Average expenses by political party

A quick update showing the average expenses claim in 2007–8 by political party.  Of the big three, the Lib. Dems. out-expensed Labour by £4,448 per MP (3.1%), who in turn out-expensed the Conservatives by £6,700 per MP (4.8%).

Overall average: £144,176

May 14, 2009 | Filed Under Government, Numbers and stuff | 3 Comments 

High-level analysis of MP expenses

The Guardian made the data available for the expense totals, broken down by type, of each of the 645 MPs for the last year.  Below is my summary.

Expenses for the year totalled £92,993,748, an average of £144,176.35 per MP.  Eric Joyce, MP for Falkirk, topped the list with a claim of £187,334.  Philip Hollobone, MP for Kettering, claimed the least: £47,737.

Sixty percent of the total claimed was for staffing costs, 12% for office running costs, 12% for the cost of staying away from the main home.  Then we have comms. allowance (5%), rail travel (2%), stationery-associated postage costs (2%) and mileage (2%) followed by a bunch of other expenses each making up lesser percentages.

Andrew Robathan, MP for Blaby in Leicestershire had the highest allowance for living away from the main home, at £23,083.  Margaret Beckett topped the list for staffing costs, at £107,458 compared to an average of £85,872.  59 MPs (9%) did not make any claims for living away from home.

Sarah Kennedy, wife of Charles, was the spouse that benefited most from the spouse’s travel allowance, accounting for £6,046 across 30 journeys.  Donald Kennedy, their four-year-old son, seems to have been the biggest beneficiary of the family travel allowance: £5,250, also over 30 journeys.

Owen Paterson, Shadow Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, was the biggest petrol-head, claiming £1,764 in mileage.  Angus MacNeil was the biggest flyer, claiming £28,137 on air fares.  In all, the taxpayer picked up the bill for 6,181 journeys made by family members of MPs, a bill of £461,067.

May 13, 2009 | Filed Under Government, Numbers and stuff | 3 Comments 

Cameron grounds the kids

Just when you thought it impossible for Gordon Brown to lose any more ground against the Conservatives (or the Conservatories, as I’d like them to be called hereafter), he’s lost a huge amount of ground in the last few hours.

Earlier today, David Cameron acted like the parent of a naughty set of kids.  He strongly berated members of his party, holding his own hands up about his wisteria-trimming ways, and put in place firm sanctions for their behaviour.  He confronted the issue of what is right vs. what is legally allowed, siding with the public opinion that legality doesn’t matter, and what is right and just is more important.  And he ordered that his “kids” owned up to the errors of their ways and paid money back to the fees office for anything that fell outside the spirit or letter of the law, or else face eviction from the party.

Compare this to Hazel Blears’ phraseology when declaring that she would repay the capital gains tax that she previously avoided, a position that she vehemently defended not 24 hours earlier.

It’s not enough to simply abide by the rules and the law…

Hardly the most contrite position.

When asked whether any other Cabinet ministers would need to act in a similar manner, Alistair Darling, for example, Gordon Brown suggested that “Hazel Blears is in a different position to other members of the Cabinet”, reluctant to indict his ministers, Blears included.  In the same interview with Nick Robinson, Brown confirmed that “people do make mistakes”.

Cameron’s hard line is impressive, and he is likely to come out of this not smelling of roses, but certainly with the moral high-ground over Brown.  He said an independent review of every claim made would help MPs show they are “worthy of public trust”.

Brown’s continuing reference to “mistakes” and his very suggestion that MPs might be worthy of trust are not sentiments the public wants to hear at the moment.  Nor do they want to hear Blears refer back to her legal cleanliness when offering to write her cheque to HMRC.

They want to hear that the kids have been grounded and their pocket money stopped.  That’s where Cameron has captured the public’s imagination and further increased his lead over Brown in the election race.

May 12, 2009 | Filed Under Government | Leave a Comment 

Brown, Blears, New Labour and the Olympic Village

The revelations that have graced BBC News’ number one spot for the last several days, and will no doubt grace it for a good few days more, are despicable.

For those abroad, or those whose heads have been buried down a rabbit-hole for the last few weeks, the story is about ministers’ abuse of the expense system, particularly the rules surrounding the second homes that most ministers are entitled to given their need to divide their time between Westminster and their respective constituencies.

Or in many instances it’s not about their abuse; it’s about them following the expenses policy to the letter.  (For some, they’ve clearly gone outside the policy, but for the moment let’s concentrate on those that have read the expenses policy and followed it.)

While Gordon Brown sympathises with the rising numbers of unemployed, he spends £6,577 of tax-payers’ money on cleaning services in the space of 26 months.  While you could argue this to be modest at £58.22 per week, this is for what should surely be a small flat in London.  That’s some thorough cleaning.  More than we pay for our three-storey main residence.  (We don’t get our second property professionally cleaned mainly due to its non-existence.)

If the above example is not sufficiently clear-cut, then surely Hazel Blears’ antics are enough to leave you with a sick taste in your mouth.  To the Commons Fees Office that polices the expenses, she declared her London property as her second home, allowing her an £850 per month contribution to the mortgage.  Yet when selling the property, she told HMRC on the other side of Parliament Square that it was her main residence, saving her an estimated £18,000 in capital gains tax.  FTW.

The latest revelations surround the Conservatives, and the stories continue to abound detailing the antics that the public is now both tired of and livid at.  But the stereotypically self-centred policies of the Tories suggest that maybe we expect them to find and exploit the loopholes to maximise their own gain.  For Labour, they were elected in 1997 on a promise to move away from such values, to bring about greater equality and opportunity for all, and to generally do the right thing.  Given these “New Labour” aspirations, it’s hard not to shout obscenities at Blears on the TV when she tells us that she operated within the rules.

I have complied with the rules of the House, the rules of the Inland Revenue and that’s the situation as it is

Time will tell whether she has—The Guardian today revealed that HMRC is investigating possible cases of tax evasion by MPs such as Blears.  (Slightly worrying, btw, that a Cabinet minister has not yet been informed of 2004′s  machinery of government changes—yesterday was the fifth anniversary of HMRC being named for the first time in public, by Sir David Varney.)  But whether or not she followed the rules, surely Labour’s ethos and reason for being means that she shouldn’t ever try to defend her actions in this way.  Surely to God.  I’m not sure whether her diminutive 4’10″ stature, a fact that has been stripped from her Wikipedia entry after I added it a couple of years ago, intensifies my anger at this particular incident.  If it does, I can only apologise.

The expenses system certainly needs shaking up.  But so too do the values of the people representing the Labour party.

In an attempt to find a solution to this debacle, instead of having an expenses system for second homes, why not just commandeer an ex-council block and house all the ministers there.  Or better still, why not give them a bit of the Olympic Village come autumn 2012?  Or would that be considered too far from Westminster, necessitating a second property within a spit of SW1?

May 10, 2009 | Filed Under Government | Leave a Comment 

Where fonts end and formats begin

I was wondering the other day how the separation was defined between fonts and formats.

In the olden days of newspaper and book printing everything was a piece of lead.  An italicised e required a different piece of lead than did a regular e—both appearing backwards of course, to allow them to be readable when printed.  And leading itself, the spacing between lines of text, was introduced by inserting varying amounts and widths of lead horizontally between the rows of text.  My interest in typefaces may be related to my grandfather’s career as a typesetter—doubtful though, as sadly he died on the day of my fourth birthday.

And when word processing was brought to the masses by way of the typewriter (I still love the fact that you type that word using only the top row of the QWERTY keyboard; and I’m still baffled by the fact that I always type QWERTY by hunting out the letters one-by-one rather than automatically sweeping acros the top row), variable fonts, italics and bold were out, and underlining was done sub-optimally by retracing your steps and overtyping some underscores.  Leading was created through the carriage return, with variation of the standard created through adjusting the roller on which the paper sat.

And now in the world of the computer-based word processing, there is a clear separation between fonts and formatting.  Well, mostly clear.  Bold is part of formatting, apart from instances in which it’s been wrapped up in the font, in the likes of Arial Black.  Underlining and strikethrough are a format that can be applied to characters irrespective of their fonts.

Maybe the modern-day divide is true to the spirit of its lead predecessor, with typefaces coming in boxes and formatting (e.g. leading) being typeface-independent.  But the instances where formats play with the fonts themselves (e.g. italics, strikethrough) make it a little more complex.

Still, I think the divide is perfectly-positioned.  Except for Arial Black, of course.

May 10, 2009 | Filed Under General | Leave a Comment 

Musical artists I know little about

In an effort to extend the breadth of the publicised subject matters I know little about, I thought I’d continue with the theme set out in this post of a month ago, in which I asked for index cards on each of religion, Northern Ireland and Israel/Palestine to bring me up to speed.  (Apart from a link kindly provided on Israel/Palestine, nothing has been forthcoming.)

This post lists a few musical artists that are sufficiently mainstream and well-respected to warrant people having a good, high-level background on them, but for which I have no such background, for whatever reason.  (Too busy listening to shit pop in the 80s, I expect.)

Anyway, in no specific order, below is my starter list for ten.

There are lots more.  But I can’t think of them right now, so I’ll append as I remember them.

Apologies if this ill-education offends anyone.

May 9, 2009 | Filed Under Life, Music | 2 Comments 

My marathon running order

I’m not sure I’m cut out to do a marathon.  Which is a bit of a bitch given that I’ve entered into the ballot for LDN 2010.

I decided to get off my lazy arse last Sunday lunchtime while my daughter slept (which I just mis-typed spelt), and ran 6.32km in 32m 55s.  It was my first outing in twelve months, and I ran too far, too fast.

I spent the afternoon hacking and went downhill from there.  A visit to the doctor on Thursday morning equipped me with steroids and antibiotics, and fingers crossed they’re doing the trick, along with the ibuprofen, Lemsip and Strepsils.  Today is the first day I’ve felt good since.  Not great, but good.  But don’t speak to me.  My face is still hiding a wealth of ghastly goo that makes me sound like Monica in The One With Rachel’s Sister.  I’m fine-d!

Anyway, I was thinking.  If I am one of the “lucky” ones who gets selected in the ballot, I’ll run it (mentally) in the following order:

It would be very painful to do it in the reverse order, finishing four stints of 10km only then to have to do a further 2km, only to find you’ve still got 194m to run.

It’ll be tough to think of it that way, particularly with the big milestone banners throughout the route of the course.  But they’re probably all in miles, so maybe easier to ignore if I work in kilometres.

May 9, 2009 | Filed Under Life, Sport | 1 Comment 

A month in

It’s exactly a month since the site moved half way round the world from Sydney to its new WordPress home in Jersey.  And today, Akismet, the anti-spam add-on for WordPress, celebrated by successfully hiving off its 1,000th spam comment.  Not a bit of intervention needed on my part.

Overall, I’m happy with WordPress.  Very happy.  I need to get FTP access to the file system so that I can do some playing.  And I need to figure out just where some of the code is stored for some of the modules, because while the interface allows me to do quite a bit of stuff to the visuals (e.g. what appears in the right-hand columns), it’s not at all obvious where the resultant code goes and indeed what’s styling it—to me at least.

And there’s one outstanding bug that diverts all links to old posts using the old pLog URL structure to this post about paragraph numbering in the civil service.  Rob, if you can sort that last one out, that’d be peachy :-)

Many more months of WordPress loveliness to follow.

May 9, 2009 | Filed Under Tech stuff | 1 Comment 

Paginated articles: don’t patronise me

I hate paginated articles.  I hate them with a passion.

Don’t get me wrong.  I understand why sites create them.  They give the user the “opportunity” to load another page, allowing more, and varied, advertising to be served to me, thus increasing your revenue.  And in days gone by, bandwidth might have been a driver.  In appreciation of my 28.8kb connection, the site might have shown some mercy, loading pages in bite-sized chunks to allow me to start reading as soon as possible.  (I doubt it, but I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt.)

But bandwidth is no longer an issue in this context.  And surely the world of Web 2.0 allows adverts to be changed on the hoof without loading a new page.

So please stop patronising me.  Please stop making me hunt for the Page 2 link.  And serve me the content in its entirety that I’ve chosen to read.  Thank you.

May 4, 2009 | Filed Under User experience | 2 Comments 

Twoogle enhanced: Twitter to Google Docs

Google Spreadsheets introduced new functionality the other day allowing sheets to be protected individually.  Previously, you either protected a workbook in its entirety or you didn’t.

In my earlier version of the Twitter to Google Docs feed (now named Twoogle in deference to the continuing trend for Twitter apps to begin with the letters TW), I separated the Friends list from the Feed to save people breaking the latter.

I’ve just created a new, enhanced version, combining the two spreadsheets into a single one, and locking down the Feeds sheet to save people from themselves.  ;-)

Click here to access the new version.  Please leave comments here to let me hear your feedback.

May 2, 2009 | Filed Under Spreadsheets, Tech stuff | 3 Comments 

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