“A Little Bird Told Me” is a weekly op-ed column that will appear every Monday on Breaking Tweets. It is part of an effort to add more opinions to BT, with the addition of an international roundtable discussion also in the plans.
Let me premise this by saying that I live in Chicago and went to college within easy driving distance of both Washington D.C. and New Jersey, so by now I’ve become pretty numb to political spending scandals.
If tomorrow, for instance, a governor or congressman was caught passed out in a five-star hotel with thousands of taxpayer’s dollars worth of blow and hookers I honestly wouldn’t bat an eye.
I get it; it’s part of the culture of politics and has been for as long as we’ve casting ballots and taking our cues from others. As the oft quoted John Dalberg-Acton famously put it, “Power tends to corrupt,” words that make complete sense to me.
That being said, if my elected officials are stealing from me, I would at very least like their gross abuse of power to make sense.
This brings us across the pond to a recent tweet made by The Daily Telegraph stating that according to a recent poll the MP’s expenses scandal is the “most shocking story of [the] last 50 years”—crazy if you consider how much has happened in the last half decade.
Now that’s a statement that boarders on the obscenely vague, so if I told you that in 2009, following an interesting parliamentary squabble, MPs’ expense reports would finally be open to the public you probably would expect to hear that there was quite a bit of wallet padding on the list.
Nothing too sinister, some campaign contributions perhaps, a payoff to other officials here and there, maybe even a shinny new car or three, but ultimately nothing to far out of the traditional realm of political jobbery that we’ve come to expect.
However, following some decoding and fact finding by The Daily Telegraph, the facts of the actually expenses came through, revealing some beyond bizarre expenditures.
For instance, Conservative MP David Heathcoat-Army was caught making a total of 19 claims over the course of four years, for a grand total £388.80. Where’d it go? Well the good Mr. Heathcoat-Army needed to keep-up with his garden and spent the nearly 400 quid on hundreds of bags of quality horse manure to fertilize his precious plants, not to mention other horticultural necessities like mouse poison and a chainsaw.
Or how about Heathcoat-Army’s fellow Conservative Douglas Hogg, who claimed reimbursements of £40 for piano tuning, £671.17 for a mole catcher and £2,115 for clearing his moat—that’s right a moat.
Hogg’s expenses even prompted the creation of a satirical twitter account, DouglasHoggMP. Some fun clips include, “Digging out my own bloody moat now.. you pestering buggers!” and “And now i’ve got mud in my bloody keyboard….I don’t see why I should have to put up with this shit,” both posted on June 18.
Maybe the most interesting case is the £1,645 expense claim of Sir Peter Viggers, who spent the £1,645 on a little man-made floating island modeled after an 18th century Swedish building that was built to house his ducks.
A duck island? Are you serious? That’s a level of corrupt spending totally beyond anything I’ve ever seen stateside.
For that matter, piano tuning, moat cleaning, mole catching and gardening? This is a type of ill advised political spending that I just don’t think American politicians are creative enough to even conceive.
So, let’s get back to the tweet by The Daily Telegraph, stating that the expense scandal was the “most shocking story of the last 50 years.”
I think the effect of such a scandal isn’t just a set back in public perception because of the shear number of MPs called into question—more than 50—or the fact that politicians were fudging the system—as we already went over that’s not new—it’s the exorbitant spending on seemingly inane services.
It gives the impression of a massive disconnect between the mindsets of the leaders and the people.
In other words, cleaning a moat might not be at the very top of most individuals’ list of things to spend new money on and could be looked at instead as highfalutin snobbery.
The results of this massive blow to the MPs’ images can already be seen in twitterland, not only with the fake twitter account of Douglas Hogg but with constant critiques of MPs’ decisions by twitters who make a point of always referencing the expenses scandal.
Twitters like Barada35 who tweeted on September 18, “UK MPs think government public-spending should be cut – maybe a 50% cut in their own ’salary’ might help!”
So take a brief pause in reverence for the UK’s Members of Parliament, masterminds of a scandalous feat more shocking than any other scandal of the last half decade…good luck at winning back your reputations, you’ll need it dearly.
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Editorial: Duck islands, moat cleanings and the UK Parliament’s big problem
Posted by Chasse Rehwinkel on 9/21/09 • Categorized as Commentary, Europe, Politics
Let me premise this by saying that I live in Chicago and went to college within easy driving distance of both Washington D.C. and New Jersey, so by now I’ve become pretty numb to political spending scandals.
If tomorrow, for instance, a governor or congressman was caught passed out in a five-star hotel with thousands of taxpayer’s dollars worth of blow and hookers I honestly wouldn’t bat an eye.
I get it; it’s part of the culture of politics and has been for as long as we’ve casting ballots and taking our cues from others. As the oft quoted John Dalberg-Acton famously put it, “Power tends to corrupt,” words that make complete sense to me.
That being said, if my elected officials are stealing from me, I would at very least like their gross abuse of power to make sense.
This brings us across the pond to a recent tweet made by The Daily Telegraph stating that according to a recent poll the MP’s expenses scandal is the “most shocking story of [the] last 50 years”—crazy if you consider how much has happened in the last half decade.
Don’t know what am I talking about?
Well, in the United Kingdom Member’s of Parliament, or MPs, are permitted to claim reimbursement for any purchase they make as long as it is, “wholly, exclusively and necessarily incurred for the performance of a Member’s parliamentary duties.”
Now that’s a statement that boarders on the obscenely vague, so if I told you that in 2009, following an interesting parliamentary squabble, MPs’ expense reports would finally be open to the public you probably would expect to hear that there was quite a bit of wallet padding on the list.
Nothing too sinister, some campaign contributions perhaps, a payoff to other officials here and there, maybe even a shinny new car or three, but ultimately nothing to far out of the traditional realm of political jobbery that we’ve come to expect.
However, following some decoding and fact finding by The Daily Telegraph, the facts of the actually expenses came through, revealing some beyond bizarre expenditures.
For instance, Conservative MP David Heathcoat-Army was caught making a total of 19 claims over the course of four years, for a grand total £388.80. Where’d it go? Well the good Mr. Heathcoat-Army needed to keep-up with his garden and spent the nearly 400 quid on hundreds of bags of quality horse manure to fertilize his precious plants, not to mention other horticultural necessities like mouse poison and a chainsaw.
Or how about Heathcoat-Army’s fellow Conservative Douglas Hogg, who claimed reimbursements of £40 for piano tuning, £671.17 for a mole catcher and £2,115 for clearing his moat—that’s right a moat.
Hogg’s expenses even prompted the creation of a satirical twitter account, DouglasHoggMP. Some fun clips include, “Digging out my own bloody moat now.. you pestering buggers!” and “And now i’ve got mud in my bloody keyboard….I don’t see why I should have to put up with this shit,” both posted on June 18.
Maybe the most interesting case is the £1,645 expense claim of Sir Peter Viggers, who spent the £1,645 on a little man-made floating island modeled after an 18th century Swedish building that was built to house his ducks.
A duck island? Are you serious? That’s a level of corrupt spending totally beyond anything I’ve ever seen stateside.
For that matter, piano tuning, moat cleaning, mole catching and gardening? This is a type of ill advised political spending that I just don’t think American politicians are creative enough to even conceive.
So, let’s get back to the tweet by The Daily Telegraph, stating that the expense scandal was the “most shocking story of the last 50 years.”
I think the effect of such a scandal isn’t just a set back in public perception because of the shear number of MPs called into question—more than 50—or the fact that politicians were fudging the system—as we already went over that’s not new—it’s the exorbitant spending on seemingly inane services.
It gives the impression of a massive disconnect between the mindsets of the leaders and the people.
In other words, cleaning a moat might not be at the very top of most individuals’ list of things to spend new money on and could be looked at instead as highfalutin snobbery.
The results of this massive blow to the MPs’ images can already be seen in twitterland, not only with the fake twitter account of Douglas Hogg but with constant critiques of MPs’ decisions by twitters who make a point of always referencing the expenses scandal.
Twitters like Barada35 who tweeted on September 18, “UK MPs think government public-spending should be cut – maybe a 50% cut in their own ’salary’ might help!”
So take a brief pause in reverence for the UK’s Members of Parliament, masterminds of a scandalous feat more shocking than any other scandal of the last half decade…good luck at winning back your reputations, you’ll need it dearly.
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