Thread: Gordon Brown facing crisis as Labour MPs head for the lifebo

I am posting this because I expect the same here in the states on the next midterm election

Gordon Brown facing crisis as Labour MPs head for the lifeboats

• 52 Labour MPs apply to sit in House of Lords
• Senior party figures expect heavy defeat

Martin Kettle and Nicholas Watt
guardian.co.uk,
Thursday 28 May 2009 21.30 BST

Gordon Brown is facing an escalating Â*crisis of confidence inside the parliamentary Labour party as record numbers of his MPs apply to sit in the House of Lords after the next general election.

In the clearest indication to date that increasing numbers of Labour figures believe the party is heading for a heavy defeat at the hands of David Cameron, the Guardian has learned that at least 52 MPs have formally approached Downing Street to be given places in the upper house.

Martin Kettle on the Labour MPs who are asking to be moved to the upper house in expectation of defeat Link to this audio http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/audi ... ics-labour

The MPs include current chairs of select committees as well as past and serving middle and junior ranking Â*ministers, according to Labour sources. They account for a seventh of those elected at the last election.

The move by the Labour MPs comes as Brown faces the most perilous week of his premiership.

Ed Balls, the schools secretary, said yesterday Labour would perform badly in the European and local elections next Thursday.

"In European and local elections, [held] before a general election the governing parties tend not to do so well," Balls said at an election briefing. "That is going to happen to us. Of course it is. That is what happened in 2004."

Others were more blunt. "We are doomed," one senior Labour figure told the Guardian.

"We're all doing our bit in the elections but it is over for Labour."

Another Labour figure said the keen interest in the Lords shown by the party's MPs highlighted how disconnected senior figures are from the prime minister.

"They should look at how many peers Gordon has created – he is no fan of the upper house," one former minister said.

Brown is expected to try to assert his authority soon after the elections with a cabinet reshuffle.

It was the reshuffle last October, in which Peter Mandelson returned to the cabinet, which shored up Brown's Â*position after ministers had been in semi-open revolt over the summer.

But there is already speculation in Labour circles about whether Brown will face a leadership challenge if Labour Â*performs badly next week.

Alan Johnson, the health secretary, has attracted Â*attention after he devoted the last bank holiday weekend to publishing an article calling for electoral reform. But some of the prime minister's strongest opponents at senior levels of the party are sceptical of a cabinet-led challenge.

There is a feeling that the cabinet had a chance last summer to move against Brown but David Miliband, the foreign secretary, blew his chances with a few poorly chosen interventions.

Hazel Blears, the communities Â*secretary, seen as the most likely cabinet minister to resign in exasperation at the prime minister's performance, has been damaged after she failed to pay capital gains tax on the sale of a London flat. She has since paid back the amount.

One senior figure said there was a Â*feeling of resignation that Brown would lead the party into the next election.

"This is the third time we have seen the movie," said a figure who agitated for a challenge last year. "The expenses row may actually help the prime minister. He will be able to say these are exceptional circumstances and that every party has been hit."

Polls indicate that the UK Â*Independence party, which was thought to have reached the high water mark of its success in 2004, will be the main beneficiary of protest votes next Thursday. This would hit the Tories and the Liberal Democrats.

Balls gave an indication of the line that Brown is expected to use in the aftermath of the elections. "The polling we are seeing [shows] that in these elections [the expenses row] is going to impact on mainstream parties because it is probably going to persuade [voters] to stay at home," he said. "That will be a judgment on the whole political system rather than simply the government."

Balls, who will be one of Labour's main strategists for the general election, Â*underlined one of the main frustrations felt by the prime minister: that Labour still occupies the right central ground territory to win the election – he believes Brown would preserve vital public services while Cameron would impose swingeing cuts – but it is difficult to frame a debate on Â*substance in the current climate.

"If you have a serious discussion with a voter about the choices between the two parties, which takes more than five or 10 minutes, then actually people are very concerned about what the Conservatives say on the economy and on public Â*services," Balls said.

"I don't think we are losing the debate on policy. Our challenge is to have the debate on policy. I was out on the doorstep in my Â*constituency. There is a great deal of Â*concern about the expenses. But people want to know about some of the wider issues around public spending, the economy and Europe."

Balls underlined the worries over the impact of the expenses row by saying it could take 10 years to restore public trust in politics. "It will take us not just months, it will be a very big task for this parliament and through the whole of the next one," he said.

The disclosure that 52 Labour MPs are looking to life in the Lords shows many figures believe Labour will struggle to fashion the debate in the way described by Balls.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009 ... our-crisis

From The TimesMay 29, 2009

A third of British MEPs employ family members on expenses


Robert Kilroy-Silk admitted that his wife Jan works for him

David Brown, Fran Yeoman and Victoria Swalwell
More than a third of British MEPs are paying their relatives hundreds of thousands of pounds, despite a ban by the European Parliament next month on employing family members.

The wives, husbands and children of MEPs are earning up to £40,000 a year to work as secretaries and researchers at a total annual cost to taxpayers of more than £700,000.

Campaigners called last night for all 78 British MEPs to stop employing relatives immediately to prevent any suspicion that public money was being misused. New Members of the European Parliament will be banned from hiring relatives, but those already employed can stay until 2014.

After the Westminster expenses scandal and less than a week before next Thursday’s European vote, the spotlight is now focusing on MEPs’ generous and largely unregulated expenses. MEPs were under pressure yesterday to publish receipts showing how they are spending their £3,800-a-month office allowances.

The salary of British MEPs rises next month from £63,000 to £80,500. In total MEPs can receive expenses and allowances of £363,000 a year including a £261 daily subsistence allowance for simply turning up at work. They are entitled to £183,776 in staff allowances, £87,407 in travel expenses and £45,648 in general office expenses even though they are provided with offices in Brussels and Strasbourg.

The office allowance is paid automatically and they do not have to produce receipts to support the expenses or repay any underspend. One MEP said he had been told that just a handful of politicians have ever repaid any of their expenses because they had not spent the total amount.

Conservative MEPs have been ordered by David Cameron to publish details of their relatives’ employment and headline figures of their expenses. To date, all Lib Dem MEPs with the exception of Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne have published the details voluntarily. But Labour and UKIP have refused to order their Members to lift the veil of secrecy on expenses until after next week’s European elections. Labour has also said that its MEPs will begin to publish all their receipts relating to their office allowance every six months.

The published figures show that Tory MEPs spent an average of £3,312 a month in office expenses between September and December 2008. Liberal Democrat members spent an average of £2,900 a month last year.

Syed Kamall, a London Tory MEP, claimed almost £1,000 a month for stationery, periodicals and subscriptions. Chris Davies, MEP for North West England, was the top spending Lib Dem, spending £40,881 on office expenses last year including £9,000 on “communicationsâ€

MPs' expenses: Our politicians are agreed - it's everyone's fault but theirs
The range of excuses in the MPs' expenses affair has been breathtaking.

By Jeff Randall
Last Updated: 8:17AM BST 29 May 2009

Comments 149

At university, I had a friend whose fragile relationship with sobriety resulted in a few scrapes with the college authorities and local constabulary. His well-rehearsed response was to shift blame by claiming victim status. Rather than apologise, he would insist: "I was led on by the treachery of others, sir."

This, I discovered many years later, was not an original line. He had borrowed it from Alex, the anti-hero in Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange. It was, however, remarkably effective, in that it invited tutors and police officers to look beyond his misdeeds to the (non-existent) dark forces of betrayal.

More than 30 years later, it seems such diversionary tactics are alive and well at the Palace of Westminster. Many MPs whose fingers have been suspiciously near the taxpayer's wallet are desperate to deflect suggestions of culpability. In thrashing about for plausible escape routes, they appear unbothered by the facts and eager to frame anyone but themselves for their embarrassment.

Ben Chapman, the Labour member for Wirral South, who overclaimed £15,000 on his mortgage, might have plucked his attempt at self-exculpation from the pages of Burgess's dystopian novel: "It is clear that I was misled by the fees office into the arrangement in question." Get it? Nothing to do with Mr Chapman's behaviour; all the fault of perfidious bean counters.

He went on: "The publicity in The Daily Telegraph, and subsequently elsewhere, has been hurtful to my family, friends and local party members." You can see where this was meant to lead: the beastly press is responsible for the painful controversy in which Mr Chapman has become embroiled.

Lord Mandelson, who knows a thing or two about treachery, tried something similar. In an attempt to deodorise the stench over some of his colleagues' financial affairs, the master of mischief accused this newspaper of "classic smear tactics, using insinuation and innuendo to create the appearance of wrongdoing without being able to substantiate it".

He added: "I think if there had been any wrongdoing on the part of a Cabinet minister, you would have heard about it a long time ago. It would have been exposed, quite rightly, before and the House of Commons authorities would have taken action against it." As an exercise in re-framing the debate, it was only marginally less ridiculous than the Prime Minister's YouTube smile.

With the focus of our investigation moving from bogus expenses to allegations of tax avoidance, the search by some MPs for stain-removal agents becomes ever more frenetic. As Labour veteran Lord Hattersley said on Newsnight, if ministers have been deliberately avoiding capital gains tax, whether or not within the rules, they should be chucked out, regardless of their subsequent offers to pay up. This includes the wretched Hazel Blears, who looks the right type for MFI cabinets, but not those assembled inside Downing Street.

The willingness of MPs from all parties to fabricate excuses, blame the system and dodge accountability reflects a wider British malaise, one which has become much worse after 12 years of Labour nannying: the replacement of personal responsibility with a culture of entitlement and grievance.

By its actions, this Government has taught a thick slice of society to demand something for nothing and expect someone else to pay. Is it any wonder that many MPs are filling their swag bags, while accusing others of foisting upon them the keys to the till? They are Parliament's equivalent of Leona Helmsley, the Queen of Mean, who claimed $2.6 million of phony business expenses and was jailed for tax fraud, after insisting: "Only the little people pay taxes."

If one or two of our MPs are to avoid her fate, they had better start producing excuses of substantially higher quality than most of those wheeled out so far. It's hard to see why "I was incredibly busy" or "There was an error in my accounting" would wash if the miscreants were ever to have their collars felt.

Checking previous cases, I was particularly impressed by the Swedish woman who was found not guilty of tax fraud after telling the court that rats in her restaurant's attic had eaten the cashier records stashed there. Good, eh?

The problem here, however, is that it's hard for MPs to blame famished rodents if, as many have, they've already drawn on state funds for pest-control services.

More exotic, but less successful, was last year's fantastic story by Nigerian-born Remi Fakorede, who was accused of scamming £925,000 in tax credits. Her defence was that she had been forced into crime by a "voodoo curse" on her and her family. Summa cum laude for creative thinking.

Unfortunately, the judge at Snaresbrook Crown Court dismissed the defendant's "cynical attempt to manipulate the jury" and sentenced her to five years in prison. Never mind, that should not put off MPs in their search for redemption. We look forward to a Tory grandee blaming sorcery as the reason for a six-figure expenses claim on a crenellated castle in Great Swindling.

In his extended essay, The Economics of Innocent Fraud, J K Galbraith wrote: "Out of the pecuniary and political pressures and fashions of the time… political systems cultivate their own versions of the truth. No one is especially at fault; what it is convenient to believe is greatly preferred… There is no serious sense of guilt; more likely there is self-approval."

Many of the professor's ideas about political and corporate scandals were forged in the depression of the 1930s, yet his comments seem equally appropriate for Britain's recent meltdown of parliamentary authority: a surfeit, as Galbraith saw it, of "self-serving belief and contrived nonsense".

Thus we had Margaret Moran (Luton South) claiming £22,500 of taxpayers' money to treat dry rot at a house in Southampton, 100 miles from her constituency, so that she and her partner, who works on the south coast, could enjoy a cosy family life. This, she insisted, was acceptable "support".

No less grotesque was Julie Kirkbride's last-ditch effort to save her skin by bleating about the pressures of being a working mum. In order for her to square the circle of parental and official duties, she "needed" a £50,000 extension, funded by taxpayers, to the home we had already subsidised.

Self-serving and contrived? You bet. Which is why both are going.

In his brilliant "locust years" speech in 1936, Winston Churchill damned fellow MPs for an era of "procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays". The issue then (the appeasement of Hitler) was, of course, more threatening than our latest mess (the feather-bedding of greedy MPs), yet in both cases the House of Commons failed the country.

Churchill warned: "We are entering a period of consequences." His words echo through the chamber today.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstop ... heirs.html