Snout deep in the trough

[mids]

Spot on article about the disgusting gred of the home sec. If her main home is her sisters house in London, does that mean she lives there over the summer?

Smith has claimed the money for expenses incurred at her Redditch constituency home, on the grounds that the lodgings she rents from her sister in south London from Monday to Thursday most weeks is her "main home".

Of course it is, Jacqui. Not the home you own with your husband, Richard (who you employ for £40,000 a year as your parliamentary assistant), the house you bought and furnished together, where your two sons live and where they go to school. That would be your second home, would it? Whereas the lodgings you rent from your sister in a house she bought and paid for, that she furnished and owned, that's your "main home", is it?

www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/feb/09/jacquismith-labour

[minge tightly]

Can you feel the anger building across the nation at the corrupt symbiosis of nu Labour and hyper-capitalism.

Give it another few months of rising unemployment and come the summer, riots will be kicking off.

[mids]

It's their complete refusal to do anything about it other than occasionally fiddle with a few rules that encourage and condone it that gets me.

[VikingHumpingWitch]

How do you spend £24 grand a year on your home anyway? She must have rebuilt the bloody thing by now.

I hate this government.

[flatandy]

So Jacqui's main home is in London? That must please her constituents no end. I'm surprised she's brave enough to live somewhere you need an armed guard to buy a kebab, too.

[flatandy]

Anyway, hateful though Jacqui is and corrupt though this is, it's pretty small beer, really, isn't it? I mean, most MPs are most corrupt than this.

All you have to do is look at the unremarked upon bit of this, that her husband is a "parliamentary assistant" and earns £40k a year of taxpayers money for, presumably, making her tea.

This seems to be considered perfectly reasonable and harmless.

[tarrant]

Civil servants have a strange method of calculating costs anyway.

I recall, when I worked in the NHS, almost 20 years ago now, some senior staff could claim up to £1.70 a mile in mileage allowance.

That was for those working in offices!

But this expenses thing is going to be a certain albatross around the government's neck.

It's been going on for years of course. Which is really no excuse at all.

[VikingHumpingWitch]

Ah well now. If she needs a Parliamentary assistant, and presumably it is a role requiring you to work closely together and sometimes at odd hours, then it might as well be her fella. Providing there is some evidence that he actually does do something in the role.

[flatandy]

This is the parliamentary assistant who live in her second home, in Redditch?

[minge tightly]

That's going to go across the board mids, and in fact has done so for the past decade.

This time though, people won't be blinded by the 'greatest economic boom eva'

[VikingHumpingWitch]

Well I live in Gothenburg but it doesn't stop me working for clients in London, California, Dubai etc and so on.

[omnipleasant]

Complete non-story this one.

[mids]

Massive. Huge story.

[omnipleasant]

Rogue story.

[ricklinc]

I'm all in favour of nu labour getting embarrassed. But this milking the people scam has been going on ever since one member of a stoneage tribal council decided that he was entitled to a second mud hut closer to the river.

Can't we just stick to the fact that she's a fcuking useless member of the clueless cabinet of an incompetent government?

[wetkingcanute]

Oh Omni PLEASE...I have absolutely no problem with you being a Labour supporter but, just once...just once when faced with something that goes against rigid party dogma or shows the party in a bad light, could you not just say, "well maybe that's not right" or "OK it's a fair cop".

It would make all your other views have more weight.

[omnipleasant]

I often do, WKC.

This particular story, though, is not important to me. I don't really care about the whole MPs expenses thing, Labour or Tory (and they are both as 'bad').

[omnipleasant]

(expenses, John Lewis list, salaries etc not to be confused with out-and-out Conway style corruption)

[sushimo]

Littlejohn nailed it:

Richard Timney is Jacqui Smith's husband and was recently discovered to be bombarding their local paper with letters praising his wife and attacking the Conservatives.

He didn't reveal in any of this correspondence that he was actually married to Jackboot Jacqui, or that he is paid £40,000 a year by the taxpayer to be her adviser.

Given that he didn't think it relevant to declare an interest, it's hardly surprising that his wife thinks there's nothing wrong in pretending her main home is her sister's spare room.


www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1140528/RICHARD-LITTLEJOHN-Jackboot-Jacqui--Second-Home-Secretary.html

[feral]

why dont you care when you keep screeching " TAX THE RICH " ?