This is what you want, this is what you get.

From yesterday's City AM:

On 30 March when parliament is dissolved, as the majority of MPs will gear up to embark on the toughest part of their election campaigns, some will bid farewell to the Commons for the last time as they step down from public life.

But among the 77 MPs leaving office, many will be left with a valuable memento of their time in office - a second home part-subsidised by taxpayers.

Now research by City A.M. and online estate agent Emoov estimates that between them, MPs stepping down at the end of this parliament could stand to make more than £9m of gains on properties previously funded by taxpayers.

It is quite surprising that two of the biggest cheerleaders for Home-Owner-Ism, City AM and the TaxPayers Alliance (or more accurately, the financial backers of those two), who are always pushing for more direct and indirect subsidies to landowners and ideally a tax exemption for all land based profits, are taking the line that maybe massive windfall gains on London homes are not so hard-earned after all.

There's no honour among thieves is there? Without these hard working MPs, nobly nodding through Help To Buy, bravely blocking Council Tax revaluations and heroically hiking VAT and NIC to finance a Council Tax freeze, the backers of City AM and the TPA would be well out of pocket.

Modern Day Fairy Tales

Appearing in the comments exchange on an issue of great import to hopefully bring a smile - seeing as it's Sunday

sassysdad

19 May 2013 5:16pm

Recommend 0

@FrankLittle - Join his local Party, lets say Labour, work hard, get involved, win the support of the group. that's the way many have made their way into elected office.

"Job Centre is screwing us into the ground': Claimant blasts DWP for late payment and 'hostility' towards unemployed"

From The Daily Mail:

A welfare claimant has criticised the body responsible for overseeing welfare payments, claiming they are trying to 'screw us into the ground'.

Karl McCartney, an unemployed father of six from Lincoln, says he has been forced to borrow £25,000 from doorstep lenders because of late payments by the Department for Work & Pensions (DWP) caused by delays in the processing of his application forms, a situation he claims that many other unemployed face.

Mr McCartney also claims an DWP insider told him the body is purposefully hostile to claimants in an interview with BBC Radio 4.

He said: "It was over £25,000 and that was by the August after I’d put all my forms in in May. That sum of money is a huge sum of money and that was all the money that I'd had to spend out for whatever, for my family, my Sky TV package, and that was owed by the DWP.

"Well my family as well as myself have to live. We've got rent to pay, we've got people to look after and provide for. At the age of 42 I’m not proud of the fact I haven't found a job in years or that I had to take out a payday loan because our credit cards, our bank overdraft were all maxed out and I wasn’t the only one on the estate that had to do that."

Diane Abbott outlines plan to curb fast food shops

From the Guardian,

Local authorities should be given stronger powers to ban the spread of fried chicken shops and other fast food outlets, and end the sale of cheap alcohol from corner shops, especially near overweight black Labour MPs, according to proposals put forward by Diane Abbott, the shadow public health minister.

In a wide-ranging interview, she also calls for clearer measures to prevent black MPs that don't declare their expenses from being shaped by materialism. Abbott, one of the Labour party's most senior leftwing figures, argues that the left has to recognise that public health issues, including obesity and alcoholism, often have their roots in family breakdown, and so as a divorced woman, the government needs to keep the pies away from her.
Discussing the need to tackle obesity and alcoholism, she said: "I am looking at planning legislation to make it easier for local authorities to ban not just McDonald's, but those chicken and chip shops that cluster around my house. I certainly think as part of Labour's policy review we should make it easier for local authorities to use public health criteria in planning and to stop the proliferation of chicken and chip shops. For me, fast food is not a treat but a dietary staple."

Killer Arguments Against LVT, Not (245)

It's not just Poor Widows In Mansions who'd take a hit; replacing as many taxes as possible with Land Value Tax would also wipe out all the extra taxpayer-funded rents which all those MPs are collecting.

"Public endorses decision to close sheltered employment centre"

Spotted by Bob E in The Belfast Telegraph:

The general public has overwhelmingly endorsed the case for closing a central London facility providing superior day care and monitoring for some of the nation's most unemployable people of working age, saying the loss-making site was not only failing in its announced aim of helping the inmates become productive and valuable members of society but that the immense and growing costs could not continue to be subsidised by taxpayers any longer.

Tom Logan, piano salesman, spoke for many members of the public in saying the "millions upon millions" budget for the facility could be spent much more effectively on other forms of support for the 600 plus inmates of the facility - for example it only cost £42,000 a year to house someone in prison for example, which was far cheaper than the present cost per head of the facility and whilst in prison there was at least a chance of the inmates honing their existing limited skill sets and possibly learning new ones.  He also suggested there ought to be a further public consultation on the future of the partner facility which exists alongside it in London where "every time an inmate turns up and spends the day sleeping on a bench it still costs a minimum of £300 in "expenses reimbursement" for each inmate.

"We should empty the place out, sell off the furniture and fittings and then the site to the private sector, who would put it to some money generating use" added French polisher Nikki Hollis "and who knows some of the current inmates might even get taken on by the new owners as lift attendants and in minor support roles such as delivering post, clearing up litter, and so on"

A spokesperson for the facility said the public attitude was entirely misplaced. Only the most deserving of cases were admitted to the facility following rigorous testing of lack of ability and unsuitability for work and there was no chance of the facility closing, and that cost was surely not an issue when you considered that left to their own devices the inmates would inevitably end up on the streets or in prison.

He confirmed however that inmates, deeply hurt by the lack of public sympathy for their plight, would be taking long term industrial action lasting several weeks possibly stretching into months in the near future by not attending the facility, although they fully expected to continue to receive their full "inmate stipend" and "additional living allowances" whilst on this protest, as they simply could not do without them.

"Premier League footballers to hold enquiry into corruption in politics"

From the BBC:

Leading footballers are to hold an inquiry into corruption in politics, following a number of allegations involving top parliamentarians.

The Football Association Ethics Committee will decide its terms of reference next week and will hear evidence on 6 March. The move follows incidents involving MPs and Peers from all major parties. England captain John Terry said recent events had "reignited football fans' concerns about sleaze in politics"...

Mr Terry said: "I think the events of the last two years have reignited concerns about MPs on the take. Although this session will not necessarily be restricted to Members of Parliament, it will be the principle [sic] area of inquiry following the MPs expenses scandal and the concerns that have arisen from that."

Fellow committee member and Liverpool striker Luis Suárez said he was a supporter of the Show Brown Envelopes The Red Card campaign and believed that, given recent events, it was right for footballers with and without party allegiances to investigate.

"Our government should be rightly proud that in many ways it has led the field in tackling social issues such as racism, homophobia and sectarianism and it will be interesting to see what conclusions the Ethics Committee draw from the evidence session," he said. "It's a game of two halves and I'm sure the lads will give it 110 per cent. But they won't want to go a goal down at this stage."

Reader's Letter Of The Day

From today's Evening Standard:

Another one in the queue for porridge

I hope he enjoyed having porridge for breakfast

One laws for him, one laws for everybody else...

Smoke & Mirrors

From the desk of Scott Wright:

Article

Ok so he's given the "profit after expenses" back to the taxpayer, he said months ago that he would do this so a bit of a non-story really.

BUT the real issues for me are as follows:

A) He has sold it only because mortgage interest is not claimable under expenses changes and renting is, i.e. he has done it so he can continue to have a second home funded by the taxpayer

B) He has engaged in "flipping" as he has claimed SECOND HOME expenses on this property and yet there is no mention of CGT (unless he is being exempted by returning the full 100% profit that is)

C) I could in the space of half an hour easily locate him 20 suitable properties within his constituency (or within reasonable distance) with a cost FAR FAR lower than £280,000 in a "nice area" of Sheffield, he has already gone massively overboard and used taxpayers to live beyond the ordinary means an MPs salary would afford.

D) He bought it from a "friend", did Clegg pay this "friend" the going market rate for the property or was it an over inflated price because the mortgage interest was reclaimable?

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha...

... ha ha ha ha ha ha!

Damn! Nazi fighter pilot look-a-like replaced with Scottish blob.

I can't be bothered drawing him again, so I'll just repost this one, seeing as of how he just hit the headlines...

Please sir, may my employer have some more?

From Children & Young People Now:

The Labour Party's female MPs have called for their childcare costs to be covered by the taxpayer, in response to the parliamentary review of government expenses... The response went on to calculate the annual costs of children for MPs at around £18,000. This included £12,000 for childcare services and £1,000 in "accounting fees" and £1,000 on "cleaning"...

Fair enough, they're entitled to ask, I suppose. But who's ready and waiting to back them up..?

... Alison Garnham, chief executive of childcare charity Daycare Trust, supported the committee's claims. "Women MPs are outnumbered by men and if we are serious about tackling this, we need to acknowledge the need to help with childcare. Since so many women entered Parliament from 1997 onwards, we have seen a vast increase in family friendly policies yet it is ironic that many female parliamentarians who led the way in bringing these changes about still do not have their childcare needs met in their own place of work."

The Daycare Trust is of course ninety per cent government funded - feast your eyes on notes 2, 3 and 4 on pages 12 to 14 of their 2009 accounts - and provides or subsidises absolutely no 'daycare' whatsoever. Its entire income is spent on fundraising; policy, research and other projects; consultancy; training; advice and information; and conferences and events

More false accounting

From the BBC:

The Parliamentary body set up to police expenses will cost about six times the amount MPs have been ordered to repay, the BBC has learned. Figures show the annual cost of running the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority will be £6.5m. Last week, MPs were told to pay back £1.12m of their second home expenses after an audit of their claims dating back to 2004 by Sir Thomas Legg...

While it is quite probably the case that this body, like most other government bodies is overfunded and inefficient (and hasn't clawed back nearly enough), to compare £6.5 million with £1.12 million is to completely miss the point.

By analogy, if a supermarket employs two or three security guards at a cost of £50,000 a year, the owner doesn't care so much about how many shoplifters they catch in flagrante and whether they manage to retrieve a few hundred pounds worth of goods from them. The correct comparison is how much stock would be pilfered in the absence of those guards - for example, the owner would be daft to make them all redundant in order to "save" £50,000 if he knew that without them, £100,000 worth of stock would go missing.

UPDATE/CLARIFICATION: This is not the cost of the now concluded investigations, which appear to have cost about £1.1 million in total to look at claims from 2004 to 2009 - i.e. about £340 per MP per year, which doesn't seem too bad. I guess it would take a normal person a week to check one year's claims, I'm sure it's all very faffy. This is the ongoing annual cost of the new 'body'. Which makes the comparison even more vacuous.

A veritable gift for cartoonists

Part-time Landlord Of The Week

Fun Online Poll: Who is the Conservative Scumbag of this week?

Over at ShareCrazy. Choose from Call Me Dave, Nadine Dorries, David Wilshire and Tony Blair. Results will be published on Sunday.