Denis Kilcommons: Society of big grins at others’ expense

Feb 10 2009 By Denis Kilcommons

WHAT sort of a world do we live in when bankers who were at the helm when the financial world collapsed stand in line with big grins on their faces to be given a billion pounds in bonuses for their failure after the taxpayer has bailed them out?

Oh yes, I forgot, it’s the same sort of world where the questionable morality of the lobby system apparently has peers in the House of Lords queuing up to offer themselves for hire at up to £5,000 a day to "facilitate" changing the law.

And where MPs have been found not just dipping their bread in the gravy train of expenses but ladling it out into buckets to take home to the family. And where no less than Home Secretary Jacqui Smith is criticised for the money she claims for her "second home".

I have no argument with the "second home" allowances. An MP in Yorkshire needs a residence somewhere closer to the Houses of Parliament from which to commute.

Ms Smith’s constituency is in Redditch where her husband and their children live in the £300,000 family home. During the week she stays at her sister’s terraced house in London.

And this is where the criticism comes in. She has claimed that her sister’s house is her main residence and that the family house in Redditch is her "second home". This will strike anybody with half a brain as stretching the truth to fit the criteria for expenses.

Accordingly, Ms Smith, who earns £142,000 a year holding down one of the great offices of state, uses public money to run her family home in Redditch.

Matthew Elliott, the chief executive of the Taxpayers’ Alliance said: "Many people looking at this situation will consider it morally questionable that Jacqui Smith should have claimed this allowance."

But claimed it she has and banked £116,000 between 2001 and 2007 in the process.

She, of course, states she has done nothing wrong and has made her claims with the knowledge of parliament and within its rules. If so, the rules need changing.

Oddly enough, Conservatives usually eager to make the most of any Labour

gaffe or embarrassment have remained strangely reticent about Jacqui Smith.

Quite possibly because there are members among their own ranks who make similar claims through similar arrangements of residence.

What sort of world do we live in? I sometimes wonder when I view the malaise of a society where a privileged few seem to be out for all they can get.

Most of us struggle to survive against rising costs and the incompetence of Government while many of those at the centre of financial and political power remain isolated from reality in the stratosphere of their own egos, a place where the only experience they feel comes from sitting on overstuffed wallets.