"To be honest, what I've seen offends my Presbyterian conscience. What I've seen is something that is appalling," he said.
Would you trust this man as Chancellor of the Exchequer? According to The Sunday Times, our Prime Minister would.
Big mistake ...
"I urge you to cast a positive vote for a better future by voting Green in the European elections."
The new system Mr Johnson favours is known as Alternative Vote Plus and was first suggested by the Independent Commission on Electoral Reform, led by Lord Jenkins, in 1998.Well it's not that simple. What follows is (grossly) over-simplified.
Under AV Plus, voters would have two ballot papers: one for their constituency representative and a second for their favoured political party.
Most seats in the Commons would be filled with locally elected MPs, but the remainder would be allocated by proportional representation according to the number of votes cast for each party.
Calling this an "elegant" option, Mr Johnson said: "This is a genuinely radical alternative that only Labour in government can facilitate."
Friends have said that he is one of the least likely figures in the Cabinet to get caught up in the recent expenses scandal."Alistair has always been so modest and safe," said Lord George Foulkes, a former ministerial colleague and ex-fellow Labour MP.
Hundreds of donations to political parties are to be kept secret under plans being slipped through the House of Lords.
Labour and the Conservatives have been accused of collusion over plans to raise the threshold above which parties must report donations from £5,000 to £7,500. The move is opposed by heavyweight figures such as Lord Neill of Bladen, former chairman of the Committee on Standards in Public Life, who said that there was no real justification for the increase.
The Electoral Commission has said: “An increase of this level has the potential to reduce public confidence in the transparency and integrity of political funding.”
The Prime Minister vowed yesterday to do whatever it took to clean up the system.
“I pledge to you that the country will be proud of the Labour candidates that stand at the next general election,” he said. “We will show that everything possible has been done to ensure that the public is satisfied about our political system and we will not shrink from any action that is necessary to achieve that.”
All MPs who step down, or are defeated, at an election are paid a "resettlement grant" designed to compensate for loss of salary. It ranges between six months' and one year's pay depending on age and length of service in the Commons.
An MP aged between 55 and 64 who has been in Parliament for 15 years will be paid a year's salary – £64,766 at current rates. The first £30,000 is tax-free. In addition, all MPs can claim a maximum of £40,799 for "winding-up costs" to pay off staff and end office leases. Politicians also benefit from a generous final salary pension scheme heavily subsidised by the taxpayer.
Who's that Labour MP who supports the Speaker. Tommy Sheridan, is it? Someone Sheridan. He wants sketch writers banned from Parliament for making "personal and racist attacks" on MPs. What rot. The fat Scots git.
Six in 10 Scots children do not know how to boil an egg.
THE truth has been revealed about lying. From fabricating chunks of their CV, trimming a few inches off their waistline, or rounding down the number of notches on their bedpost, it seems many people shun honesty in order to impress and get on in the world.
A poll of 2,000 people across Britain has uncovered a litany of untruths commonly told by people about their lifestyle and employment history.
What is happening to the motion?
It will be printed on the Commons order paper tomorrow. Carswell is tabling it under "future business", which means that it is set down theoretically for debate that day (ie tomorrow), but that it is not expected to be debated that day. In other words, it is for debate on a "named day". That is not the same as an "early day motion" (EDM), which is a motion down for debate on an "early day" (in practice never). Carswell had been planning to table his motion as an EDM. But EDMs have no practical effect whatsoever.
Will it be debated?
Not necessarily. It is not unusual for backbench MPs to table motions for debate on a "named day".
David Cameron can instruct his new scrutiny committee to remove the Tory spivs and scam merchants. The committee can be empowered to strike off the approved candidates list any Tory MP found guilty of making unethical claims. On the Labour side, the party's national executive committee will this week discuss a proposal to conduct a clean-out. Gordon Brown should support this at once and ensure that there is a tough mechanism for imposing deselection on the fiddlers and fraudsters on his benches.The problem is deciding which of the miscreants is an outright cad worthy of being cast into the outer darkness and which is an idiot who has made a simple mistake or two in compiling his or her expenses claim. We could all agree (perhaps) that Messrs Morley and Chaytor should be compelled to spend more time with their imaginary mortgages, while Ms Blears should pay a severe penalty for her capital gains tax avoidance (and for being extremely irritating). But do Mr Darling's flipping, Mr Straw's excessive claim for council tax, Mr Willetts' light bulbs, Mr Letwin's leaky pipe under his tennis court and Mr Salmond's gluttony constitute sins of an equal magnitude? Maybe they do, maybe they don't.
A few MPs have emerged as the good guys. Some from all three main parties do not claim a second homes allowance, even though they are entitled to do so. Labour MPs Martin Salter, Celia Barlow and Geoffrey Robinson do not claim the allowance. From the Conservatives, Adam Afriyie, Richard Benyon, Philip Dunne, Anne Milton and Rob Wilson turned down the money. On the Liberal Democrat benches, only one member from outside London, Cambridge MP David Howarth, has turned it down. Environment Secretary Hilary Benn claimed only £147.78 a year on food. Ed Miliband claimed only £6,300 to rent a terraced house.
Diane Abbott, the Labour MP, raised fears over public anger. "Saying sorry isn't enough. Giving money isn't enough. The public ... want to see dead MPs hanging from lamp-posts," she said.
But what does synecdoche mean? It's one of the great vexed issues of English grammar, up there with "what is a zeugma?", "are my litotes straight?" and "are semi-colons functionally worthless?". A synecdoche is a figure of speech in which part is responsible for the whole. Examples: in "20 head of cattle", the word for part of a cow (its head) has been substituted for the whole; "All hands on deck!" is not a call for mass mutilation. Instead, "hands" here stands for all the sailors on a ship.
David Willetts, the shadow universities secretary, claimed more than £100 for workmen to replace 25 light bulbs at his home.
MPs can claim a maximum of £400 per month for food, without having to produce receipts, but questions will be asked why the First Minister spent so much. Commons records show Mr Salmond claimed the maximum allowance for eight months in 2005/6, a total of £3,200.
However, included in Mr Salmond's claim was £800 for the months of August and September 2005, when the Commons was on its summer recess. Mr Salmond voted on July 12, 2005 but was not required to take part in another division until October 12.
The SNP's victory in the 2007 Holyrood election curtailed his appearances at Westminster, but the food claims did not stop.
In the 2007/08 financial year, which covers the period between the end of March 2007 and the start of April 2008, he voted on only six days in the Commons.
However, he still claimed £1,751.50 for food, or more than a third of the maximum allowed for the entire 12 months.
When he was Chancellor, he had a grace-and-favour apartment in Downing Street and a bolt-hole flat nearby, which he bought in a fire sale from the estate of the late crook Robert Maxwell - appropriately, you may think, given that Gordon appears to have modelled his pensions policy on Captain Bob's.
Until shortly before he became Prime Minister, Brown designated his bolt-hole as his 'second' home for the purposes of claiming allowances, which included paying his brother six grand for 'cleaning services' - as you do.
With all the accounting acumen for which he is legendary, he even spread the cost of a £9,000 new kitchen from Ikea over two financial years, which allowed him to stay just within the maximum second home allowance limit.
When he inherited No 10, he followed the example of any shrewd businessmen looking to keep as much of his own hard-earned as possible - he put the flat in his wife's name.
This left him free to switch his house in Scotland to his 'second' home. Consequently it, too, has now been extensively renovated at the expense of taxpayers, who also pick up the tab for his gardener and cleaner.
Another bonus is that if he sells the flat when he's kicked out of office next year, he won't be liable for capital gains tax - which he would have been had it remained his 'second' home.
Cute, eh? No loopholes, exemptions, avoidance or special allowances there, then. But given that he's lived pretty much cost-free in Downing Street for the past 12 years, we might ask why Gordon has charged anything on his expenses. After all, just because he can, it doesn't mean he's obliged to.
He's not short of a bawbee or two and is famously parsimonious. And as Prime Minister he's paid £194,250 year and rarely has to put his hand in his own pocket. He's got a six-figure, index-linked pension to look forward, too, and no doubt a few directorships in the pipeline.
So why does he stoop to charging taxpayers for tarting up his house in Scotland and paying his gardener and cleaner, let alone picking up the tab for his lightbulbs and Sky Sports subscription?
The star of the swine flu outbreak has surely been Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s deputy first minister and health secretary. There is something reassuring about that soft Scottish accent – I suppose it has to do with memories of Dr Finlay’s Casebook on television – and one feels that, thanks to her charm, good sense and calm but brisk manner, we shall all be safe from this new terror. Can we put her in charge south of the border as well?
Unfortunately, she belongs to the Scottish National Party but, since outsourcing is in fashion, I see no reason why our health arrangements couldn’t be delegated to the SNP. I would rather trust Sturgeon than Boots, Tesco, Richard Branson or any of the other figures proposed to run the exciting polyclinics planned by New Labour in place of GPs’ surgeries.
Downing Street and ministers gave short shrift to a proposal from the Compass think-tank to turn Royal Mail into a not-for-profit company, under a similar model to Network Rail, rather than selling off at least a third to an overseas competitor, arguing that there were better ways to modernise the organisation.
Pat McFadden, the Postal Affairs Minister, immediately turned down the idea, saying that Downing Street had dismissed the suggestion as “unworkable and not under consideration”. The minister said that the Royal Mail needed “transforming”, partly because of its huge pensions deficit, not a “political fix”.
