Miller resigns at last – now it is time to call in the police

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benefit, cash, cheat, court, Daily Telegraph, David Cameron, expenses, fraud, George Osborne, house, Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority, ipsa, law, London, Maria Miller, Mike Sivier, mikesivier, money, mortgage interest, paddock, people, police, politics, profit, resign, scandal, taxpayer, Vox Political, weak

Going (unpunished): Maria Miller has made a huge profit from her misuse of taxpayers’ money while in public office. Now is the time for her to face a criminal investigation.

Maria Miller resigned as Culture Secretary today (Wednesday) – after nearly a week of hanging on by her fingernails in the hope that everyone would suddenly forget that she fraudulently claimed mortgage interest on a south London house that she wanted the authorities to believe was her second home (when in fact it was her parents’ first).

During that time she has managed to reignite public disgust at the many expenses scandals in which Parliamentarians have been revealed to have been involved since the Daily Telegraph first lifted the lid on them in 2009.

She has also managed to undermine public support for comedy Prime Minister David Cameron, whose continuing support for her has shown just how weak he must be. He needed Miller because she was a woman in a predominantly male Cabinet, state-educated in a mainly private-school Cabinet, and an avid supporter of Cameron himself in a government that is beginning to realise that he’s a dud. In supporting her, he showed just how precarious his hold on the leadership really is.

Of course, she also generated a huge amount of hatred towards herself. Remember, this is a person who used taxpayers’ money to pay for her parents’ house – a building which she subsequently sold for a profit of more than £1 million.

Miller is not the first Cabinet member to make a million with taxpayers’ cash either – stand up George Osborne, who formerly had us paying for a paddock, a house and other scraps of land in his Tatton constituency on which he falsely claimed expenses, saying they were vital for the performance of his duties as an MP. He later sold the lot for around £1 million, having spent not a single penny of his own on the property – it all came from the taxpayer.

Osborne was protected from prosecution by the Parliamentary Standards Authority – a body that appears not to be as independent as it claims.

Now is the time to report Miller to the police.

A Parliamentary inquiry is not the same as a criminal investigation and it is important for her case to be tested in a court of law. This woman was part of a government that has had no qualms about using the law to take taxpayers’ money away from people who needed state benefits in order to survive; now let us see how she fares when the law turns its attention to her.

Who’s up for it?

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Ministry’s mistiming will keep Miller in the spotlight

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asset, £1 million, cabinet, Chris Grayling, Conservative, convict, criminal, David Cameron, fraud, George Osborne, government, help, house, Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority, ipsa, Maria Miller, Mike Sivier, mikesivier, Ministry of Justice, mistime, mistiming, MoJ, money, mortgage interest, politics, profit, seize, standards commissioner, Tories, Tory, trial, victim, Vox Political, weak

“Oh, f…”: Now Maria Miller’s Cabinet colleagues are stabbing her in the back. By accident?

The Ministry of Justice has just announced that £14 million, taken from criminals’ ill-gotten gains, will be used to help their victims.

How much of this will come from the fraudster Maria Miller?

None.

What an awkward, mistimed moment – another in a series for which this Conservative-led administration should be justly famous.

Here we all are, stridently discussing the future of a Cabinet minister (Miller) who clearly defrauded the taxpayer out of tens of thousands of pounds to pay for mortgage interest on a house she then sold for more than £1 million profit – and her Cabinet colleague Chris Grayling decides now is the time to announce what the government is doing with other criminals’ ill-gotten gains.

This will merely intensify calls for Miller to face trial and conviction, and for her financial assets to be seized.

The MoJ press release states: “Under this government more money than ever before is being raised from offenders specifically to help victims of crime.” This is except for when the offender is a member of the government, apparently.

“An increase in the penalties judges can impose on criminals from 2012 is ensuring criminals are forced to pay the price for their wrongdoing.” Except when they are investigated by Parliament, rather than the police.

Miller remains a member of the Cabinet, her criminally-won gains sitting in her bank account. She is unrepentant, as her “obstructive” attitude to the Parliamentary investigation and her 30-second apology to Parliament – for that obstruction, and not for any criminality – clearly demonstrates.

David Cameron, the weakest Prime Minister in living memory – if not all time – does not have the backbone to sack her.

Maybe there is another reason for this.

We were all reminded by the Scriptonite blog yesterday that there is another crook in the Cabinet who likes doing dodgy property deals.

George Osborne “‘flipped’ his first and second homes to claim over £100k of taxpayer money for interest payments on a mortgage for his £455k Cheshire pad. He later sold the home for over £1m having made improvements partly funded by taxes. He also claimed taxpayer money to cover payments on a horse paddock for the property,” Scriptonite reminds us.

In fact, he claimed taxpayer money for several pieces of land in addition to the house, and sold the lot for a profit that was estimated to be £1 million, because he never paid a penny of his own towards the purchase – it all came from the taxpayer.

Vox Political called for Osborne to face criminal proceedings more than a year ago but the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (IPSA) closed ranks around him and the Commissioner said that, as this had already been investigated under the lax pre-2009 rules, Osborne was going to get away with it.

So the message today is that you don’t have to be a master criminal to get away with illegal activities – you just have to be a member of the government.

Is that really what the Conservatives want to say – before an election?

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MPs Claim £70K a DAY in Expenses

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expenses, Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority, ipsa, Mike Sivier, mikesivier, MP, Parliament, people, Vox Political

The hypocrisy of the Westminster bubble was on full show today as IPSA, the body which oversees Parliamentary ethics at Westminster, released data showing that between October and November 2013, MPs made over 3,300 claims for expenses totalling £4.5 million.

This data covered 61 days and showed:
•On average, 541 claims made DAILY
•Each Claim was, on average, £135
•£73,300 claimed in expenses DAILY

Read more at The Political Ramblings of a Working Class Man.

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Standards watchdog orders MPs to repay ‘profits’ on second homes – why isn’t Osborne on the list?

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account, David Jones, expenses, false, farmhouse, fraud, George Osborne, home, Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority, Interest, ipsa, land, Mike Sivier, mikesivier, mortgage, paddock, profit, scandal, second, Tatton, taxpayer, Vox Political

Shady: Why will the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards NOT investigate the new evidence that has come to light about George Osborne’s expenses?

Members of Parliament have been made to pay back nearly £390,000 in ‘profits’ judged by the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority to have been made on taxpayer-funded homes – with one highly-notable exception.

In total, 71 MPs have repaid cash claimed on mortgage interest payments between 2010 and 2012.

The highest amount repaid was £81,446, by Conservative David Jones. He had only claimed around £18,061 but the amount he had to repay depended not only on how much he had claimed, but how much the value of his property had risen.

Changes to the system after the expenses scandal meant new MPs could not claim expenses towards the cost of mortgage interest payments on their second homes. Those who had already bought properties under the old system were allowed to continue claiming until August last year, if they agreed to repay a share of any profit made over that period.

This leads us to the worst offender we know, and the reason he does not appear on this list.

We know that George Osborne falsely claimed mortgage interest on a farmhouse, a neighbouring paddock, and other land in his Tatton constituency as an allowable expense, stating that he needed the house to perform his duties as an MP. Taxpayers’ money paid the interest on the paddock and the other land, even though they were registered separately with the Land Registry and went unmentioned in his expenses claim.

Between 2003 and 2009, he claimed up to £100,000 in expenses on the building (and the two pieces of land, even though they went unmentioned on his claim), which he had bought for £455,000 in 2000. A 2005 re-mortgage allowed him to increase the value to £480,000 and add the initial purchase costs and £10,000 for repairs to the interest-only arrangement; all the money came from the taxpayer.

Osborne stopped claiming in 2009. This is why he cannot be included among the MPs being asked to refund the taxpayer. When the Standards Commissioner examined Osborne’s expenses claims in 2010, he was ordered to pay £1,936 – a derisory amount that mocks the taxpayers who stumped up the cash.

Osborne sold the farmhouse and land in 2011, for an amount believed to be around £1 million. He pocketed all the money and did not repay a single penny that he had taken from the taxpayer.

Considering the amounts these 71 MPs have had to pay back – and especially considering the amounts paid by those whose property (like Osborne’s) increased in value – one might consider him to have made a very canny decision to stop claiming when he did. Bear in mind that it was an interest-only mortgage, so it would not have been paid off when he stopped claiming.

He played the system, using taxpayers’ money to make himself £1 million. He also committed fraud, or at least false accounting, in failing to declare that he was also claiming for two extra pieces of land that would have invalidated the claim altogether, as they were not used for Parliamentary purposes.

While he keeps the money, those MPs who have paid back huge amounts – including prominent cabinet members like Kenneth Clarke and Philip Hammond – have a right to feel that the system has discriminated against them.

I bet they don’t do anything about it.

MPs’ pay demand signals end of ‘Austerity Britain’

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Chancellor, Coalition, Conservative, David Cameron, Exchequer, government, Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority, Labour, Liberal, Liberal Democrat, Mike Sivier, mikesivier, Parliament, pay, politics, Prime Minister, rise, Tories, Tory, Vox Political

Happy days are here again!

I don’t know how they did it, but the ConDem Coalition government I’ve been railing against for the last year or so must have worked an economic miracle, despite all the factors stacked against them – not the least of which was their own total ineptitude.

After all, that’s the only reason they could possibly justify asking for a whopping great 32 per cent pay rise, isn’t it?

Readers with long memories may remember that, when David Cameron came into office as the new Prime Minister in 2010, one of the first things he did was order a five per cent pay cut for every single member of his government, and a pay freeze until 2015 – in other words, for the length of the current Parliament.

MPs voted against a one per cent pay rise in 2011, and last year agreed to extend the self-imposed pay freeze until 2013.

Before anyone starts praising their virtue and magnanimity, it should be pointed out that our Parliamentarians are extremely well-paid – starting salary is £65,738, running up to around £150-160,000 for the Prime Minister himself. They do quite all right, thank you very much!

But today we discover they have been telling the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority it’s time for a raise – on average, to £86,250. That’s a 32 per cent hike.

Clearly, therefore, the economic situation has changed dramatically overnight. Remember, it was only on Tuesday that more than half of them voted to give those of us on benefits what amounts to a pay cut. Obviously they’ll be scrapping that plan.

Otherwise they’d be a bunch of low-down, fetid, excremental hypocrites, right?

Note that it was the Tories who wanted the highest pay rise – to a whalloping £96,740. The Chancellor is a Tory; he’d know when the economic tide turned and that is clearly what has informed their demand. It seems the only reason possible – otherwise such a suggestion would be utterly outrageous.

The Liberal Democrats came in with a more modest £78,361 suggestion, and Labour seem to have cottoned on that change was in the air as well, weighing in with £77,322.

I note that the Prime Minister’s spokesperson, according to the BBC, said Mr Cameron believed the issue was a matter for Ipsa. He was the one who ordered the pay freeze; he’s now very relaxed about what happens. This is another clear sign that there has been an economic miracle.

I look forward to future announcements that the link between benefits and inflation has been restored; that millions of new job vacancies are being filled in the revitalised economy; that the living wage is being brought in for everyone; and that the National Health Service is to return to its former glory after the last two years of sordid tinkering with its innards. And that’s just for starters!

I think I shall also be looking forward to getting my breakfast bacon from its still-breathing owner as it flies past my bedroom window tomorrow morning, on porcine wings that are only slightly less plausible than the situation I’ve suggested in this article.

Seriously, to all MPs responsible for this travesty: Shame on you.

And to Ipsa: Don’t you dare give them a single penny. They’re nothing but a crowd of immoral, opportunist scroungers.

And we’ve all been led to believe this government does not reward scroungers.

Or was that another lie?