What Links Expenses and Torture: New Labour's Total Immorality.

It is good that details of MPs expenses have got out. I am sad if they were sold rather than leaked in the public interest, but they should have been available, unredacted, anyway.

Having said that, the Telegraph has made a massive pig's ear of its big scoop. It majors on Gordon Brown paying his cleaner through his brother. That sounds to me unwise of Brown, but really not a huge front page story. I am not convinced Gordon Brown fiddled anything.

On the other hand, Hazel Blears changing her official second home designation three times in a year, in order to get the taxpayer to pay for furnishing all her homes, is simply crooked. As are Hoon's multiple home arrangements. Jack Straw only paid back his "accidental" excessive claims for mortgage and council tax after the Freedom of Information Act ruling that expenses would be published. The Telegraph throws away the really crooked transactions in the odd phrase.

Straw's expenses are particularly interesting. He has lived in a series of London government mansions ever since 1997. The taxpayer pays for his Blackburn flat, but his real home is his £1million plus Cotswolds property. Just where Straw gets all his money is an interesting question. Some real investigative journalism into Straw's relationship with his bagman, Lord Taylor of Blackburn, and the peddling of influence for the defence industry, would be more interesting than anything the Telegraph reports today.
http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2007/08/more_lord_scumb.html
http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2007/08/theres_good_mon.html
http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2009/01/jack_straws_cor.html

But I am struck by the continued government mantra of "It was all within the rules", which Harriet Harman is being trotted round the television studios to spout this morning. Harriet has the job because she hasn't made dodgy claims. She is old money. Her family don't even notice the odd £100,000.

But this idea that it is OK to stretch the rules to the limit - with no worry whether it is right or wrong - is not a minor point. It is done for advantage, so it is immoral, not amoral.

It is an issue which has been heavily on my mind since I gave evidence on ministerial complicity in torture to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights last week. Nobody except me and possibly Cranley Onslow showed any horror at torture. There was instead a discussion on the finest details of whether there was any possible way this may be declared legal, "within the rules".
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LF9spgagSHI

Even on an issue like torture, right and wrong seems to have disappeared completely from our national political discourse. Is it any wonder they are fiddling their expenses?

Craig Murray

A Parliament Of Poodles And Pagers

Part Two


Part Three

George Galloway "The West has DOUBLE STANDARDS when it comes to Israel"

Speaker of the House of Commons Blocks Inquiry Into Himself

Up to 20 MPs are understood to have written to Mr Martin requesting that he authorise an investigation by The Standards and Privileges Committee into the controversial police search of Mr Green's Commons office last month.
But Mr Martin refused to sign off the inquiry, which means that it cannot go ahead.

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Police State Britain: Tory MP Damian Green's Crime Was To Reveal Truths Labour Didn't Want You To Know

MPs demanded protection from a 'police state' last night after the heavy-handed arrest of a Tory frontbencher shocked Westminster.

Extraordinary details of four simultaneous raids on immigration spokesman Damian Green's homes and offices raised urgent questions about the independence of Parliament.

The Oxford-educated father of two girls, who denies any wrongdoing, was fingerprinted and required to give a DNA sample before being released on bail after nine hours.

The tactics of Scotland Yard investigating a series of leaks that had no bearing on national security and served only to embarrass Labour were compared to those used in Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe

Read more...

Well now! perhaps they will at last take notice of what is happening every day to normal people in Britain now one of there own has been on the end of it. They should read the laws before passing them!