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

Tags

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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Tory crime allegations: Why stop with Shapps?

Tags

action, Action Fraud, allegation, by election, case, computer, Conservative, contempt, court, crime, criminal, David Cameron, error, expenses, fraud, George Osborne, government, Grant Shapps, How To Corp, Iain Duncan Smith, IT, legal, Metropolitan, michael dugher, Mike Sivier, mikesivier, mortgage, paddock, Parliament, police, politics, Tories, Tory, TrafficPaymaster, Vox Political

Isn’t this fraud? The man pictured is Grant Shapps, but his name tag claims he is Michael Green – the name he used to run How To Corp before and after he became an MP. Isn’t that fraud – gaining a financial advantage by deception (in this case, the pretence that he wasn’t Grant Shapps)?

Picture David Cameron’s bemusement, as he stares around the Cabinet at its next meeting, wondering why Labour has asked him to order an investigation into criminal allegations against Grant Shapps – when George Osborne and Iain Duncan Smith are in the room.

Labour’s Shadow Cabinet Office minister Michael Dugher has written to Cameron, calling for Shapps to be suspended and an investigation launched under the ministerial code of conduct after the police said one of his companies may have committed “an offence of fraud”.

The official Conservative line is that the police have closed investigations into Shapps’s How To Corp, there is no case to answer, and any further allegations should be put to the Party (as Dugher has) or the police. The source added: “To suggest there are allegations left unchallenged is actionable”, implying a threat of legal action if Labour persists.

But this is to deny the result of the police inquiry. The Metropolitan Police stated in a letter that the company’s sales of TrafficPaymaster software, that ‘spins and scrapes’ content from other websites, “may constitute an offence of fraud, among others”, but that this would not be investigated further.

Why not? A crime is a crime and the police are specifically employed to prevent it.

It seems that Tory ministers really are above the law.

Look at how the Met brushed off Vox Political‘s attempt to have George Osborne investigated for fraud, after he paid mortgage interest on a paddock with taxpayers’ money, claiming it was an allowable expense on property he needed to perform his duties as an MP – and then sold it off in a package with other land and a neighbouring farmhouse for around £1 million and pocketed the cash.

Apparently it was already under investigation, according to the policewoman who called at the end of last year. Have you heard anything about it since?

Perhaps it was one of the fraud matters that got lost by computer error.

And what about Iain Duncan Smith’s habitual offence of lying to Parliament? He has done this so many times that nobody can say it is unintentional, and he has never apologised for the factual inaccuracies. This is an offence of Contempt of Parliament and according to convention he should have been ejected from the House of Commons months ago and a by-election called for his seat.

If the Conservatives can’t keep their own house clean, why isn’t Labour demanding action on these matters?

Flawed Coalition figures claim crime is down. What about fraud (George Osborne)?

Tags

Action Fraud, Coalition, Conservative, crime, David Cameron, England, figure, fraud, George Osborne, government, Jeremy Browne, Labour, Major, Mike Sivier, mikesivier, national, office, paddock, politics, statistic, statistics, Thatcher, Theresa May, Tories, Tory, Vox Political, Wales

Shock revelations: Police using iPads demonstrate to Home Secretary Theresa May and Prime Minister David Cameron that they can’t stop Vox Political publishing the facts about their so-called government.

It must be a brutal blow for the Coalition government, after announcing that crime has dropped by a respectable amount, to then have to admit that a large chunk of fraud has been omitted from the figures.

“Crimes recorded by police in England and Wales have fallen by 7 per cent in the year ending March 2013, according to the Office for National Statistics,” stated the BBC, proudly acting once again as the Coalition’s mouthpiece.

At around the same time Jeremy Browne, the Minister of State for Crime Prevention, was telling us about mistakes at Action Fraud, which now receives all reports of fraud on behalf of all police forces in England and Wales: “Between November 2012 and July 2013, 2,490 reports (of which 1,738 were reports of crime) were not processed correctly due to a fault in the IT system,” he reported.

Oh dear – another cock-up.

By now, the people of Britain should be used to this sort of behaviour from an administration that once promised to be the most open government in history. Fraud is up, they say? How unsurprising – it seems one is being perpetrated on us right now.

The report from the Office for National Statistics estimated that “there were 8.6 million crimes in England and Wales, based on interviews with a representative sample of households and resident adults in the year ending March 2013”. This represents a nine per cent decrease compared with the previous year’s survey, and is the lowest estimate since the survey began in 1981 – less than half its peak level, which was in 1995.

But there are several reasons we should treat this result with care. Firstly, we are told the survey began in 1981 – during the first Thatcher (Conservative) government – and the amount of crime it measured peaked 14 years later, in 1995 – during the Major (Conservative) government. In other words, during all those years of Conservative rule, crime just kept getting worse and worse.

Also, under the Labour governments of 1997-2010, crimes committed fell from around 17 million to around nine million – a drop of about 48 per cent. In the last year of that government alone, crime fell by nine per cent, according to the British Crime Survey. Today’s result could very well be building on Labour achievements and have nothing to do with the Coalition, which has been cutting police numbers (and logically police effectiveness).

Finally, recorded crime totalled 3.7 million offences in the year up to March 2013 – less than half the Crime Survey for England and Wales’ estimate of the total number of crimes. If they’re not recording crimes, they’re not investigating them – so this means more than half of the crimes committed in this country appear to be going unpunished.

That’s not a good record.

The Home Secretary, Theresa May, was quick to claim responsibility for the apparent improvement. She said: “Our police reforms are continuing to deliver results across the country with falls in crime in every police force in England and Wales.

“Recorded crime is down by more than 10 per cent under this government, and the independent survey shows that the public’s experience of crime is at its lowest level since records began. This is a significant achievement.

“Police forces have shown an impressive ability to rise to the challenge of making savings while still cutting crime. This government has played its part by slashing red tape and scrapping targets to enable the police to focus on crime fighting.

“We have encouraged chief constables to make savings in back offices to give renewed focus on the frontline and we are seeing the benefits of those efficiencies. We have also set up a College of Policing to ensure the police are better equipped with the knowledge and skills they need to fight crime.

“England and Wales are safer than they have been for decades, but we will continue to improve our national crime fighting capability when the National Crime Agency is fully operational later this year.”

Another national agency? Let’s hope it does better than the one dealing with fraud. Back to Mr Browne: “This issue came to light too late to notify the Office for National Statistics for inclusion in Crime in England and Wales for the year ending March 2013, published today.

“As part of routine revisions to the data, any corrections will be included by the Office for National Statistics in next quarter’s crime publications.”

He said: “Action Fraud has taken immediate action to process the affected reports and will be writing to apologise to everyone who submitted a report and to make clear that their report is now being dealt with.”

Vox Political‘s complaint against George Osborne was submitted in December 2012 and is therefore likely to be among the complaints that were overlooked.

It is alleged that he committed fraud by falsely claiming 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.

The apology letter is awaited with great interest. In fact, a letter may soon by winging its way to Action Fraud, just to make sure the matter is not forgotten again!

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

Tags

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.

Osborne’s ‘Disabled’ parking disgrace

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bullingdon, club, demyship, disabled, gate, George Osborne, Gideon, oxford, paddock, parking, university

How low can this man go?

He uses taxpayers’ money to make £1 million for himself by buying a farmhouse and associated land in Cheshire, using public funds to pay the mortgage interest, then selling it for around twice the original price and pocketing the cash.

He buys a standard train ticket, then is caught travelling in First Class.

Now this. After spending three years pummelling the sick and disabled people of the United Kingdom, this arrogant little brat steals one of their parking spaces.

Does this man have no shame at all?

Gideon was famously a member of Oxford University’s restaurant-smashing Bullingdon Club. He got into Oxford on a ‘demyship’ – a special kind of scholarship for “poor scholars of good morals and dispositions, fully equipped for study”.

Poor? He’s the millionaire son of Sir Peter Osborne, 17th Baronet, who co-founded the firm of fabric and wallpapers designers Osborne & Little.

His morals speak for themselves.

Part-time Chance(llo)r and towel-folder to explain how impoverishing people makes work pay.

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38 degrees, age, authority, avoidance, band, bedroom tax, below, benefit, benefits, boo, break, campaign, cap, Chancellor, change, Coalition, Conservative, council, credit, cut, Daily Politics, demonstration, Department for Work and Pensions, disability, disabled, DWP, Employment and Support Allowance, ESA, exploit, fair, games, George Osborne, Gideon, government, Grant Shapps, Iain Duncan Smith, inflation, Interest, legislation, Liberal, Liberal Democrat, living wage, local, make work pay, Mandatory Work Activity, Mike Sivier, mikesivier, money, mortgage, motion, Olympic, online, paddock, Parliament, people, petition, politics, poverty, rally, retrospective, social security, Tatton, tax, taxpayer, top, Tories, Tory, unemployment, unfair, Vox Political, WCA, welfare, work capability assessment, work placement provider, Workfare, working

Not fair at all: We love this shot of George Osborne because it clarifies perfectly that, as with Michael Howard before him, there is “something of the night” about him. Will YOU believe him when he says it is fair to punish the poor for an economic recession they never made, while rewarding the rich who did the damage?

You know the Tories are scraping the bottom of the barrel when they wheel out Gideon George Osborne to defend benefit changes as “fair”.

It’s hilarious (unintentionally, I’m sure) that they’re wheeling out a man whose appearance in last year’s Olympic Games prompted an international crowd in a full-to-capacity stadium to ‘boo’ him – in order to try to popularise their unjustifiable crimes against the poor.

This is a man whose only proper job was folding towels at a department store, if I recall correctly!

He’s due to make a speech at 12.30pm today (April 2, so it can’t even be defended as an April Fool) in which he is expected to say the Tory cuts mean “this month we will make work pay”, and nine out of 10 working households will be better-off.

They’ll be better of than the remaining one-tenth of households, maybe, but the Tories are never going to convince intelligent people that they’re making work pay by cutting anything! Common sense tells us that, in a country where wages are deeply depressed (such as the UK – oh yes they are) the only way to make work pay is to offer a living wage!

But what can we expect from a political organisation that is now focusing its efforts on redefining the dictionary?

The lexicon here at Vox Political gives multiple definitions for the word “fair”, so I’ll pick out those that may be applied, as follows:

“1. Reasonable or unbiased.” The changes include a below-inflation cap for people on working-age benefits and tax credits, meaning they will become worse-off, year-on-year, while the cap remains in place. Meanwhile, people in the top tax band – who therefore take home the most pay – are getting a £100,000 tax break. Reasonable? No. Unbiased? Not a chance in hell.

Let’s also remember that Osborne is the Chancellor who thought it was a good idea to promote tax avoidance schemes on the Daily Politics TV show, on January 9 this year.

“2. According to the rules.” The Tory-led Coalition is the government that changes the rules to suit itself. Let’s all remember that when Iain Duncan Smith’s Department for Work and Pensions was found, by a court, to have been breaking the law by imposing sanctions against people who refused to take part in the ridiculous ‘Mandatory Work Activity’ schemes that take more than a billion pounds out of the economy every year (almost £900 million for companies offering placements, along with hundreds of millions more for ‘Work Placement Provider’ companies), this administration’s answer was to introduce retrospective legislation to wipe away its guilt.

“3. Describing light-coloured hair or skin, or somebody with this.” Let’s widen this definition a little; a person who is “fair to look at” would be deemed attractive, so let’s go with that. Are these changes attractive? Most definitely not. They are designed to make the claiming of benefits unattractive.

“4. Sizeable, as in ‘a fair number of responses’.” This is accurate – the changes will affect millions of homes, throwing many of them into abject poverty.

“5. Better than acceptable.” If they were acceptable, then we would not have seen thousands of people demonstrating against the new Bedroom Tax, in towns and cities across the UK. Nor would we have seen the huge amount of campaigning against the benefit changes online and via petitions. And there will be motions against implementing the tax in local authorities up and down the country. The people responsible for them don’t think these changes are acceptable; nor should you.

“6. No more than average.” It could be suggested that Grant Shapps has been saying the more stringent application of the Work Capability Assessment to applicants for Employment and Support Allowance has created a more representative average number of claims by ensuring 878,000 people dropped their claims when faced by those changes – but, wait a moment, this has been exposed as a lie, hasn’t it? In fact, the number of people dropping their claims has been revealed – by official DWP figures – to be the natural wastage you get from people getting better or finding work they can do while ill, and the number of people receiving the benefit has, in fact, risen.

“7. Not stormy or cloudy.” Clearly the storm of protest around these changes renders this definition irrelevant.

Osborne, who not only advocates tax avoidance but allegedly participates in it himself – he was the target of a campaign by 38 Degrees, early in the life of this Parliament – also seems a strange choice to talk about fairness and making work pay, because of his involvement in a ‘get rich quick’ scheme which was extremely unfair and had nothing to do with work.

Readers of this blog may remember that Osborne used taxpayers’ money to pay mortgage interest on a farmhouse and associated land that he claimed to use for Parliamentary purposes in his Tatton constituency (this has not been proved), and then sold the properties for around £1 million, pocketing the lot. He didn’t work for the money, and this exploitation of the taxpayer can hardly be considered fair – but he got away with it because his privileged position as an MP, apparently, allows it.

Fair? No.

Corrupt?

This seems more likely.

An e-petition to tackle corruption amongst MPs

Tags

agreement, Andrew Lansley, bribe, Care UK, Coalition, company, Conservative, contract, corrupt, David Cameron, donation, e-petition, financial, George Osborne, Health and Social Care Act, Interest, lobby, Mike Sivier, mikesivier, MP, paddock, politics, Tories, Tory, Vox Political, Work Programme, Workfare

It wasn’t what I really wanted, but it’s a start – and it might help to identify some of the bad guys (and gals) in the House of Commons.

I am referring to my new e-petition, which calls on the government to legislate against MPs speaking or voting in debates on matters which could lead to them, companies connected with them or donors to their political party, gaining money. You can find it at http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/44971 – got it? Good, now sign it, please. Done that? Now read on. Thanks!

I do think this is a vital step to prevent corruption – if such a law had been in place before the current government came into power, Andrew Lansley would not have been able to speak in favour of his Health and Social Care Act before it was passed (he had received money from Care UK, as is well-documented on this blog and others).

But it is only a step. If this e-petition receives 10,000 signatures, then the government will post a response and I am dying to find out what it might be.

A Facebook friend of this blog sent me the response to an e-petition calling for the abolition of “work for your benefit/workfare” schemes in the UK, which seemed most keen to take issue with the use of the word “workfare”, even though it has been well-established in the British political scene for many years. It went on to describe the work-for-benefit schemes it does offer – in glowing terms. It makes me doubt whether the people responsible have taken the petition seriously.

Please support my petition. And please promote it by sharing the link with your friends – both online and in the real world, if possible. The Coalition Agreement of 2010 states that “the Government believes that we need to throw open the doors of public bodies, to enable the public to hold politicians and public bodies to account” but we have seen no evidence of this happening. If anything, it seems the creatures who stalk the corridors of power are more corrupt than ever before.

Does anyone remember the scandal when it was revealed lobbyists could gain access to David Cameron in return for a £250,000 donation to the Conservative Party?

This kind of behaviour must be fought. First, I think we should try to banish it from the chamber of the House of Commons. If a debate does take place, it would be interesting to see who takes part and how many oppose the proposal – for obvious reasons.

If the e-petition gets that far, it might be possible to expand, considering the activities of lobbyists and whether former MPs should be allowed to take jobs with companies that benefit from government contracts.

For my next e-petition, I have been weighing up my chances of getting one published that would seek a debate on Gideon George Osborne’s misuse of taxpayers’ cash to fund his £1 million property moneyspinner – the paddock affair. I couldn’t get one published about the Commissioner for Parliamentary Standards, who whitewashed the issue, and I doubt I could get one published seeking the dismissal of Osborne himself.

But a debate, using him as an example? That might be the way.

As ever, I am interested in your opinions.

Osborne or the IMF – who do you believe?

Tags

agencies, agency, austerity, bank, budget, corporation, credit, Credit Crunch, crisis, David Cameron, debt, education, George Osborne, IMF, income, International Monetary Fund, Mike Sivier, mikesivier, olivier blanchard, paddock, pension, politics, recession, social security, tax, Vox Political, welfare

What a day. The International Monetary Fund has politely suggested that Gideon George Osborne should slow the pace of his austerity measures; in response, Osborne has politely suggested that the IMF should go and spin on it.

You are watching ‘A Family At War’.

The IMF’s chief economist, Olivier Blanchard, told the BBC: “We said that if things look bad at the beginning of 2013 – which they do – then there should be a reassessment of fiscal policy… We think this would be a good time to take stock and see whether some adjustments should now be made.”

He suggested the March budget would be a good time to change tack, adding: “Slower fiscal consolidation in some form may well be appropriate.”

In response, Osborne said: “We have a credible and flexible debt reduction plan. That credibility is very hard-won and easily lost.

He said pension, education and welfare reform was making the UK economy more competitive, and cuts to corporation tax and higher-rate income tax were making the country more attractive to business. “We do have to carry on with the cuts. We’re not about to bring that programme to an end. [It] will go on until 2017. We are walking a difficult road but we are going in the right direction.”

My problem with the IMF is that it is the very organisation that told us our economy had a completely clean bill of health, immediately before the credit crunch, the banking crisis and the first of our recessions. How can we ever trust anything that comes out of it again?

Mr problem with Osborne is that he’s, well, Osborne. Look at what he said – it’s a load of hogwash. We don’t have a credible debt reduction plan – that’s why the credit agencies are poised to strip the UK of the triple-A rating that Mr 0 prizes so much.

Even The Spectator magazine – a Tory rag – has slapped Osborne’s chum David Cameron for lying about the debt. Cameron said his government was “paying down Britain’s debts” – in fact, on his watch, it has risen from £811.3 billion to £1.11 trillion (for those of you who like percentages, that’s from 55.3 per cent of GDP to 70.7 per cent). In other words, both as a percentage of GDP and in real terms, debt has risen by nearly a fifth under this government. And Osborne is the one who was supposed to turn that situation around.

Welfare reform isn’t making the UK economy more competitive, it’s pushing wages down. If the impoverishment of British workers is what Osborne thinks it will take to bring business into the UK, then he isn’t fit to be Chancellor. But then, we knew that anyway.

Cuts to taxes might make us more attractive to businesses, but only because they don’t have to pay as much to the government in order to operate here. That doesn’t help the UK; it helps those private businesses.

So once again, we see how Osborne views his own role – as a kind of corporate vampire, sucking money out of the state and feeding it to private businesses – from abroad, to judge from his statement today. The money he siphons out of the Treasury means a shrivelled, shrunken public spending system – again, something Osborne desperately wants, as he will use it to improperly justify further cuts to services which the British public desperately need and deserve.

Back in 2010, the IMF was recommending austerity and Osborne was shoulder to shoulder with its spokespeople. Now he’s showing his true colours.

But then, what can we expect from a man with such poor morals he even used the Parliamentary expenses system to make a cool £1 million at the taxpayers’ expense?

I wonder what he’ll say tomorrow, if the figures put us into triple-dip recession.

Rejected! E-Petition is refused but none of the reasons match up

Tags

commissioner, e-petition, George Osborne, paddock, Parliamentary, standards

The e-petition calling for the office of the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner to be replaced has been rejected by the government website.

According to the email I received this morning, “E-petitions cannot be used to request action on issues that are outside the responsibility of the government. This includes:

“Party political material;

“Commercial endorsements including the promotion of any product, service or publication;

“Issues that are dealt with by devolved bodies, eg The Scottish Parliament;

“Correspondence on personal issues.”

It adds: “E-petitions cannot be used for freedom of information requests.”

Help me out here, folks. I can’t see how this matter can be outside the responsibility of the government, since it is the House of Commons that oversees the office and appoints commissioners. There’s no party political material. There are no commercial endorsements. Clearly it’s not something handled by a devolved body or personal correspondence, nor does it make an FOI request.

There is no attempt to explain the matter further and no email address through which to discuss the matter. All I can imagine is that they interpreted the link to this blogsite as a commercial endorsement. Perhaps if I remove it?

I would appreciate input, especially from anyone with experience of the government e-petitions site.

Osborne update: e-Petition on government website

Tags

commissioner, e-petition, George Osborne, paddock, Parliamentary, standards

I have submitted an e-petition to the government’s website, calling for action after the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards refused to accept a complaint about George Osborne and the paddock, for which he claimed expenses, along with another piece of land and a farmhouse in Cheshire.

The farmhouse was the only part for which an expenses claim was permissible, and Mr Osborne has now sold all three pieces of land at huge profit. I submitted information including Land Registry documents that showed there was a prima facie case against the Chancellor, but apparently that’s not good enough.

It seems to me – and to many readers of this blog, to judge from the comments I have received – that this was wrong, so my first e-petition calls for the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner to be replaced by an independent organisation that is capable of investigating offences by MPs in a more robust manner.

I have included a link, sending readers who want further information to this page. If you are one of those readers, the whole story is mapped out in the following articles:

https://mikesivier.wordpress.com/2012/12/08/storm-in-a-scrapyard-over-hughes-while-osborne-should-be-arrested/

https://mikesivier.wordpress.com/2012/12/09/police-urged-to-investigate-fraud-allegations-against-osborne/

https://mikesivier.wordpress.com/2012/12/10/osborne-update-met-passes-the-buck/

https://mikesivier.wordpress.com/2012/12/21/osborne-paddock-update-parliamentary-commissioner-for-standards/

https://mikesivier.wordpress.com/2012/12/30/osborne-update-information-sent-to-standards-commissioner/

https://mikesivier.wordpress.com/2013/01/15/osborne-update-are-they-kicking-his-paddock-into-the-long-grass/

https://mikesivier.wordpress.com/2013/01/23/osborne-update-standards-commissioner-ignores-the-facts/

Please sign the petition; let’s make sure MPs who misbehave face the full force of justice.