expenses/5315055/MPs-expenses-Liberal-Democrat-claims-for-308000-flat-used-by-daughter-as-bolt-hole.html

More:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/mps-expenses/5314418/How-Nick-Clegg-pushed-expenses-claims-to-the-limit-MPs-expenses.html

More:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/mps-expenses/5314093/Chris-Huhne-a-multi-millionaire-but-you-buy-his-chocolate-HobNobs-MPs-expenses.html

More:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/mps-expenses/5314759/Sir-Menzies-Campbell-hired-top-designer-for-10000-overhaul-of-flat-MPs-expenses.html

Here are some words for the public: hob-nobs, designer, bolt-hole, plasma TV, cheeky cheeky.

Sally, Vince Cable said at Shell that they were told not to udertake computer modelling but undertake scenario planning. It was computer modelling failure to predict the problems which has caused the present situation. Cable’s experience at Shell enable him to warn of the dangers of debt- personal, coprporate and national in 2003. Cable is the only MP aprt from Field to warn of the danger of debt and realise the immensity of the problems ahead. Cable was Chief Economist of Shell. When the H of c had MPs from the Boot , Pilkington an GKN ( Guest Keen Nettlefield) , Cayzer families , then there people from the leading pharmacy, glass, steel and shipping companies in the World. The H of C actually contained people who knew something from first hand.
MPs just being appointed to compamies for their political influence does very little for increasing expertise in the H of C.

The obvious age for someone to become an MP is 50, after they have achieved something; are not looking for preferment, therefore have enough confidence to scoff at the whips; know their own minds; still have a good 10-20 years’ service to offer.

But oh no – let’s have Georgina Gould or Tory Boy instead, who know nothing about anything.

Sally

Except if you are a private bank in which case you get bailed out, or you get to retire on a pension of £1.6 million a year. Or you are Ford motors in which case you also get bailed out to the tune of $120 billion. or General motors, or…………………………………..

Sorry, but the Right wing private sector goes bust argument is just bullshit. Socialism for the rich capitalism for the poor.

Remember you’re a Tory troll.

This post is sounds more like free market libertarianism!!!

“Whatever happened to all the private sector experience regarding efficiency and value for money for the taxpayers?”

In your race to attack the Tories, you’ve failed to spot the stupidity of your logic. MPs are public servants, they are part of the public sector. It just demonstrates how organisations will behave without competition and/or market forces.

Now we’ve dealt with the very top of the public sector pyramid, its time to start examining the rest of mammoth State bureaucracy. I’d like to see each area subject to a proper process audit as well as a financial one. Remove the waste. We need drastic action to decrease the pension liability. Final salary pensions should be stopped for all new employees, as of now. The BBC should be broken up and privatised.

A prize for the first cliché response to say:

1) what about the poor nurses
2) Tory cuts to services
3) Its all Thatcher’s fault.

Instead of reducing the State and making it more efficient, Labour has just bloated it with the rewards that exist in the private sector, without the accountability and responsibility associated with market forces.

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23690795-details/Top+teachers+in+1m+bonus+probe+as+knighted+headmaster+is+suspended/article.do

Yes- because fucking Fred Goodwin and his cronies are so accountable and responsible, aren’t they?

It was the Govt that authorised his pay-off. They should have let the bank fail.

Sally @14: I wish the bail-out argument was that simple, I really do. The problem is the domino effect. Lending and stock-trading financial institutions have their hands so deep in the trouserspockets of virtually everyone that certain banks failing would quite genuinely cause a collapse of the system as a whole.

The problem is this: vast swathes of our economy are fictional. [1] Much of the rest of our economy is mortgaged to bankers, including the houses most people live in and virtually all SMEs. If a bank failed and every debtor was given a clean slate, and their assets back as real assets: every home-owner gets their mortgage deeds and owns the house outright, every small business owner gets to wipe their debt out of their accounts in one sweep, then you’d have a situation where it was a good idea for people as a whole to let banks fail.

In practice, there’s no way in hell that any government is going to permit that quantity of redistribution (of money, and therefore of power and security for their people) to happen. Left, right, centre. Pope. It’s not going to happen because it diminishes the power of the plutocrats. So what you get instead is a situation where the lending stops altogether and the demands for repayment get passed from ‘owner’ to ‘owner’ (this is called ‘purchasing of toxic assets’) until someone funnels tax capital into the system to reset the clock for the bankers. That’s what’s been happening since the fall of the Mock.

The system is predicated on a game of financial musical chairs. We’ve got to the point now where business and tech move so fast that it is no longer possible to ‘work up'; to get sufficient capital to be competitive you either have to inherit or borrow. It does not take a genius to identify the ways in which that is a system designed and engineered to benefit those who started out with capital accumulations, and to explicitly hinder those who did not.

[1] This is why confidence (i.e. as in confidence trick or ‘con’) is so important to the market. When bankers and traders en masse start to doubt, the illusion wavers and suddenly everyone has less money than they thought they had. For the non-laymen in the audience: yes, I am both over-simplifying and being slightly facetious.

Cjcjc @30:

Gerontocracy worked much better when the pace of social, technological and intellectual change was slower. It has very serious risks if you try and apply it today. Viz. the bloody awful lawmaking applied to technology and particularly internet technology; the lawmakers don’t, and can’t, understand the world as it is seen by those who grew up with a low cost of entry to the knowledge market.

Older people clearly make better administrators; experience, self-assuredness, people skills, practice, having made mistakes on the way up. Absolutely no question there. But legislators are not the same things as administrators, we just happen to have a system where the same people do both jobs.

Nadine Dorries does us all a favour with her blog post:
http://blog.dorries.org/Blogs/2009/May/15#15

Nadine’s post demonstrates that the Telegraph acted fairly, communicating with MPs before the allegations before publication, outlining any allegation that might be made. The Telegraph introduced innuendo in their reporting, but facts are facts. Her response was packed with dissembly.

Out of touch and hopefully out of parliament.