A powerful MPs’ group has rejected a plan by Parliament’s financial watchdog to cut expenses.
The Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority wants to ban claims for tea and biscuits and installing televisions in second homes.
I’m shocked, I tell you. Shocked!
As parliament is effectively the ‘management’ for the Civil Service why can’t MPs work to the same rules.
Instead of setting up the £60M IPSA why not just tag these few hundred MPs onto one of the Civil Service claims systems, say something like the MOD, who are used to handling claims from all over the world. The rules and systems are already in place.
Could it be that the fact that they could be sacked for claiming £1 for a bus fare that hasn’t been spent be the problem? Every year MOD staff were warned that ‘there is no lower limit to fraud’ any fraud ‘is a breach of trust’ etc… One rule for them, one rule for the plebs.
And they still talk about the breakdown (or total lack of) trust between politicos & the populace as if it’s somehow our fault.
Apart from rapacity, is a total lobotomy a pre-requisite for public office, or is it a consequence thereof?
Hopefully it will all end in tears, and said tears will be theirs.
In a time of austerity this clearly seems to be the most elegant solution to the problem of MP’s expenses.