Blears survives attempted deselection

Some of you may be wondering if Acid Rabbi has something against Hazel Blears, what with the way we keep going on about her. Well, you'd be wrong. We're secretly in love with her. It's the jackets made out of 1970s-style curtains that does it for us.

Ms. Blears, who controversially resigned from her position as Communities Secretary recently, has long been thought of as rather an ineffective politician - a poll amongst Labour MPs revealed that a mere 56% of them considered the Salford representative to be doing a good job. Others thought she was the worst-performing member of the Cabinet, and once her somewhat dubious expenses claims (three homes in a year, expensive hotels) and second home designations came to light she found herself in trouble - and was soon drowning in it.

Ms. Blears is a happy little pixie following last night's no confidence motion vote, which was defeated 33 to 12, allowing her to continue as Salford's MP.

By "flipping" homes, Ms. Blears was able to sell property and then claim expenses to cover the cost of Capital Gains Tax, which anybody selling a second home is liable to pay. She made a profit of around £80,000 on the sales but has paid back £13,000 since the Daily Telegraph began publishing details from its list of all expenses submissions. As if that wasn't enough, the manner of her departure from Government also had repercussions as she found herself widely attacked for choosing to go when she did, just prior to the European and UK elections in which Labour received a lower share of the vote than they have done at any point in their history. She had also attacked Prime Minister Gordon Brown's YouTube video, claiming that it was no substitute for knocking on doors and talking to the electorate, which caused a bit of a playground spat between the PM and herself.

It all became too much, and so she resigned - later claiming that it is decision she will regret for the rest of her life, making tearful apologies and blaming her rashness on "four weeks of intense media pressure." However, she subsequently faced accusations from all quarters that she had undermined the Government's chances of doing well in the election and had destabilised Parliamentt, which led to three wards of her constituency deciding to put forward a no confidence motion which - if successful - would have spelled the end of her career as a politician.

Last night, that motion was defeated with a vote of 33 to 12 against, with one abstain. After the vote, Ms. Blears said: "Now I've got a chance to rebuild and reinvigorate my politics a little bit about reconnecting with the people." However, local organiser Stephen Kingston has vowed that the MP is not yet out of the woods, promising that the campaign to deselect her will continue and saying that last night's defeat "shows the Labour party in Salford is completely and absolutely out of touch with their own voters."

Around 100 protestors chanted "Hazel out" outside the building where the vote took place. While Ms. Blears states that her success is a clear message "from party members that events of a few weeks do not wipe out 30 years of a record in local and national politics, fighting and being a champion for some of the poorest people in our country," she'll need to bear in mind that those protestors speak for a far larger percentage of Salford's population.

Politicians have gradually been losing what little real feeling and contact they ever had for the electorate - we can see this from their constant failure to, in our opinion, "get things right" and how many of them seemed as surprised as rabbits caught in the headlights as the expenses details rapidly blew up into the biggest scandal to hit the British Parliament in generations - this applies as equally to those involved in local politics as it does amongst MPs, and those 32 councillors that voted against Ms. Blears' deselection are no true indication of what Salford's populace is thinking.

Expenses published

As promised, details of all MPs' expenses stretching back over the last four years have been published online. You can see them here - it'll take a while if you want to read them all because there's rather a lot - assuming the site hasn't crashed as a result of the massive amount of hits it's likely to receive today.

Certain details, such as private addresses and bank details, have of course been edited out. Unfortunately this effectively makes it impossible to find out if homes have been "flipped" - ie; the designated second home has been changed, a method used by many MPs to avoid paying Capital Gains Tax or costs incurred for maintenance of a property, several of whom have been exposed by the Daily Telegraph which has obtained full and unedited information and which has been using it to increase sales for several weeks.

Hilary Benn, MP for Leeds Central: "when something goes wrong in life the most important thing is to hold your hands up and say it shouldn't have happened and then you have got to put it right." Image from Wikipedia, used in accordance with Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike2.0 license.

If the Government's published version were all we had to go on, we'd have been left unaware of cases such as that of Hazel Blears who claimed for three separate addresses in the space of a single year (since the addresses are edited) or the fact that Margaret Moran's second home was a hundred miles away from her Luton constituency, in Southampton which - purely as a coincidence of course - happens to be where her partner lives. Unsuccesful claims, which are in many cases the most revealing in that they prove MPs were more than happy to rip us all off and have us finance their luxury lifestyles - also do not appear, which woud have left us in the dark over Peter Viggers' infamous duck house. Acid Rabbi does not mind providing pleasant living quarters for ducks since they're nice creatures, but does object to subsidising the lifestyles of MPs who are well-paid and really quite objectionable.

An example of one of the not-very-revealing documents published online today.

"The argument for keeping bank details, phone numbers and addresses confidential I think is a fair one," says Cabinet Minister Hilary Benn (considered one of the expenses saints by the Telegraph - his total claims since 2004 add up to £42,113 which is amongst the lowest of all MPs. Don't forget he receives a ministerial salary of £141,866 though, which most people would consider sufficient to cover the costs of normal life). That's all very well - MPs deserve to be protected by data laws just as the rest of us do - but if there's any way that they can escape public scrutiny the publication is as good as useless.

Mr. Benn - the son of veteran socialist politician Tony Benn, who famously gave up a hereditary title to allow himself to stand as an elected MP - adds that the allegations have been "very, very damaging for confidence in Parliament." Voter confidence is at an all time low, with many people believing that their long-held suspicions that most - if not all - politicians are in it for nothing more than their own interests have been confirmed and absolutely nothing can be done to change that. We know what they have done, and we will not forget. However, if they come clean by telling us everything, own up to their actions and apologise - and they'll need to prove they really mean it by ending self-regulation and handing over control of the entire expenses system to an independent body that must be fully transparent to public inspection - we might, in time, forgive them.

Blears to face no confidence vote

It looks as though we might be about to see the end of Hazel Blears' political career as she prepares to face a motion of no confidence in her Salford constituency after a poll carried out by Channel 4 revealed that two thirds of Labour members believe Prime Minister Gordon Brown should have sacked her prior to her controversial resignation from the Cabinet just before last week's elections, which has been seen as damaging to the party which then went on to achieve the lowest results in its history.

Ms. Blears has gone on record stating that "in hindsight that judgement was wrong. I should have waited until after the election. The effect on the party is something I will live with for ever." She also commented on the "rocking the boat" brooch she wore as she travelled back to Salford, putting it down to a lapse of reason that came after "four weeks of intense media pressure, the like of which I have never known." She had been in trouble with the PM after criticising his YouTube appearance in the Observer newspaper and, earlier this year, a poll of Labour's MPs showed that she was widely considered to be the worst performing Cabinet minister - just 56% said they thought she was doing a good job.

You could almost feel sorry for the poor little ginger munchkin, couldn't you? Almost. Perhaps a little bit more if it wasn't for the fact that - as we've already said today - she hadn't flipped her designated second home so that she could sell a property and make £45,000 profit, claiming expenses on three separate premises in the course of a single year; consistently claimed the maximum she was permitted or very near to it in expenses; spent the full £400 she's entitled to for food each month despite her rather reasonable Minister's salary and stayed in London's "most fashionable hotels" at our expense.

Good riddance.

Blears: My resignation "is something I will regret forever"

Ex-Communities Secretary Hazel Blears, who resigned last week just prior to the elections, has spoken ruefully of her decision to go.

"In the end, that judgement was wrong," she says, adding that she was under the impression that leaving so soon after the departure of two other ministers - including her friend (supposedly) Jacqui Smith - would avoid causing more trouble than necessary.

Ms. Blears was seen to be wearing a brooch bearing the words "rocking the boat" as she travelled back to her constituency shortly after handing in her resignation - an act she also regrets, saying that it came after several weeks of intense media attention concerning her expenses claims, which included claims for three separate properties in a single year and bills from what the BBC have called some of the capital's "most fashionable hotels," had clouded her judgement. She continues to claim that allegations related to her expenses "genuinely are not true."

Hazel Blears throws up her hands in regret at her decision to resign. Nobody else does, though.

She originally designated a property in her Salford constituency as her official home, allowing her to make claims to cover costs on it including the £300 per month mortgage, but later "flipped," so that a flat in Kennington, South London, became her second home - this allowed her to claim for the £700 monthly mortgage on that home. Then, in 2004, she sold it for £200,000 to an ex-Labour MP, making £45,000 profit and stayed at various hotels - including one at £211 a night - during September and October 2004, before purchasing a new London home for £300,000 with a £1000 per week mortgage. Ms. Blears is also known to have claimed for an £850 television, a £651 mattress, £4874 for furniture, £913 for another television, an £899 bed, £668 for bedlinen and curtains and assorted other items; in addition to regularly claiming the maximum monthly allowable figure for food, £400.

During 2004-5, she spent just £94 less than the ceiling limit of £20,902. She must have realised she was missing out at that point, because in the last two years she has claimed to the penny the maximum amount she could possibly get.

Ms. Blears may regret her resignation. But the tax-payers - us - most certainly don't.

Blears clears her desk

Say what you want about the expenses row - we've found it just about the most entertaining thing to have happened in politics since the Westland Affair back in 1986 permanently screwed up Heseltine's chances of ever becoming Prime Minister - but you have to admit it's had its good sides.

The latest of these has been Hazel Blears' (pictured right, top) decision to resign. Blears says she plans to quit because she wants to "return to the grassroots (where I began), to political activism, to the cut and thrust of political debate." Not because of that £13,000 you rather deviously didn't pay in capitals gains tax on the second home you sold until you were forced to because the story became public, then?

All in all, this has been a pretty good week - we've also got rid of Home Secretary Jacqui Smith (pictured below left)- and it's still only Wednesday! Smith, of course, was somewhat embarrassed when payment for two porn films her husband (who is also employed as her assistant) watched on pay-per-view showed up on her expenses, an incident that quite possibly sparked off the Daily Telegraph's interest in the phenomenon and led to their getting hold of the report they've subsequently used to ensure what is probably the first increase in sales they've had in many moons (or at least since most people realised the paper is little more than a journal for semi-fascist Tory old farts, at any rate). In March this year, a poll of Labour Party members - which was then leaked - revealed that just 56% thought she was doing a good job and many considered her to be the worst-performing Cabinet minister. Since then, it has been revealed that Smith claimed a total of over £157,000. A week is a long time in politics, or so the old saying goes, so who knows how many more high-profile fraudsters...er, we mean politicians (though it increasingly looks as though we were all correct in assuming the two words mean the same thing) will do the honourable thing by the end of the week?

Interestingly, nobody is quite sure who leaked the story of the porn films. However, it seems that only two people knew about it. One of them was Gordon Brown, who for all his faults is a relatively professional man and who would be unlikely to want to rock his government with scandal so soon after achieving prime ministership. The other was...Hazel Blears - the Telegraph reported that "Sources close to Downing Street suggested that Miss Smith’s decision only became public after it was leaked by friends of Miss Blears." Blears and Smith are known to have been friends and, well...if one of my friends had found themselves in a sticky and potentially very embarrassing situation, I'd try to protect them - but then, I'm not a politician. Blears has also been a very vocal critic of both Brown - most notably attacking his regrettable (for anyone who has seen it) YouTube appearance - and recent government performance. It was after she made her comments on the YouTube video that Brown attacked her expenses in a classic example of a playground feud, adding fuel to the fire that has grown from the increasing friction between Blears and No.10 which has caused many to speculate that the Prime Minister would either demote or sack her come the next ministerial reshuffle. Another of the Telegraph's sources claimed that the story would likely have been leaked by somebody who wished to "destabilise Gordon Brown", which is interesting as back-benchers have been urging her to challenge Brown and put herself forward as a potential Labour leader.

So, did she stab her supposed friend in the back? Just goes to show - she's not to be trusted. Which is, of course, precisely what we have learned from the whole expenses row - politicians are incapable of regulating their own activities and cannot be trusted. An independent body, with the powers to keep checks on them, is desperately needed if we are to ever have faith in them from now on.