Socialist, My Arse!
Private Eye continues to expose the behaviour of the 'not so great and good' at the Palace of Westminster - through its regular HP Sauce column - so here's the latest offering for your interest and amusement
HP Sauce
"So, farewell then John Lyon, who has just retired from his four-day-a-week £105,000 job as parliamentary commissioner for standards after presiding over the worst era of fiddling in the history of the Commons.
Consistency was not his catchphrase. He was keen totake up complaints from the BNP, including one against Denis McShane. But he let off lucky David Laws, who gace £50k of taxpayers' money to his live-in partner in the form of "rent" - a fiddle no other member had been bright enough to think of.
Lyon refused to investigate some of the biggest examples of MPs' boot-filling, such as the thousands claimed in so-called petty cash. Oddly enough, one of the most regular exploiters of the petty cash wheeze, which allowed MPs to trouser up to £250 a month without receipts, was Kevin Barron MP - who just happens to chair the standards and privileges committee that oversees the commissioner's work, now better known at Westminster as the double standards committee. Since we described Lyon in 2009 as "feeble" and an "establishment stooge" (Eye 1241), he has done nothing to prove us wrong.
Well, almost nothing. In his last act before retiring, Lyon belatedly woke up to the worst abuseof the expenses system - the massive claims for mortgage interest payments. He opened an inquiry into Maria Miller MP, who claimed £90,000 over four years for a house she alreaduy owned where her parents lived. The new commissioner, Kathryn Hudson, now has the delicate task of of deciding whether to ask the culture secretary to repay the money and how long Miller might be suspended for claiming seven times the amount that forced McShane to resign.
If Hudson does take Miller to task, other MPs who made a fortune from the London property market before 2010 - step forward again, Kevin barron, who sold his taxpayer-funded flat for a profit of almost £500,000 - will begin to tremble. Dare she antagonise the chairman of her own double standards committee, a challenge her predecessor conspicuously ducked? Watch this space."
I don't know about anyone else, but I do laugh to myself when I stop and think about the contortions of some Labour MPs - who like to portray themselves as 'good socialists'.
While their party leader - Ed Miliband - bangs on about the 'something for nothing' society, of course.
Socialist my arse - as people might say here in Glasgow.
