Labour Feeding From The Trough

[Gromit]

// The Sunday Telegraph reports Patrick Mercer convinced Keith Vaz, Valerie Vaz, Julien Brazier, Mark Field and Fabian Hamilton to join his Fiji APPG. And the Sunday Times has stung Lords Laird, Cunningham & MacKenzie.

“Lord Cunningham, Lord Mackenzie of Framwellgate and Lord Laird offered to become paid advocates for a firm pushing for new laws to benefit its business. They also said they could set up an all party parliamentary group as a lobbying vehicle.” //

The name of Vaz cropping up again in corruption allegations is no surprise.

Looking like a bad week for policians of all parties.

We do seem to elect a Great deal of rogues to Parliament. do we get the politicians we deserve?

[Canary42]

Nobody voted for a ConDem Coalition !

[Svejk]

How on earth does Vaz keep getting re-elected ?

[Canary42]

Rightly or wrongly, the general public frequently don't share Press outrage.

[janbee]

Nobody , NOBODY, voted for this CONalition government. We didn't vote for them , we didn't want them and yet, here we are, we got 'em! As for Vaz... won't say what I think of him. It's a family site after all. Suffice to say that he's a politician and 99% are at the trough. A very corrupt and greedy group of people.

[Sqad]

Gromit...LOL...I know what you mean, but is this situation just in Politics?.....I don't think so.

It i was elected to Parliament on £70,000 a year to take all this cr@p from the electorate with a chance of being ousted at the next election........I would take the position of MP for all it was worth.........every expense. every scam and every avenue of "fiddle" would be exploited........legally if possible.

[Sqad]

P.S as for Keith Vaz..........he has my total admiration.

Look at it this way...you are well educated, smartly dressed, well spoken and want to go into politics.....but you are "black." So the Conservative party is out, Liberals, one has to have or pretend to have the concerns of the electorate constantly in your mind OR there is the Labour Party.

Not a difficult decision.....particularly New Labour.

Although his Politics deep in his heart and soul are to the left of centre he has cut himself a nice piece of chocolate cake and become a well known and respected politician squeezing every last bit of blood from his position.

As I would have done in his position.

[Svejk]

Even if you 'admire' Vaz (T.I.C. I presume) it doesn't explain why anyone votes for him. Or does it.

[tonyav]

Constituency, Sveik !

[frugalfred]

One would have hoped that Cunningham would have learned from the experiences of his father - Alderman Andrew Cunningham, jailed for five years (reduced to three on appeal) for corruption in the Poulson affair.

[boxtops]

The clip I heard on the radio this morning included one of 'em saying (effectively) it would have to be kept quiet as it was against the rules.

[jno]

Mercer's on tape, but it's not necessarily the case that the others in the Fiji sting knew what was up.

No sympathy for lords, though. Not elected, of course, but can they be depeerised?

[modeller]

//Nobody voted for a ConDem Coalition !//

But in a way we did ! Most of us ,80%, vote like sheep. We vote like our parents or our peers say how they will vote. The number of times I've heard the words " Oh we're all Labour here !" or "Well we usually vote Conservative ". It's only about 10% who change their votes and the government. Last time that 10% decided none of the parties knew what to do and deprived any of them of getting a working majority. What's more it will happen again in 2015 . Which means we will get another coalition or a very weak government.

[FredPuli43]

Reminds me of a property developer who told me that he much preferred Labour Councils and Labour governments "because they are much cheaper to buy" ! Which , I suppose, is not to exonerate Conservative ones, it's just another way of stating that the people he needed all had their price.

[modeller]

//No sympathy for lords, though. Not elected, of course, but can they be depeerised? // Yes they could but they wont be , because most of our MPs don't want to change the status quo and rely on the Lords to keep it that way.

[ToraToraTora]

Well you get what you pay for. There is an argument that if we paid a decent salary we'd get better MPs. I realise it's not a popular view but less MPs of higher quality is the way forward. Get shot of the devolved parliaments too, apply the same principle locally, and we'd be getting somewhere.

[Sqad]

modeller is quite correct if the electorate hadn't strayed from the well worn path of mainly 2 Party politics, we wouldn't have been in this "coalition mess".....but no, the good old British Public had to have their protest votes to the Green Party et Al and yes......it will happen next time.

[mikey4444]

Modeller is right ! Our voting system here in Britain may leave no choice but to have a coalition, like we had in 2010. But it needn't have been Tory/Lib. It could have been Labour/Lib, or even Tory/Labour...why not ? Its what we had during WW2.

It would appear that in 2015, there is a possibility that no one party will have an overall majority of seats in Westminster, so we must prepare ourselves for another coalition of some sort. This was never a problem during most of the years since 1945, as two parties totally dominated the political scene. But now that the minor parties are getting some support, albeit very small, the possibility of coalitions will continue. We are a free country and people must vote how they think fit but people who are tempted to vote for the minor parties, especially the more loony-tune ones, should think just what their vote will actually mean. To use the Green Party, purely as an example...what possible difference will it make if they double their number of MPs in 2015, from 1 to 2 ?

Are coalitions such a bad thing ? There are a lot of countries in the West that seem to have them permanently, and they all seem to manage somehow.

[Svejk]

It seems people are so inured to corruption there's little interest in this thread. Bit sad,imo.

[Svejk]

Ask sqad about drug fuelled/funded medical conferences. That might spark some interest.

[Gromit]

I should have pointed out that Julien Brazier and Mark Field are Conservatives.