Nadine’s post demonstrates that the Telegraph acted fairly, communicating with MPs before the allegations before publication, outlining any allegation that might be made. The Telegraph introduced innuendo in their reporting, but facts are facts. Her response was packed with dissembly.

Out of touch and hopefully out of parliament.

Gerontocracy worked much better when the pace of social, technological and intellectual change was slower. It has very serious risks if you try and apply it today. Viz. the bloody awful lawmaking applied to technology and particularly internet technology; the lawmakers don’t, and can’t, understand the world as it is seen by those who grew up with a low cost of entry to the knowledge market.

Older people clearly make better administrators; experience, self-assuredness, people skills, practice, having made mistakes on the way up. Absolutely no question there. But legislators are not the same things as administrators, we just happen to have a system where the same people do both jobs.

The problem is this: vast swathes of our economy are fictional. [1] Much of the rest of our economy is mortgaged to bankers, including the houses most people live in and virtually all SMEs. If a bank failed and every debtor was given a clean slate, and their assets back as real assets: every home-owner gets their mortgage deeds and owns the house outright, every small business owner gets to wipe their debt out of their accounts in one sweep, then you’d have a situation where it was a good idea for people as a whole to let banks fail.

In practice, there’s no way in hell that any government is going to permit that quantity of redistribution (of money, and therefore of power and security for their people) to happen. Left, right, centre. Pope. It’s not going to happen because it diminishes the power of the plutocrats. So what you get instead is a situation where the lending stops altogether and the demands for repayment get passed from ‘owner’ to ‘owner’ (this is called ‘purchasing of toxic assets’) until someone funnels tax capital into the system to reset the clock for the bankers. That’s what’s been happening since the fall of the Mock.

The system is predicated on a game of financial musical chairs. We’ve got to the point now where business and tech move so fast that it is no longer possible to ‘work up’; to get sufficient capital to be competitive you either have to inherit or borrow. It does not take a genius to identify the ways in which that is a system designed and engineered to benefit those who started out with capital accumulations, and to explicitly hinder those who did not.

[1] This is why confidence (i.e. as in confidence trick or ‘con’) is so important to the market. When bankers and traders en masse start to doubt, the illusion wavers and suddenly everyone has less money than they thought they had. For the non-laymen in the audience: yes, I am both over-simplifying and being slightly facetious.

In your race to attack the Tories, you’ve failed to spot the stupidity of your logic. MPs are public servants, they are part of the public sector. It just demonstrates how organisations will behave without competition and/or market forces.

Now we’ve dealt with the very top of the public sector pyramid, its time to start examining the rest of mammoth State bureaucracy. I’d like to see each area subject to a proper process audit as well as a financial one. Remove the waste. We need drastic action to decrease the pension liability. Final salary pensions should be stopped for all new employees, as of now. The BBC should be broken up and privatised.

A prize for the first cliché response to say:

1) what about the poor nurses
2) Tory cuts to services
3) Its all Thatcher’s fault.

Instead of reducing the State and making it more efficient, Labour has just bloated it with the rewards that exist in the private sector, without the accountability and responsibility associated with market forces.

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23690795-details/Top+teachers+in+1m+bonus+probe+as+knighted+headmaster+is+suspended/article.do

Except if you are a private bank in which case you get bailed out, or you get to retire on a pension of £1.6 million a year. Or you are Ford motors in which case you also get bailed out to the tune of $120 billion. or General motors, or…………………………………..

Sorry, but the Right wing private sector goes bust argument is just bullshit. Socialism for the rich capitalism for the poor.

Remember you’re a Tory troll.

This post is sounds more like free market libertarianism!!!

But oh no – let’s have Georgina Gould or Tory Boy instead, who know nothing about anything.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/mps-expenses/5314613/Lembit-Opik-forced-to-pay-for-own-2500-plasma-TV-MPs-expenses.html

Trying to claim a plasma TV when the HoC was in recess and just days before he could potentially have lost his seat… my word.

More:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/mps-expenses/5315055/MPs-expenses-Liberal-Democrat-claims-for-308000-flat-used-by-daughter-as-bolt-hole.html

More:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/mps-expenses/5314418/How-Nick-Clegg-pushed-expenses-claims-to-the-limit-MPs-expenses.html

More:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/mps-expenses/5314093/Chris-Huhne-a-multi-millionaire-but-you-buy-his-chocolate-HobNobs-MPs-expenses.html

More:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/mps-expenses/5314759/Sir-Menzies-Campbell-hired-top-designer-for-10000-overhaul-of-flat-MPs-expenses.html

Here are some words for the public: hob-nobs, designer, bolt-hole, plasma TV, cheeky cheeky.

The point that was originally made was that inefficient companies go bust. Inefficient public sector bodies don’t. Internal markets do not change that. Elections don’t change that. Cuts to funding don’t change that.

I don’t understand people getting cross for saying the tories are doing better under this. The tories ARE doing better at this. Cameron apologised for what his MP’s did: Brown eventually apologised for “the system” while labour sent people about to tell the media that is was all within the rules and that was just dandy. Furthermore, Moran and Blears (and Hoon if he didn’t pay CGT) remain the worst cases. They are now both paying the money back, while at the same time claiming they didn’t do anything wrong and acting like its an act of nobility.

Lib dem expenses are now out, and only one really compares. Only a couple of especially bad cases to deal with- simply using the expenses is a story in a couple of cases where it wasn’t for the other parties. The telegraph includes with most of them that they are being paid back already, so that leaves labour well behind.

The Lib Dems won’t really be able to take more of a lead on this than the tories, especially since a number of senior people are implicated (if in minor ways). However, it leaves labour looking very, very bad. You can say everyone else abused the system as much as anyone else till you are blue in the face (though I would argue labour was a bit worse but stuff the lot of them yes)- but everyone else had the good sense to say sorry and promptly give the money back while labour told everyone it wasn’t their fault. The public will not forgive that quickly.

Well, that of course depends whether you agree with them having all these outside interests. I personally don’t agree. Why? Because they always want the ones that pay big easy money.

If they want to do outside jobs, and really, really (as they claim) want to have an idea of how the world works then there are plenty of things they could do that does not pay well. Work as a hospital porter a few days a week. Tories from rural areas could go pick sprouts to getter a better idea of how things work.

Funny, they do not do those sort things, so I take with a large pinch of salt all this stuff about “outside interests are a good thing” clap trap

Governments can close them, cut or increase funding, replace the staff within them, replace leaderships. In a democracy the government themselves can be replaced, thus providing some incentive for running public bodies properly (or at least better than rival parties). Furthermore public sector bodies can, in theory, be made to compete with each other via internal markets, voucher systems and other market simulations thus bringing competitive forces into play.

Here’s a few thoughts:

1) Say an MP’s only source of income can be their MP’s salary (as you suggest): how do we know they won’t be overly influenced by the party machine? What if, as seems often to be the case these days, their only viable career is politics?

2) What if an MP has friends, family etc who aren’t MPs? How do we know they won’t be influenced by their views?

3) What if they had links to a Trade Union?

4) What if they’d had any other sort of job before being an MP? Or, indeed, if they’d been unemployed, or a student? Any of these things could have influenced them.

5) What if they have shares?

6) Would they be allowed to, say, publish a novel whilst being an MP?

I don’t see how this is a “right-wing talking point”. In my view it’s sad to see parties on all sides filling up with apparatchiks. We could do with some more independant people couldn’t we?

Almost Soviet like? Like almost left-wing? Was this a Freudian slip Sally?

You suggest that since a handful of companies get bailed out, it cannot be true that companies go bust. Clearly, in general they can and do. Clearly, and without exception, public sector bodies cannot and do not.

No conflict of interest there…….no siree!

By the way, is that short for Conservative Jerk, Conservative jerk, Conservative…… by any chance?

And the answer to Sunny’s question – ignoring the ad hominem – is transparency.

Silly Sunny, of course he does not think before he writes. He just regurgitates right wing talking points from troll central. Fascinating how the trolls have been drilled in what to say. Almost Soviet like.

More second jobs and fewer bad laws please!

do you actually think before you type right-wing talking points??

If someone is working for a company, how do we know they won’t be influenced by that? Where’s the separation? Gordon Brown’s brother works for a nuclear firm. Rather coincidentally this govt has been talking up nuclear energy relentlessly. How in the world is lobby influence supposed to decrease if an MP has outside interests? You sound confused cjcjc.

Except if you are a private bank in which case you get bailed out, or you get to retire on a pension of £1.6 million a year. Or you are Ford motors in which case you also get bailed out to the tune of $120 billion. or General motors, or…………………………………..

Sorry, but the Right wing private sector goes bust argument is just bullshit. Socilaism for the rich capitalism for the poor.