He also seems to skip over the gardening costs, new kitchens and excessive taxi use to simply argue that the “poor” MPs need the expenses otherwise they wouldn’t be able to survive on their £60k salary”. It’s almost the same as a rich person trying to argue that no-one should be taxed because otherwise the poor will have less disposable income.

Labour says they had a deal with the Conservatives – and they deny it.

A small, small victory but a victory non the less:

Earlier, Mr Brown blamed the Conservatives for what he said was a breakdown of a previous consensus over the way forward.

“We thought we had agreement on the FOI Act as part of this wider package,” he told MPs. “Recently that support that we believed we had from the main opposition party was withdrawn.

Makes ya think, no?

“In view of the lack of cross-party agreement, I can confirm that we will not proceed with the motion on FoI in the debate tomorrow. I tabled the motion relating to FoI because it would provide a legal underpinning for a package of changes which would achieve greater transparency in the publication of what MPs spend.”

Bat. Shit. Crazy. What greater transparency can there be than the current system of FOI? Anything else is LESS transparency, my god…

It does, of course, help to have a particulary egregious proposal to campaign against, kindly supplied by the government.