There was interesting reading the evening standard on Friday last, when they were going
through the revelations of Labour MPs expenses, including the Prime Ministers.
You are no doubt aware the PM has been paying his brother for cleaning his
flat/house or whatever. Now, it turns out they were sharing a cleaner and
his brother had arranged and was administering the contract.
The gem of information the Evening Standard revealed in the report is that
Gordon Brown's brother holds a senior position in power company EDF. In fact
according to the Telegraph's profile
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/mps-expenses/5293459/Who-is-Andrew-Brown-Profile-of-Gordon-Browns-brother-MPs-expenses.html
Andrew Brown is
"Andrew moved again in 2004 to become the head of media relations at EDF,
the French utility company. He is now the director of corporate
communications."
It is similar to many other policies of this Government - if you dig even a
little unders the surface, you see personal or party connections. Take for
example the current debacle on the so called lack of housing.
The Labour Government introduced "choice based letting" - which meant that
people can put their names down on multiple waiting lists. In one district, the introduction of "choice based letting"
immediately trippled the size of the waiting list, according to the council leader.
He told of one case where a family who owned their own home was found to be
on the list for a particular picturesque village, because it cost nothing to take a
punt with the new system and maybe get lucky.
Another example he tells of was a couple who had bought their council house, subsequently sold it and
lived in work provided accomodation. A couple of years later he went off
on the sick, apparently unable to work but still able to manicure the cricket pitch, and lost his dwelling. They of course went to
the top of every waiting list in the district.
So the government uses statistics in a misleading way to create the lie of a housing
shortage, while there is almost 1 million un-occupied properties in England
and Wales according to the FT and Evening standard. That is un-occupied,
not second or holiday homes.
No surprise then that two of the largest house building firms in the UK give
substantail donations to Labour party coffers.
The expenses debacle is the least of the corruptions our elected representatives
are guilty of.
