Devine serves a mere four months

Paul Waugh twitters news of my favourite MP.

It seems as though Labour MP Jim Devine has walked out of prison today after serving just four months of a 16-month sentence.

I'm on holiday and I simply can't be arsed to get angry about this.

It really is Them and Us, isn't it?

H/t Guido.

Cheater Chaytor Free to Go

Quietly on the BBC news, and buried deep in the Politics section of the BBC website, comes the news that thieving ex-MP David Chaytor has been released from his open prison. He was imprisoned for 18 months in January. He served just twenty weeks. That's less than one-third of his sentence.

I wrote at the time that:

... David Chaytor has been found guilty and sentenced to 18 months. So that's 9 months, less time spent on remand, less a bit because he is a decent chap of previously good character (heh, obviously not) and he pleaded guilty, so that will be about 10 minutes, then. In, no doubt, an 'open' prison. Hardly the twenty years banged up with Big Tony and the pot of Vaseline that we would have hoped for, but pleasing, nonetheless.

Folks, when I said 10 minutes, I was joking.

Remember that Chaytor

• Deliberately and with premeditation defrauded the taxpayer of £20,000
• Tried to argue that he and his kind were above the laws of ordinary people
• Appealed his sentence on the grounds of his 'previous good character'
• Made me choke on my coffee at the chutzpah of the above.

I thought 18 months was about right.

Four-and-a-half months is a complete joke.

Seriously, folks, this can't continue.

This Week's Lucky Winner

... of the Guess The Level Of Corruptibility And Spinelessness In Politicians And The Judiciary contest (otherwise known as 'Pin The Tough But Fair Community Sentence On The Donkey') is ...

... drumroll ...

... another drumroll ...

... annoying lengthy pause like wot they do on the telly ...

... Brian!

Well done that blogperson.

(It's the biggest and blackest I could manage.)

16 months? What?

Out in time for the New Year Sales

I see that mortgage cheat Elliot Morley has been handed down a less-than-draconian sentence of a mere 16 months for conveniently forgetting that his mortgage had been paid off, and continuing to claim money from me (and you) to fund his non-existent payments.

This is from a man who, in the words of Mr Justice Saunders, made "excessive" and "deliberate" claims which "were not explicable even in part by oversight". In other words, deliberate and calculated fraud, to the tune of £32,000.

On the basis of the extent of the fraud, and the level of deliberateness in the deceit, in comparison with the (curiously identical) 16 months handed down to 'Everybody Does Virement' Jim Devine, I guesstimated a little over 4 years. Brian was a little more cautious and plumped for a minimalist 18 months. Maverick reckoned three years. Other guesses were anonymous, and still nowhere near.

As it turned out, none of us had taken into account how much the Establishment looks after its own, and even Brian was a generous two months too high. With the normal sentence reduction for breathing, he will be out in eight months. £4,000 a month. Not many people earn that, even by honest work.

So, as the maker of the closest guess, Brian is the lucky (or astute) winner. Brian, let me know the colour of your choice and I will devote a whole post to your awesomeness. Or cynicism.

Scunthorpe

Thanks to commenter Brian, I hear that sentencing of Elliot Morley will take place on Friday 20 May, according to the CPS.

On the basis of Jim Devine's 18 months, I guesstimated that Morley would get longer, perhaps four years or more. I think that's not going to happen, for all the usuial reasons. Yet who would have thought that the head of the IMF would be refused bail on a sex assault charge in New York? Brought by a mere woman, and of the servant class as well? There's hope yet.

Brian nails his colours to the mast with a prediction of 18 months.

Any advance on that? There is a superb prize on offer for the one who gets closest, but you'll have to read the original post to see what it is.

Elliott Morley - Poll Closed

Thanks to everyone who voted in the Elliott Morley poll, as mentioned in this post.

The question was:

How long will Elliott Morley go down for?

The majority of you thought he would get two years. One optimist thought four years or more (as if), and two cynics thought he would get off on a technicality.

The only person who would put his or her name to a definite guess was Brian (18 months), so he wins the prize by default. If he would care to get in touch and let me know his favoured text colour, then I will award his prize in due course.

Elliot Morley, The Man Who Put The ...

... an old Scunthorpe joke, along the lines of Typhoo putting the 'T' in Britain. Work it out.

Yes, Elliot Morley has pleaded guilty to dishonestly claiming more than £30,000 in expenses to which he was not entitled. Most of this related to a mortgage that had already been paid off - but which Morley claimed he had forgotten about. If there has been a more preposterous claim in the whole sorry affair of MPs' expenses, I have yet to hear it. To most people, paying off the mortgage is a significant event. You count down the months beforehand, imagining what you are going to be able to do with the hefty wodge that you have been paying to the building society every month for the past 20 or 25 years. But that's when it's your own money, of course. When it's someone else's, what's the fuss? Easy come, easy go.

To Morley's credit, he has realised (or his brief has made him realise) that claiming it was a genuine oversight just wasn't going to wash in front of a jury of normal people, and he has turned in a plea of guilty.

Let's see if we can work out how long this paragon of rectitude is going down for. Devine got 16 months (out in eight, and his brief said he hoped he would be out in four, but let's leave that for the time being). Morley's cheating was around four times the amount that Devine got, and it wasn't even semi-justifiable (Devine was merely claiming under the wrong heading to spend the money on his office; Morley was going for cash in the bank), so let's guess at 16 x 5, or 80 months. Knock off a third for the guilty plea, say 54 months - or four-and-a-half years. That's my calculation. I will be disappointed if it's much less, but I fear it will be. I'll be putting a poll at the top of the blog. Feel free to make a guess. (No prizes, but an honorable mention and your name in 16-point Times Roman in a colour of your choice for whoever gets closest.) Poll runs for a week, and he is due to be sentenced after 12 May.

Incidentally, does anyone else think he looks a bit like Chris Farlowe?

Baby, baby, you're out of time ...

Devine Justice 2

Well, he could hardly have expected to get off after virtually confessing live on Channel 4, now could he? From the BBC:

Ex-Labour MP Jim Devine has been jailed for 16 months for fraudulently claiming £8,385 in expenses.

Devine was last month found guilty of using false invoices for cleaning and printing work.

He's not as nice as he looks, you know. He made up stories about his former office manager, Marion Kinley, to justify firing her, and she was awarded £35,000 damages by a tribunal for unfair dismissal. He couldn't pay, and was declared bankrupt last month, so she never received a penny. Even during his trial (and presumably under oath) he claimed that she forged his signature to pay herself more than £5000, although his legal team now admit that this was false.

Sixteen months sounds about right - until you read this:

Devine's lawyer said he would probably serve eight months - but could get out in four with good behaviour.

I know I've said this before, but why was he sentenced to 16 months if he will automatically get out in 8? And why do the defence team think that it will be halved again? Sentencing in this case, as in all the other cases I read about, is a nonsense. Of course, there's the sympathy whinge:

In mitigation, Devine's lawyer said the fraud had been "entirely out of character" and prison would "bear heavily on him" as he suffers high blood pressure and has lost his reputation as well as his 30-year political career.

Good.

He's been sentenced to prison, which is the least we could hope for. And good riddance to a nasty, dishonest bully.

Justice delayed but not denied

I wrote in March, (and updated here) when the CPS decided there was 'insufficient evidence' to prosecute Baroness Uddin:

So Baroness Uddin will not be facing criminal charges over her designation of a flat she hardly ever visited as her 'main residence', in order to claim between £25k and £30k a year in attendance allowances for the House of Lords. The property was not, according to neighbours, occupied or even furnished. Constantly Furious points out that her claim for 2007/8, even at the maximum rate allowable, represents more days than the Lords actually sat. But no charges are to be brought.

Well, the good ol' House of Lords have shown themselves made of sterner stuff. According to the BBC, the House has demanded that she repay £125,349 in expenses unfairly claimed, and has suspended her until Easter 2012. She has also been suspended from the Labour Party.

In other news, Lord Paul (Labour) has offered his resignation from the Party after being suspended from the Lords for four months and being ordered to repay his overclaim. Interestingly, he has tried to play the race card on this one:

The Labour peer and donor Lord Paul "freely admitted" he never spent a night at the one-bedroom flat in Oxfordshire he designated as his "main residence" between late 2005 and end end of July 2006, the report said.

The report on his claims states: "Lord Paul explained his interpretation of the term 'main residence' by reference to his cultural background. He insisted that 'anyone coming out of India would not understand what main residence means'. He accepted that he had 'not once' looked at the guidance on the back of the claim forms."

The House of Lords Privileges and Conduct Committee report said:

... they could not claim, on the balance of probabilities, that he acted dishonestly or in bad faith but added: "However, his actions were utterly unreasonable and demonstrated gross irresponsibility and negligence."

In other words, bang to rights. I wrote at the time

Reminder: Lord Paul is a billionaire who gave £400,000 to Labour, and £45,000 to Gordon Brown's leadership campaign. Totally unconnected to this, he was made a peer in 2006 and a Privy Councillor in 2009, despite the allegation that he was spectacularly unqualified for either role.

Lord Bhatia (cross-bench peer, but a big Labour donor), meanwhile, has been suspended for eight months and has already repaid the £27,446 he overclaimed.

The committee found he did "not act in good faith" in the way he designated his "main home" - for the purposes of claiming an overnight allowance - nor in mileage claimed for journeys to that property, in Reigate.

All I can say is that I am delighted. I never thought we would see justice for the taxpayer in all the greasy corruption of the expenses scandal. Most of the others have got off lightly - and you could say that suspension and paying back what you stole is still a fairly lenient 'punishment' - or got away with it completely, but at least some form of justice has been done here.

Meanwhile, David Chayter (Labour), Elliott Morley (Labour) and Jim Devine (Labour) want their cases to be heard by Parliament and not a criminal court. They say:

... this is not an attempt to ''take them above the law'', but to ensure they are adjudicated by the ''correct law and the correct body''.

That's a bit like a gang of armed robbers saying it would only be fair if they were tried by a jury of other robbers, and judged against the laws of the criminal underworld. I hope and trust that the Supreme Court will see through this impertinent and self-serving stunt.

Can anyone see the common thread in all of the above - one factor that binds all of these thieving scoundrels together? Thank God we threw the whole nasty, corrupt lot out in May.

Barry Sheerman - plonker

I was delighted to see a Labour MP getting interested in motorcycling this week. After all, bikes are cheaper to buy than cars, use less of the planet's resources to make, don't use as much of that nasty oil stuff, make less of that horrible CO2, and are the solution to any congestion problem you care to name. Step forward, Mr Barry Sheerman, MP ...

Oh, hang on ...

A Labour MP has urged people to tell their male loved-ones not to ride motorcycles.

Huddersfield MP Barry Sheerman called motorcyclists “widow makers and orphan makers” who were “disgraceful in a civilised society”.

He said: “If you have a husband, boyfriend or son who wants to get a motorbike, please try and persuade them to get something with four wheels instead.”

I don't know where to begin - the rampant sexism of assuming that all bike riders are male (or, perhaps that all riders who are killed are male), which is patently untrue? The Kiplingesque term 'widow-maker'? Pur-lease. Get something with four wheels instead - and kill three mates and a bus queue as well as yourself? And note that it is the motorcyclists themselves who are "disgraceful in a civilised society", not the bikes. It seems that 'love the sinner, hate the sin' hasn't reached Huddersfield yet.

He gets his facts wrong, of course (nothing unusual there when there is a 'valid point' to be made - think of the climate change con). He says that:

“Around 650 people on motorbikes die each year, which is an astonishing figure. "

It is astonishing, because it is wrong. The figure for 2007 was 596, and for 2008, 493. Too high, but not as high as Sheerman is claiming, and note the downward trend. And how many of those deaths were caused by 'safer' car drivers failing to look? Or poorly-maintained road surfaces? Or spilt diesel?

Two thoughts come to mind: one is that Mr Sheerman, to be consistent, would also need to be opposed to other activities by young men which leave widows and orphans ...

Solicitor James Ryan, 37, died after being swept away by an avalanche while skiing in the Italian Alps. He leaves two young children. (Times today, paper edn)

... or is it just those that aren't nice, aspirational middle-class recreations?

And as for "disgraceful in a civilised society", how about looking closer to home?

The senior backbencher, who claimed £8,613 expenses from the taxpayer for car use in a year ...

Lying hypocrite, then.



Two disgraces to civilised society, yesterday.

Peers' Expenses - More Disgrace

The Times is reporting on the collapse of criminal inquiries into the expenses claims of Baroness Uddin and Lord Paul:

THE HOUSE of Lords has used parliamentary privilege to hide the details of a ruling that caused the collapse of criminal inquiries into the expenses claims of two Labour peers.

Officials blocked the release of a secret memo outlining the reasons for the changes in expenses rules that made it impossible to prosecute Baroness Uddin and Lord Paul.

The memo, written by Michael Pownall, clerk of the parliaments, proposed a peer’s main home could be somewhere they visited as little as once a month. His proposal was passed in January by the leaders of the Lords on the house committee.

However, when The Sunday Times used freedom of information rules to discover the reasons for the new definition, Pownall signed a privacy certificate blocking disclosure of his memo. On Friday Keir Starmer, the director of public prosecutions, said Pownall’s new definition was the reason for the collapse of the Uddin case.

So they are happy to take expenses from the taxpayer by claiming that a property they do not and never have lived in (in one case an empty housing association property, in the other a flat in a hotel that was already occupied by the manager) was their 'main residence', thereby making themselves eligible for an attendance allowance, worth £100,000 to Uddin and £38,000 to Paul. Bear in mind that these are already rich people.

Then they change the rules to ensure that they can't be prosecuted for this extortion.

Then, when we ask why, they claim Parliamentary privilege and refuse to tell us. Us, the people who pay for it all.

Reminder: Lord Paul is a billionaire who gave £400,000 to Labour, and £45,000 to Gordon Brown's leadership campaign. Totally unconnected to this, he was made a peer in 2006 and a Privy Councillor in 2009, despite the allegation that he was spectacularly unqualified for either role.

It's like a banana republic. Wrinkled Weasel takes it all apart better than I can, so I will leave it to him. I am speechless.

This weekend the Taxpayers’ Alliance and Sir Paul Judge, who runs a campaign for independent MPs, said they may fund private prosecutions.

I wish them every success. Surely someone, somewhere has the guts to release this memo in the public interest?

Make Poverty History Pt 2

Excellent.



H/t Old Holborn.

Uddin off the hook - for now

So Baroness Uddin will not be facing criminal charges over her designation of a flat she hardly ever visited as her 'main residence', in order to claim between £25k and £30k a year in attendance allowances for the House of Lords. The property was not, according to neighbours, occupied or even furnished. Constantly Furious points out that her claim for 2007/8, even at the maximum rate allowable, represents more days than the Lords actually sat. But no charges are to be brought.

Well, well, well.

The rules surrounding the claiming of Lords' allowances were even more vague than the Green Book used by the Commons, and basically, a noble Lord or Lady's 'main residence' was wherever they said it was. There was a vague rule about visiting at least once a month, but that was too imprecise to make a prosecution viable. Evidence from neighbours and utility companies suggested she hardly ever went there, but Kier Starmer, Director of Public Prosecutions, didn't think the evidence would stand up in court:

Director of Public Prosecutions Mr Starmer said the definition of a peer's "main home" in the Lords expenses scheme would always have been "critical to any possible criminal proceedings against Baroness Uddin".

He said it was his job to decide whether there was a "realistic prospect of conviction" resulting from the police evidence, not to make "findings of fact".

He added there was "insufficient evidence to bring criminal charges against the peer adding: "Baroness Uddin is entitled to be presumed innocent and that is the basis upon which I have approached the case."

Hardly a ringing endorsement of her innocence to my eyes.

However, it's not all over yet:

An inquiry by the House of Lords authorities into her case was opened last July but put on hold pending the police investigation.

Let's hope their Lordships have a sense of decency and an understanding of the public outrage over this, and take some positive and rigorous action against Noble Troughers who bring the entire edifice into utter disrepute. What is the most shameful aspect of this for me is the fact that the flat she called her main residence is part of a social housing complex, subsidised by the taxpayer, and by keeping it as her 'main residence' (to qualify for the attendance allowance) she was presumably preventing someone in genuine need from having a roof over their head.

What an utter, utter disgrace.

Uddin was made a life peer by Tony Blair in 1998.

Expenses, personal

A comment in the previous post led me to think about my own experiences with claiming expenses. I have never been in a job where I had a lot of expenses to claim; mine were usually the odd overnight stay and the usual travelling costs, and so on. So I can't claim any vast experience of the subject.

The only time I have ever had an expense claim refused was when I had to visit my Head Office for a week or so to carry out some risk management work. I was booked into a Travelodge a few miles away - nothing but the best for me, I hope you will agree. Travelodges don't have their own restaurants, but they are always located near to a Little Chef, where a suitable breakfast can be obtained for an additional charge.

On this occasion, I crossed the petrol forecourt and sat down in the Little Chef. They had a special deal on - full English breakfast, plus a pot of tea and a copy of the Daily Express for, I think, £7.99. Since this was well within the 'reasonable' allowance for a breakfast, I ordered it and forgot about it. Unfortunately, the individual items were itemised on the bill. My expenses claim was returned to me with the comment of "please re-submit, deducting 70p for the newspaper - we do not pay for employees' reading material".

I did as instructed and did, indeed, feel slightly guilty at the thought that someone considered I had tried it on. I think it goes right back to early childhood, when I was taught that greed was bad, and 'trying it on' to see what you could get was thoroughly poor behaviour. I know it was only a copy of a newspaper (I don't even read the Express normally, dammit), but I understood the principle all too well. 70p or £70,000 - it's the same principle.

Which brings me back to the MPs and their claims for astronomical amounts (Harry Cohen's £70,000 would have been four years' wages for me at the time) on the flimsiest of excuses. If anyone in private industry has tried claims like these, they would have been sacked and probably reported to the police. For MPs, it is something to which they are 'reasonably entitled', and they have the sheer neck to go out in public and try to justify it.

One rule for them.

The Fifth Man

Step forward, Jim Devine, Elliot Morley, David Chaytor, and Lord Hanningfield. You are going to court to answer charges that you fiddled your expenses. I hope the court will have the courage to find you guilty if you are, and I hope that, if convicted, you are all sent to prison for a period of time commensurate with your greed and deception.

One of my first posts on this blog was in response to the expenses fiasco, in which I professed some sympathy for the ones who had got caught in a culture of 'claim it anyway', especially if they had first sought the guidance of the fees office and been given the green light. But these four are accused of something far more reprehensible - false accounting, where they deliberately falsified records to maximise the amount they could claim. Even on the most generous interpretation, these are criminal acts.

Now we can add Harry Cohen, who claimed around £70,000 for his 'second home' expenses, while renting out his 'first home', and therefore making it not his first home, of course, since he cannot live there.

They are all challenging the claims, and may indeed be innocent, so I will merely express the hope that the courts find out the truth, and that they are then fearless in their sentencing.

I can't resist putting up this video of Jim Devine being skewered by Krishnan Guru-Murthy on C4. Every time I watch it, I ask myself how the hell this person ever became an MP. It seems that the Scottish Labour mafia have huge influence - he is from the same mould as the inept Michael Martin. The joke about pinning a red rosette on a donkey never seemed so apt.



To follow Gordon Brown's approach to statistics, I would say that these five people prove that 80% of all serious corruption is by socialists. It's more accurate and truthful than a 'zero-percent rise' in public spending.

That expenses stuff again ...

Now that the dust has started to settle, I am revising my view of the MPs' expenses affair. I was as angry as anyone else when the Telegraph first started its publication of the unredacted details. But with the benefit of a bit of reflection, I have calmed down a bit.

Clarity on one thing: MPs who live some distance from London need a base in the capital in order to do their jobs. I have no problem with the taxpayer funding all reasonable excess living expenses incurred by this. Any half-decent company would do the same. A house or flat, a few sticks of furniture, a TV, all to a reasonable standard, no problem. So the question of allowances is not the issue, to me at any rate. How the allowances are administered is a whole new kettle of worms.

The first question is: what do want from our MPs? I want them to be honest, most certainly, and I am aware that, like pregnancy, there are no degrees of honesty - you are either honest or dishonest. But I also want them to be human beings rather than squeaky-clean cardboard cut-outs fresh from a Politics degree and a few months working as a politician's gopher. I regard myself as honest, but I'm not sure if I could measure up to the high standards that are being demanded (with 20/20 hindsight) by some commentators.

If we go back to 1997, there was a massive intake of new MPs. Fresh from a different and unrelated job in most cases, they arrive at Westminster for the first time. The Mother of Parliaments! All that oak panelling! All those arcane traditions! Putting myself in that position, I think I would have been pretty much overawed by the experience. And if someone greatly senior to me later said to me, "you can claim for this, and that, and the other thing as well," and then went on, "we all do it, we've always done it, and it is approved by the Fees Office," I'm sure I would have gone along with it. For the reasonable stuff, anyway - a bit of redecoration, a TV, an allowance for the odd burger after a late-night sitting. It would have taken a very strong will to resist that kind of blandishment, especially as the MPs were told - and it was true - that the Parliamentary authorities had approved it. Some MPs, and these are the ones I feel sorry for, actually sought the approval of the Fees Office and received it in writing before claiming items under their allowances. I can't fault that - it's exactly what I would have done. So I suppose I must allow a new category of honesty to add to the binary distinction I referred to earlier: "basically honest, but willing to go along with the majority view which appears completely acceptable to everyone else here". I would probably fall into that category, and so I bet would most other people when they are not on their high horses prancing on their newly-discovered moral high ground.

So I am prepared to forgive the odd bath-plug and TV subscription [1], the mistakenly-included tampons and the leaky water-pipes. Even a change of second-home designation where it can be justified is not a problem. Where I get angry, really really incendiary, nuclear angry, is where I see evidence of manipulation of the system, an awareness of the potential for profit. Claiming for a mortgage that has been paid off is fraud, pure and simple, and the claimant should go to prison. The day that the Inland Revenue allow the rest of us to say that things were just an oversight in the midst of a very busy schedule is the day that I will forgive that kind of grasping mendacity. No normal person (even if they hadn't kept track of the final date of mortgage repayments) would fail to notice an extra £800 in their bank account every month, unless they were so wealthy that these kind of sums were pocket money and not worth accounting [2]. Regularly flipping the designated second home to maximise the allowances for repair and refurbishment is evidence of malicious intent. If a similar thing occurred under a private employer, there would be instant dismissal for gross misconduct and a demand for full repayment, at the very least. Claiming allowances on a 'second home' 100 miles from your constituency and the same distance from London is another clear abuse of a loosely-worded system. Claiming an empty flat as your main residence in order to get the taxpayer to fund your massive 'second home' where you really live is even worse: lying to gain financial advantage or, in the language most of us understand, fraud. Building a property portfolio on the taxpayer to provide you with a nice little nest-egg when you retire is criminal - and doubly criminal when it's Labour politicians - those scourges of greedy capitalism - doing it. Somehow, with the Tories, you can forgive it, because you expect them to be on the lookout for an investment opportunity. How the Labour offenders square making a few million on the property market with loyalty to their trades union roots and their minimum-wage constituents is beyond me.

But all these are understandable, if reprehensible, human failings. What brought me to boiling point was the way in which MPs tried to first of all hide it, then cover it up, and finally make a partial disclosure in the hope that public interest would die away. Hah. It didn't. When it became obvious that these things were of public interest, they tried blocking it. Then they tried to amend the FoI bill so that MPs would be exempt (how the hell did they think we would swallow that one?). Then they made a big play of publishing all the redacted receipts in the hope that we would be grateful for their magnanimity and forget about the whole thing. Of course, the information that they blacked out is the very information that led to the discovery of flipping and deliveries of expensive goods to the 'wrong' house, and so on. Michael Martin was the driver of this venal process, and that was why he had to go. And every MP who voted for it should hang his or her head in shame.

We've caught you out now, and it will never be the same again.

Rant over.

[1] Yes, even the porn films. Realistically, they were just a couple of items half-way down a long list of things that were just chucked in with the rest, without any particularly dishonest intent (except the one that says "Another bill? Give it to the taxpayer"). It should have been checked, certainly, but this isn't a hanging offence. I was pleased it happened to Jackboot Smith, however - a richly-deserved comeuppance, if that's not too graphic a phrase.

[2] And how the fucking fuck does anyone think that being able to write a cheque for several tens of thousands of pounds somehow makes them less culpable? I couldn't write a cheque for that sum at all, ever, and even one for £500 would make me think for a long time about where it was coming from. Show me someone who can pull out a cheque for 20 grand on live TV, and I'll show you someone who has more money than they know what to do with. My money, and yours.