'Show us the money', Vera!

Anna Raccoon has a fascinating story about Vera Baird, one of Labour's minor ministers and troughers.

Here's an extract but do read the whole article as there are other interesting revelations:

'The house that Vera Baird put on the market for £315,000 last year after she had finished ‘winding up’ her constituents in sunny Redcar, has finally sold for £265,000.

This is the house that ‘we’ mostly paid for, so that Vera could continue the good works of the saintly Mo Mowlem on behalf of the benighted inhabitants of Redcar. We paid for the mortgage interest, the new boiler, the roof, the floors, the windows and furnished it for her.

Fortunately for the scrupulously honest Vera, she was kicked out of parliament the day before the change in MPs expenses rules which would have forced her to give the profit she made on this house back to the taxpayers.  Still, last year Vera did say that she would be acting ‘morally and properly’ when the property was sold.

I am sure she has done so, who could imagine anything less of her? She has, she says, ‘made a donation to charity’. We do not know which charity, nor how much the donation was for...'

The whole concept of MPs receiving money from the public purse to pay a mortgage on a property and then keeping the profits from the sale of that property stinks to high heaven. I would have thought that any MP who, perfectly legally, took advantage of this arrangement would feel honour bound (as a current or former 'honourable' or 'right honourable' member) to voluntarily repay such profits. Somehow I think that I shouldn't hold my breath!