British Tory and 'new' Labour expenses scandal

This is a video about the politicians’ expenses scandal in Britain.

From British daily The Morning Star:

Defence minister in faulty tower farce

Friday 11 December 2009

by Adrian Roberts

Defence Minister Quentin Davies is fighting for his political life amid outrage over his £20,000 expenses bill for repairing a bell tower at his lavish home.

The Grantham and Stamford MP was picked out for criticism as the Commons published hundreds of thousands more receipts from claims.

His boss Gordon Brown also suffered embarrassment after revealing that he had paid back £500 used for painting a summer house because the spending was “questionable.”

The Prime Minister’s office declared his “full confidence” in Mr Davies over the receipt, which was submitted for roof and bell tower repairs in February.

Officials only paid £5,376 of the £20,700 total because the MP, who defected to Labour from the Tories in 2007, had gone over his annual allowance limit.

The invoice covered a £10,330 roofing repair “together with a quite separate job (to the bell tower) for which I emphatically was not seeking any reimbursement,” he insisted.

In a statement released by his office on Friday Mr Davies said the work was needed to prevent the bell tower collapsing and “smashing through the roof.”

“With hindsight, to avoid confusion, I should have asked for separate invoices,” he added.

Of the 587 MPs who made a claim, 60 received the maximum £24,060. They included Tory Sir Peter Viggers, whose bill for a floating duck house became a symbol of the scandal, ending his Commons career.

The smallest listed was £38.70 by Crawley Labour MP Laura Moffatt, who has revealed she often sleeps on a camp bed in her Commons office to save the taxpayer money.

Quentin Davies directs, of course, ‘defence’ of Britain not at the cliffs of Dover, but in Afghanistan thousands of miles away. The corruption in Afghanistan seems to have infected Mr Davies.

This video from the USA is called Rethink Afghanistan: Experiences in the Afghanistan War.

Labour MP Colin Burgon has warned that “die-hard new Labourites” had seized control of Prime Minister Gordon Brown despite the collapse of the recent coup plot: here.

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