They Blog For You

     Everyone agrees that the MPs’ expenses saga is the worst poloitical scandal of modern times.   But has it hit the right target?   The worst offenders have actually got off scot free.   First, flipping homes (i.e. changing the designation of one’ main home into a second home, and vice versa, in order to make lucrative home improvements at taxpayers’ expense and then maximize gain by selling free of capital gains tax) has perversely gone entirely unpunished.   Maybe the fact that several members of the Cabinet and shadow cabinet profited handsomely from this wheeze might have something to do with it?

     Second, those who bought large houses (and sometimes very large houses) as their second homes not only had the taxpayer pay well above average levels in mortgage interest, but then extraqcted equally disproportionately large capital gains on the sale of ahouse for which they had contributed nothing.   This obvious loophole was never blocked.

     Third, some of the excesses in the expenses extravaganze lovingly detailed by the Telegraph were huge in total, amounting to anything from £20,00 to £40,000 or more.   Yet it is the foot-soldiers who have been taken to court and held up to public odium over sums that are far less.  

     Elliot Morley, David Chaytor and Jim Devine, if they are guilty (believe it or not, they haven’t even been brought to trial), should certainly be held to account.   But why them?    By any standards they are certainly not the worst or the biggest offenders.   But one factor does unite them which might provide a clue.   They are all back-benchers and all on the Left.   Those on the loyalist Right who’ve committed far bigger sins have not been held up to public opprobrium, but allowed to slip away quietly.   I wonder why?