David Chaytor loses appeal to have jail sentence reduced
Former Bury North Labour MP David Chaytor has lost a challenge to have his 18 month sentence reduced for fiddling his parliamentary expenses.
David Chaytor was jailed on the 7th January 2011 for 18 months for falsely claiming £22,000 of taxpayers' money with forged documents in his expenses.
He was attempting to get his sentence reduced to 12 months by the appeal, but a presiding Judge noted:
"It is difficult to exaggerate the levels of public concern at the revelation of significant abuse of the expenses system by some Members of Parliament. "
Read more about the story in the Manchester Eveneing News here.
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Loading ...Ed Balls approach to ” light touch regulation “.
Hand in hand with Gordon Brown, Ed balls seems to forget what he says from one week to another, let alone one year to the next. It was only a year ago that Ed balls was caught out over his " light touch approach to regulation " by George Osborne in the Independent.
On Monday 22nd September 2008 he said that those who had advocated " light touch regulation " had been, in his words, "routed". This is the same Ed Balls who as Chief Economic Adviser to the Treasury for eight years boasted about the " light touch " regime of City regulation he had designed. This is also the same Ed Balls who then as City Minister called for "a light touch approach at the global and EU level".
It would appear that Ed Balls was very much in league with Gordon Brown in designing a " light touch approach to regulation " that will see the rest of us paying for it for a long time to come!
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Charles Clarke still wants a vote on the Kelly Report recommendations.
I am no longer surprised to read that a former Home Secretary and the current MP for Norwich South, Charles Clarke, wants to have a vote in the commons over the Kelly Report despite everything that's happened this year!
Even now, humiliated, shamed, dishonoured and hated by the general public, MPs feel that they should have the right to vote for the implementation of the Kelly Report recommendations. Farcically, Charles Clarke believes that " MPs should approve the Kelly recommendations as the basis for a new system and apologise for this whole episode. "
THE LAST 13 YEARS OF MP CORRUPTION UNDER A LABOUR GOVERNMENT CAN HARDLY BE CALLED AN " EPISODE "!
Mr Clarke, there's a VERY good reason that you're not being given the chance to vote on the recommendations, none of you can be trusted to be honourable and actually vote in the changes! You amazingly seem to believe that an apology for everything that's happened in the last few years will placate the masses and then everything will be tickety-boo again? The fact that MPs ( at the moment ) have gotten away with tax evasion and fraud amongst their many crimes that would otherwise have seem a member of the general public in prison, is both abhorrent and shameful to most honest, hard working people.
MPs have proved repeatedly that self regulation does not work in any way or form and that " trust, honour, morality and integrity " appear to be sadly lacking from the House of Commons.
All MPs have been tared with the same brush of corruption and greed, and even those that may have been genuinely working for the betterment of their constituents, are complicit in their actions by turning a blind eye to all those individuals who had their snouts deep in the trough for so long!
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Is there anything Gordon Brown hasn’t given away?
Gordon Brown has spent the last 13 years, both as chancellor and now prime minister, giving away everything we have of value.
I'm not just talking about blindly throwing money at the banks recently ( £1.3 trillion in the last 2 years ), I'm also talking about our rights as individuals and members of the United Kingdom. We've lost our cultural identity ( partly through the poor to non-existent immigration policies of the Labour government and the HUGE influx of both legal and illegal visitors in the last 10 years ); the ability to wave the British flag with pride without fear of persecution from others, the ability to wear the mark of your faith without supposedly offending others, the ability to speak your mind and tell the truth without fear of being instantly branded a racist or Nazi by the political correctness crowd - where will it all end?
He's given our rights over self-governance and justice away to the EU; thousands of laws and regulations that we now have to abide by from Europe ( over 85% of UK legislation is now driven by Europe ).
He gave away the Bank of Englands responsibility for banking regulation in 1997 to the FSA ( the Financial Services Authority - a powerless puppet that stood by and did nothing in the following years to curb the financial disasters of the last 2 years ). Did no-one learn anything from the Nick Leeson fiasco that brought down Barings Bank ( £827 million losses discovered in 1995 )?
The Financial Services and Markets Act imposed four statutory objectives upon the FSA:
- market confidence: maintaining confidence in the financial system
- public awareness: promoting public understanding of the financial system;
- consumer protection: securing the appropriate degree of protection for consumers; and
- reduction of financial crime: reducing the extent to which it is possible for a business carried on by a regulated person to be used for a purpose connected with financial crime
I would personally say that the FSA has failed on all four of it's statutory objectives and should be disbanded immediately with all regulatory power being passed back to the bank of England and Mervyn King?
It wasn't that long ago that Gordon Brown was talking about the lack of restrictive financial regulations being good for business and growth in the UK economy - look where it's got us now Gordon!
He sold our gold reserves at the bottom of the market.
He raided the pensions funds of people that worked hard and saved for retirement all their lives, to leave them with little or nothing.
The list goes on and on and I'm afraid that he is the man who is SOLELY RESPONSIBLE for the dreadful state were in.
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Lloyds sells Halifax estate agency for £1
It was all kept very quiet when Lloyds sold the loss-making Halifax Estate Agency group for £1 to LSL Property Services ( the owners of Your Move ) recently.
The fact that the " public " own a 43% stake in Lloyds made no difference, and no one seemed bothered to attempt to actually claw back some of the £15 billion it was bailed out by ( let alone the £260 billion toxic debt guarantee that we gave Lloyds as well ).
No wonder all the MPs on the TV and radio at the moment keep going on about the selling off of assets not being a " firesale ". There was me thinking that selling off part of the Lloyds group for a quid is exactly that?
Despite the warnings that tax payers could lose billions of pounds in the splitting up of Lloyds, RBS and Northern Rock - the firesale continues unabated and without thought of the financial burden that will be placed on the public for generations to come.
Once again the tax payer will be shafted I'm sure, and left with a collection of toxic debt that burden us all for years to come.
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Mervyn King, bank reform and £6bn bonuses
This week has seen Mervyn King give a Churchillian speech to the bankers in which he stated " never in the field of human endeavour has so much money been owed by so few to so many. And, one might add, so far with little real reform. "
He is still very concerned about the lack of banking reform one year on from the global economic crash.
Politicians still seem to be tip-toeing around the serious issues of the deep set, systemic problems within the banking system and hiding their heads in the sand, in the hope it might all fade away with time!
It appears that the Royal Bank of Scotland ( yes, the one bailed out by public money to the tune of £20 billion ) has already amassed a £2 billion pay and bonuses bill for it's 20,000 investment bankers with a possibility of that bill doubling by the end of the year.
Bonuses are set to rise by 50% according to the CEBR ( Centre for Economic and Business Research ) and bonuses alone will top the £6 billion mark this year. After a year of reducing staff, cutting overheads and consolidating their financial bases with the aid of the taxpayer, banks are once again profitable and back to their old ways.
The last year has seen an astronomical input of £1.3 trillion ( £1,300,000,000,000 or more than a billion billion pounds! ) from the taxpayer to rescue the UK financial system.
Tory peer Lord Griffiths has defenced massive bonuses within the financial services industry in saying that " Bumper payouts to bankers should be seen as part of a longer term investment in London's economy ". He said that the British people needed to " Tolerate the inequality as a way to achieve greater prosperity for all ".
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Nick Griffin on Question Time with Jack Straw, Chris Huhne, Sayeeda Warsi and Bonnie Greer
It was interesting watching Question Time this evening for many reasons. The hype behind Nick Griffin's appearance was nothing more or nothing less than was expected really.
Jack Straw started the evening off talking about MPs having a moral compass!! ( Yes Jack, but it's stuck at magnetic North! )
The programme was as most people were expecting a verbal beating for Nick Griffin. Equally expected was his poor performance in response to questions about race, religion, immigration . . . . and so on. His constant insistence about his " mis-quotes " in the press were almost farcical. Trying to deny and twist video evidence to the British public on his various quotes is both foolish and naive.
I'm afraid that Jack Straw made an equally poor impression on the occasions he wasn't launching into Griffin, when he was questioned several times on immigration. Bonnie Greer held herself with decorum throughout and was both calm, gracious and polite whilst being sat next to Nick Griffin for the programme. Chris Huhne was Jack Straw's equal in attacking Griffin but faired slightly better with his answers, whilst Sayeeda Warsi came across as someone who had interesting opinions and correctly challenged Jack Straw regarding the Labour Party and their lack of cohesive immigration policy. She fielded her questions well and put a positive foot forward in representing the Conservative party . . . I think?
I was actually hoping that the show would have more variety of questions for Nick Griffin, and that the other politicians would challenge him on a greater variety of policies than just race, as was mostly the case. We are all aware of the BNP and their policies of race, but it would have been far more entertaining to have challenged him on other policies; such as economic policy, the NHS and banking reforms but to mention the tip of the iceberg!
I think that the MPs lost a golden opportunity to really humiliate Nick Griffin and despite his sweaty, twitchy and nervous answers, I'm sure he will have appealed to a small minority of people.
To top it off at the end of the programme, Jack Straw came full circle back to Mps and their moral standing ( should have been lack of them and I would say it's more stooping or squatting than standing?).
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...There’s Nothing British about Nothing British is there?
I guess from my point of view, there's nothing more desperate ( and pathetically funny ) than a political party creating a splinter organisation to brow beat their competition ( the BNP ), rather than deal with their own serious problems! Welcome aboard the Nothing British about the BNP bus!
A a time when the public ( including me ) what to see action over MPs greed, corruption, fraud, tax evasion and amoral and unjust expense claims - the Tory party would rather focus on having a go at the BNP.
Please David Cameron, get your own house fully in order before you get a few of your " tory boys " on the BNP's case!
You're actually doing nothing to help your cause and moving the focus fully onto the BNP, and giving them far more media attention than they deserve. Wouldn't you rather tackle them head on in a debate with a battle of the minds? OBVIOUSLY NOT...!
I personally believe that the major parties are running scared. They've been in their ivory towers for too long, developing their property portfolios on the back of taxpayers money, squeezing every last penny they can each year from their expense accounts, avoiding Capital Gains Tax by consistently swapping their primary residence designation at every opportunity and relaxing on their ever increasing holidays ( now they have 144 days holiday a hear - nearly 5 months!!!!! WOW ).
They have COMPLETELY forgotten and abandoned the working man in the street, and that is what has driven him into the arms of the BNP, and they know it. They are SOLEY responsible for the rise of the BNP and if they'd done their jobs properly instead of focusing on personal gain, the country would be in a much better state and there would be far less unemployment and discontent.
On their website they say that " We believe in addressing the concerns of those people who feel alienated from their society by government failures on issues like immigration, Europe, religious extremism and job insecurity. This means campaigning for policies that work. "
Yet they mention nothing about honesty, integrity, accountability, professionalism - the key attributes that it seems most MPs are lacking! They don't mention the current government that's drowning in it's own quagmire of sleaze, greed, corruption and scandal.
I'd like to know how they're going to " address the concerns of those people who feel alienated from their society by government failures " by focusing on the BNP? They way they're going about things makes them no better than the BNP I'm afraid!!!
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Labour MPs whinging about their Parliamentary Rights.
MPs are attempting to legally block a police probe into their expenses. Scotland Yard have been warned that a police probe would breach their " right of parliamentary privilege ". ( Is that the privilege that specifies expense fraud, tax evasion and " flipping " to avoid paying Capital Gains Tax? )
Once again, it's Labour MPs attempting to avoid paying back money from amoral and excessive expense claims, by trying to utilise a potentially ancient loophole in parliamentary legislation. WHEN WILL THEY LEARN?
Gordon Brown and David Cameron should make it clear right now - if any MP refuses to pay back money for excessive expense claims after the Thomas Legg investigation, they should be removed as an MP and removed from that political party altogether!
This isn't about what the " rules and regulations " stated; this is about what is morally right and just for the tax payer and the public coffers. An independent inquiry has found that the expense system ( self-administered and self-regulated by the same corrupt MPs of course ) was fundamentally flawed and not " fit for purpose " - so just pay up and shut up!
Trying to use the same system that let you abuse public money and trust, is not going to allow you to wriggle your way out of paying back what you should never have been allowed in the first place.
All this comes on the same day that Sir Paul Stephenson ( head of Scotland Yard ) has warned that MORE MPs will face scrutiny over their expenses and that a number of MPs can expect to end up in court - that number may rise yet as investigations are still ongoing.
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...What do they know?
Have you ever wanted to make a freedom of information request ( FOI ) and get answers to questions from your home address, but haven't done so, for fear of reprisals from the organisation you contact?
Well why not hop, skip and jump over to http://www.whatdotheyknow.com
You can create an account and make a FOI through their website for free without fear of reprisals or any negative outcome.
I have made a couple of requests for information to the HMRC ( Revenue and Customs ) and the House of Commons in relation to Mps expenses.
I will be making further requests to other organisations and will post the outcomes and responses to my questions when I get them!
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Recent Posts
- David Chaytor loses appeal to have jail sentence reduced
- Long time no blog…..
- Ed Balls approach to ” light touch regulation “.
- Gordon Brown and his approach to ” light touch regulation “.
- Charles Clarke still wants a vote on the Kelly Report recommendations.
- Is there anything Gordon Brown hasn’t given away?
- Lloyds sells Halifax estate agency for £1
- Labour adds another £40 billion burden for the British tax payer
- Mervyn King, bank reform and £6bn bonuses
- Nick Griffin on Question Time with Jack Straw, Chris Huhne, Sayeeda Warsi and Bonnie Greer
- There’s Nothing British about Nothing British is there?
- Labour MPs whinging about their Parliamentary Rights.
- What do they know?
- Peter Hain calls for Nick Griffin to be banned from Question Time.
- MPs want more pay and increased holidays.
