A little history.
One of the reasons why there has been radical political change in the UK in the last year is that the British people have finally started getting truly fed up with MPs on the ‘gravy train’ who seem to prosper whilst the rest of the country goes down the plughole. Until 2006, it was legitimate for MPs to pay expenses / rents / fees etc. to their partners or family members. A change in the rules then stated that you could no longer do that.
David Laws fell foul of this by virtue of the fact that between 2004 and 2009 Mr Laws claimed money back from the State – that is, us – to pay rent to his partner a total of around £40,000. I think it’s safe to say that had this been a story involving a couple of jobless folks claiming benefits there wouldn’t be an issue of paying the money back right now – it would be more likely to be an issue of someone spending a year at Her Majesty’s Pleasure.
At first glance, Laws appears to have either been incompetent with money (never good for someone tasked with the job of implementing Government cuts) or dishonest (equally a bit of a downer for someone in that job…) And then it gets complicated – apparently the actual reason for the…misunderstanding….involving the expenses was that laws was actually gay, and he was trying to keep this quiet for respect of his and his partner’s privacy.
To date I’ve been impressed with the Coalition – both their politics and the way they’ve been implementing them. But the Coalition has come to power with a whole host of ‘issues’ around it – there are folks in both parties who don’t want it to work, Labour are waiting for errors to exploit and people are expecting a lot from the new Government. What folks are not wanting is a return to parliamentary expenses problems – especially when it features someone who’re responsible for implementing serious, albeit necessary, cuts.
- Laws – this is why I am bloody angry with you. I find it VERY difficult to believe that you:
- Didn’t appreciate that your private life was going to be public at some point in the last year or so.
- Chanced your arm by carrying on claiming after the rule change.
- Were hard-up enough to need to claim the rent back at all.
- Didn’t realise that it would all come out if you became a frontbench Minister, especially in the Treasury.
It’s inevitable that whoever implements the Coalition’s Treasury policy needs to be pretty much whiter than white – or at least as white as any politician can be these days -for whatever reasons Laws didn’t meet this criterion.
Whether he thought he was working within the rules or not, he wasn’t. He’s now given an open-goal to opposition to the Coalition within the Tory Party, the Liberals and New Labour. Personal hubris has yet again laid waste a political career, but with potentially bad implications for the country.
And that’s why I’m so fucking angry with Laws – he’s managed to drag the bad issues of the last Parliament through in to this one, distracting people away from the really major issues of getting the UK back on it’s feet after a decade of mis-rule.