• home • about • twitter • archives • subscribe • email •

'Order! Order! Order me a Jeroboam!'

They said MPs should “consider whether they actually receive” expenses even if legally entitled to them.

Earlier bank bosses said – amid reports the taxpayer-saved Jacqui Smith is to rake in £116,000 in expenses – the culture of rewarding failure was being ended.

One bank boss said any contractual or legal obligations on parliament to pay expenses at a time when the government and opposition were creating almighty balls-ups must be “challenged”.

‘Moral responsibility’

“We have made very clear that as voters for these MPs we won’t accept expenses for failures,” he told the BBC. “These do need to be curtailed.”

“I think there is a moral responsibility on some of these MPs, even if they are legally entitled to take expenses, at a time when an ever more authoritarian government stuffed to the rafters with war criminals is only still standing because of the weakness of the opposition and why I think there is an important issue of needing to restore trust in politics, senior politicians need to take responsibility and consider whether they should be claiming expenses.”