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Wednesday 24 November 2010

Denis MacShane the listening MP

I have been following Denis MacShane on Twitter for a while now and I don't think he is in 'listening mode' as the last Labour government used to say. Wikipedia  reports in summary that :
'On 14 October 2010 it was announced that the Parliamentary Labour Party has withdrawn the whip from MacShane while he is under criminal investigation for his conduct.'
In more detail Wikipedia relates that:
'MacShane, during the expenses scandal of 2009, was accused in The Daily Mail of having been less than open/honest with his expense claims. The Daily Mail featured a story stating that MacShane had claimed £125,000 over a period of 7 years for his garage, which he used as a constituency office. One fellow Labour MP privately told the journalist that he was ‘very surprised’ at the scale of Mr MacShane’s claims given that he does not have to pay to rent an office. ‘I pay £6,000 a year in rent so if he doesn’t have to pay that, it sounds like a lot of money,’ said the MP.[21] In 2008, MacShane had supported Michael Martin as Speaker, calling for Conservative Douglas Carswell to be disciplined for calling for Martin to resign for failing to reform expenses.[22] In total, MacShane was ordered to repay £1,507.73 in wrongfully claimed expenses, with his appeals against the ruling being rejected.[23][24] In addition MacShane is alleged to have passed twelve invoices from the "European Policy Institute" for "research and translation" expenses to the parliamentary authorities, the EPI is an organisation controlled by his brother, Edmund Matyjaszek, and claimed for eight laptop computers in three years.[25]
It was reported on 14 October 2010 that the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards (on instruction from the Standards and Privileges Committee[26]) had referred a expenses related complaint about MacShane from the British National Party[2] to the Metropolitan Police. This refers to the claiming of a total of £125,000 in expenses for his supposed constituency office, which was revealed to be nothing more than a shabby single garage. The Labour Party confirmed MacShane had been suspended from the parliamentary party in the meantime.[27]
MacShane had previously written an article for The Guardian in which he played down the expenses scandal writing "there will come a moment when moats and manure, bath plugs and tampons will be seen as a wonderful moment of British fiddling, but more on a Dad's Army scale than the real corruption of politics".[28]'
I do not know whether Denis Macshane is guilty of any misdeeds over his expenses, however I do know that he seems oddly reluctant to acknowledge that he is under 'criminal investigation'.  I have asked him, via Twitter, over ten times why he has not disclosed to his Twitter followers that he has been suspended from the Parliamentary Labour Party and for what; he has not replied or informed his followers. If he considers that he is innocent then I would have thought he would be shouting his innocence at every opportunity, he's not normally shy of letting us know what he thinks.

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