Nigel Farage, is he as anti establishment as he likes to make out??

Today see's the latest in a line of political figures coming under fire for their expenses. This time it is the medias darling of the moment the UKIP leader Nigel Farage. Nigel Farage has rejected "outrageous" claims that his taxpayer-funded EU office expenses of around £15,000 a year are too high. The Ukip leader is facing questions about his use of the EU parliamentary expenses system after it emerged he pays no rent on a small Bognor Regis property designated as his UK office. Between 2009 and 2013, Farage has claimed between £13,000 and £20,000 a year in office management and running costs for the site, averaging around £15,000 a year. However, a former office manager told the Times that upkeep of the converted grain store in terms of bills and other non-rental costs only amounts to around £3,000 a year, leaving around £12,000 a year unaccounted for. Farage hit back in an interview on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, arguing he legitimately made use of flat-rate "allowances" from EU funds, which do not amount to expenses. He also said he would be prepared to have his expenses checked by an auditor "if that would settle the matter". MEPs can spend these allowances "how we see fit", he said. "I'm sorry, but this whole story and even the line of questioning here is simply wrong," he said. "Let's get this right from the start shall we? We do not claim expenses for running offices or any other activity that takes place within our member state the United Kingdom; we get an allowance, a fixed-rate allowance, and we can spend it how we see fit." "It is £3,580 a month, and that is given to every MEP; we can spend it how we want to, we don't have to provide receipts for it or anything like that. We are given recommendations as to what it can legitimately be spent on, which include the running of an office, paying for a mobile phone, buying equipment, hotel bills, restaurant bills, applying for subscriptions to websites, buying newspapers, there's a list as long as your arm on what this money can legitimately be spent on." Farage said he had always been open about using the EU cash to fight against Britain's membership while staying within the rules. He said he was taking legal advice about the Times story, accusing it of launching a politically motivated attack because it is an "establishment" newspaper". Hypocritical much? Nigel Farage likes to pose as being anti establishment but he is as much part of it as any MP out there. A former stockbroker in the city of London now turned career politician Farage has carved out a good career for himself and with UKIP looking set to do well in the upcoming European elections on 22nd may could this dent his image at all ? Earlier, the Times reported he had told them: "I don't pay rent on the office but I obviously pay for everything else," he said. "Whether it's the burglar alarm or electricity." He also disputed claims by the former grain store manager, saying: "About £1,000 a month is roughly what it is. Exceptionally I put more money in as and when it's needed." The newspaper reported he has been referred to the European expenses watchdog by a former Ukip official over how he has spent around £60,000 of office expenses since transparency declarations about expenses began in 2009. MEPs are not required to provide receipts proving how they spend their expenses, with the EU saying it is a "matter of honor" that they are spent correctly. The allegations emerge as Ukip is riding high in the polls while the Conservatives appeared to have taken a hit over former culture secretary Maria Miller's wrongly-claimed expenses. The Ukip leader said Miller has "taken the mickey out of the system" and called for David Cameron to introduce powers for the public to sack MPs over serious wrongdoing. Challenged about Ukip's own expenses scandals among MEPs, he said: "In the cases of the two individuals who behaved badly, I removed the whip and kicked them out of the party a long time before they were found guilty of anything." So Nigel, what are you waiting for? With extracts from today’s guardian http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/apr/15/nigel-farage-rejects-outrageous-eu-expenses-allegations?CMP=twt_fd

The detachment of the political class in Britain

The political class our current crop of politicians who are a professional class in their own right now you’d say now have been slowly and slowly detaching themselves from society and understanding social process’s. In this day and age of political think tanks and political advisors is directly linked to the way the political parties have lost their supporter s base the 3 major political parties currently do not have much more than a quarter of a million members and not even a million between them . This in my view has lead to a bigger disconnect with understanding the moves and changes in society. In the past the political class could command a fair bit of respect and in a strange way they still do but now a days after the Mp expenses crisis and then the phone hacking where politicians has lead to a breaking down of trust and confidence in our so called politicians. Of course the move of the political class further and further to the right has played its part where now the so called centre ground is now further to the right than we have ever seen. The political class used to be drawn from small business owners and landlords but now much of our MP’s are former lawyers, solicitors bankers even who have a disconnect clearly with everyday life. This may seem an obvious point but it’s important to understand when we are looking for political representation. We still have a vote and a big emphasis is placed on it when elections come around in the UK. Oh you must use your vote you don’t know how lucky you are kind of thing yet all we are voting for more often than not is who will be our government who screw us over next. Is this much of a choice? Of course not so wherever we can it is important for Marxists to stand in bourgeois elections to provide an alternative and to at least try and reach people who have been taken in by the political class who see them still as our masters. People are becoming more and more disgusted with politicians in the pub every weekend I’m told how much our MP’s are thief’s corrupt and in it just for themselves and in many ways they are. But no politician today goes out their way to confront this image they have themselves created. They almost seem to revel in this thought and image and play off the fact they re dis trusted and have become further detached from the person on the street. The fact that MP’s are so distrusted now is an interesting situation when people have little faith in the establishment as they do right now with low levels of confidence in our police and media establishments too this can be fertile ground for new movements and new thinking. As we have seen the springing up of occupy and the tents movement in a so called new form of democracy where something new and different was tried was a direct out pouring of dis trust of politicians to deal with the crisis we find ourselves in today that’s capitalism in decay as a economic system that can benefit the many. Occupy wanted little if anything to do with politicians and tried to be far more democratic focusing on the banks and the financial institutions in London and around the globe if we’re honest to focus their anger. This was a marked change as many times down the years when there is anger or a protest movement it normally involves lobbying or protesting against the government of the day. The fact that people went and set up camps and tent villages outside major financial districts showed for me a marked change in people’s consciousness and ability to identify where this crisis has come from and where we must focus our energy in highlighting. The recent growth of UKIP is a interesting development again too as they try to pose themselves as anti establishment and down with the common man on the street clearly a image they are going with for now to court a popularize right wing vote fairly successfully taking 25% of a popular vote n the recent county council elections clearly shows they are having a impact and a big one at that. Not wishing to over play the UKIP threat at this stage as there are still opportunities for the left to get its act together it is something we should keep in mind too. But lastly a political class with seemingly no direction or any real ideological base any longer is not only a danger to us but to its own existence I think with no clear out and out leader of a political class the idea of a technocratic government a so called national government used in the past during crisis’s cannot be ruled out either to stabilise the ruling class during times of social unrest.

Interview with Dave Nellist of the socialist party on MP's on a workers wage from Red Pepper

This excellent interview from Dave Nellist superbly sums up everything that is wrong with our MP's and polititians and how his sacrifice not as he sees it mind you was so out of the ordinary and would be alien to any MP today. The fact that Dave only took the average skilled workers wage Dave was able to remain situated amoungst the working class and understand their day to day troubles as he was on the same wage as his supporters and residents in his area he represented. If any socialist party or TUSC candidate becomes a elected representitive this is what we would stand by nothing more than a average skilled workers wage.

The interview below with Dave Nellist appeared in Red Pepper in August 2009 - focusing on the MPs' expenses scandal.
It’s no sacrifice
The recent scandal over MPs’ expenses and second jobs only seems to have confirmed the suspicion that ‘they’re all at it’. But when Dave Nellist was elected as Labour MP for Coventry South East he made a point of only taking the wage of an average worker. Now a Coventry city councillor and leading member of the Socialist Party, he spoke to Red Pepper about his experience in Westminster

You took the average worker’s wage as an MP – how much would that have been, roughly, in today’s terms?

It was an average skilled worker’s wage, which was always less than half an MP’s salary. For example, in 1989 MPs received £24,107 and the average skilled worker’s wage that year, calculated from figures from the engineering union’s Coventry district office, was £11,180 – so that was 46 per cent. An MP today is on £64,766 – 46 per cent of that would be £29,792. But the amount I would take today if re-elected would depend not on a percentage, but the actual average wages received by the people I represented.

What were your personal circumstances at the time? Were you married? Did you have kids? Were you conscious of making sacrifices?

My wife Jane and I were married in August 1984, during the miners’ strike. We held a social as part of the wedding celebration and charged an entry fee, which raised quite a bit for the local miners’ support fund!

For the first year we were married Jane still had her job in a department store in Sutton Coldfield. But a year later the first of our three children arrived and for the rest of my time as an MP we only had the one worker’s wage for myself, Jane and our family to live on.

I’d been unemployed before being elected in 1983, so living on a skilled worker’s wage was not a ‘sacrifice’. We had a holiday every year in Scotland or Wales, and we could manage a night out for a meal or to the theatre or the cinema in exactly the same way as any other couple with young children could. But we felt the same pressures with bills and other living expenses as the people I represented.

So I would say taking the ‘worker’s wage’ wasn’t so much making a sacrifice. If I had taken the full MP’s wage we would have been insulated against those day-to-day problems and the pressures that most people in Coventry felt. How did you divide your time between your constituency and Westminster?

Did you need to keep up two houses? Did you take much in the way of expenses above and beyond your ‘worker’s wage’?

I usually dealt with constituency business on Monday morning, went to London Monday lunchtime, tried to come back Tuesday evening (late), more constituency business/meetings on Wednesday morning, then back to London at lunchtime, coming back to Coventry late Thursday night – unless there was any pressing business on Friday. Friday and the weekend would be spent on casework/meetings in the constituency or addressing public meetings elsewhere.

Although I managed to have a voting record usually in the top ten of Labour MPs, I addressed about 1,500 meetings over the nine years I was an MP. In the 1980s parliament often sat late into the night (or even through the night), so I rented a furnished flat in London. No moat or oak beams! Nor any claims for food!

I claimed the full ‘office costs’ allowance to employ research and secretarial assistance in the Commons and in the constituency. I also rented an office in Coventry to work from. I was receiving on average 200 letters a week. We had wards with 50 per cent male unemployment, and a huge amount of constituency casework. None of the office costs money came to me personally – it was used to pay wages, and for rent and equipment.

What did you think of your fellow MPs? Were they clearly ‘on the take’ in your day? Did having a comfortable salary make them out of touch?

A number of MPs had outside jobs – mainly, in those days, Tory MPs with directorships. One I remember, Geoffrey Rippon, who had been a minister in previous Tory governments, was the King of Company Directors. When I was there he was an MP, a QC, and the chairman or director of four dozen different companies. He had 50 jobs!

It always seemed to me to be the real reason why parliament sat in the afternoon and evening, so Tory MPs could make their real money in the mornings – or as Geoffrey Rippon apparently put it, ‘to earn a crust and go on drinking decent claret’. These days, of course, it’s ex-Labour ministers who are earning tens of thousands of pounds a year moonlighting. In my book it’s an even bigger crime than playing the expenses system to be an ex-‘Labour’ minister advising private companies on how to win contracts taking public services away, and getting paid perhaps two or three times an MP’s salary – on top of an MP’s salary!

How did other MPs react to the example set by yourself (and fellow left MPs Pat Wall and Terry Fields), proving that the job could (and perhaps should) be done on the average worker’s wage?

Although there were a number of honourable exceptions (Dennis Skinner’s and other Campaign Group MPs’ generous donations during the miners’ strike, for example), for many Labour MPs it wasn’t the socialist ideas we tried to champion in parliament that upset them the most, but the threat to them receiving their ‘due reward’.

Perhaps the most vivid example was the debate on MPs’ salaries and allowances shortly after the 1987 general election (MPs’ wage increases were never announced before elections, when they might upset voters). The debate started at 9pm and went on until past midnight, and yet every seat in the House was taken! The motion was for a 21.9 per cent rise in MPs’ salaries from £356 a week to £434 a week. That £80 a week rise was £3 more than the then take-home pay for a whole week for civil servants, upon whom the government had just imposed a 4.25 per cent pay award.

I organised the vote against. I prepared a speech, which I reckoned would take me 10-15 minutes to deliver. Because of interruptions, it actually took 38 minutes. I asked MPs to vote against the rise; but that if it were passed I asked Labour MPs to give at least 5 per cent of their new salaries to the Labour Party to prevent the proposed 40 redundancies that were due to take place at Labour headquarters.

Immediately after me, David Blunkett spoke and complained about me ‘lecturing colleagues on how much to give of their pay’. He said he tried ‘to do a good job, to learn how to do it better and to try to earn the rewards that I am paid’. The motion to increase MPs’ wages by 22 per cent went through by an 11 to one majority.

David Blunkett now apparently gets three times his MP’s salary (on top of his MP’s salary) in outside earnings from firms including A4e, which describes itself as ‘a leader in global public service reform’.

I rest my case.

Dave Nellist was MP for Coventry South East from 1983 until 1992

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Why are working class crimes demonised more ?

There is a part of society which is out of touch completely it is not the working class it is the MP's. It is nothing new i am well aware but working class crimes and punishments are far more excessive than MP's and teh ruling class's crimes and punishments. They simply do not fit.
For example just this week people rioting were getting jail sentances not fitting their crime. We have seen a sharp rise in politically motivated arresting and jailing of the working class. I do sense this is down to the fact we as workers are becoming more politisised and becoming more of a threat to the ruling class so the hardest line must be taken on us. This i'm afraid will not work as you can only keep the working class down for so long. There will be more of us and more angry and annoyed and frustrated at the lack of a working class representation on a mainstream scale.

In the past you used to have left wing labour MP's. Proper ones not the trendy ones you have today ones who stood up for working class people and offered an alternative to the tories and their class war on the working class. This is no more and ordinary working people are feeling cut off from society and teh world around them as they are facing increased job cuts and cuts in living standards. How can we expect MP's and labour MP's in particular when they themselves have been dabbling in the expenses tin claiming what the hell they can get their hands on. It is a break down in society that has failed us all from the top to the lower regions. This is another consequence of a greedy capitalist system which simply encourages greed and individualism.

Swansea West Labour MP, Geraint Davies, commenting on the rioting in Croydon, an area he used to represent in parliament, stated: "...it is clear what we have seen is just opportunist criminality."

He should know. In 2004-05, when Davies was MP for Croydon Central he claimed the highest expenses of any MP in the country, a staggering £176,026.

Despite Croydon being only 12 miles or a 20-minute commute from London Victoria, this included overnight cost allowance and £4,000 renovating his designated second home, a flat in Westminster.

The difference is that, unlike looting electrical goods, MPs' opportunism isn't considered criminal. It just feels that way to us, the victims.


Expense which have become the norm in the Westminster bubble of out of touch from reality careerist polititians racked up expenses totally huge amounts year on year at our expense.

A former MP jailed for expenses fraud claimed the second highest amount of parliamentary allowances last year, records have revealed.

Eric Illsley, the former Barnsley Central Labour MP, received £151,245 in 2010-11.

In January he admitted falsely claiming £14,500 of expenses between 2005 and 2008, and was jailed for 12 months, but was released in May. Illsley clung on to his parliamentary seat until nearly a month after pleading guilty.

The new figures, released by the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (Ipsa), show Illsley's allowances claims included £38,690 in winding-up costs. They also included £3,905 for accommodation and £5,224 for travel and food.

MPs claimed a total of £70.6m in parliamentary expenses over the financial year, down from £98m in 2009-10, when the system was still operated by the Commons Fees Office.

The prime minister, David Cameron, received £106,056, almost all of which went on staffing, although he claimed £272 to cover travel and subsistence.

The records show that the Labour leader, Ed Miliband, who claimed £74,357, was given a £4,000 advance on his expenses. After criticism from MPs that payments were taking too long, the Ipsa chairman, Sir Ian Kennedy, agreed last May to give some money upfront to cover office and travel costs.

The deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, claimed a total of £110,878, including £13,411 to cover accommodation and £1,592 for travel and subsistence.

David Lammy, the Labour MP for Tottenham, received the highest payment. His claims totalled £173,922.

Dan Jarvis, who succeeded Illsley as Labour MP for Barnsley Central following a byelection in March, had the lowest total payment. He received just £520, which covered travel and food costs.


Hundreds of MPs were ordered to repay a total of more than 1 million pounds in the wake of the expenses scandal which caused widespread anger and an overhaul of the system.

Newspaper revelations showed MPs had made claims for items ranging from toilet paper to dog food, moat cleaning and ornamental duck houses, tainting members of all major parties.

David Chaytor, 61, who had been an MP in northern England, admitted at an earlier hearing to fraudulently claiming more than 20,000 pounds in taxpayer-funded expenses.

The judge, Justice John Saunders, said Chaytor had breached the trust placed in MPs by the public and had subsequently been vilified and humiliated.

"That is an inevitable consequence for people who aspire to and achieve important public positions together with the influence which goes with those positions and who then defraud the public who elected them," he said.

"The public understandably feel cheated by what has happened."

The former Labour Party MP had claimed 22,650 pounds for rent for houses owned by himself and by his mother, and also for IT services that he had received free of change.

As a result, he was paid 18,350 pounds from the public purse, all of which he has now repaid.

Following the sentencing, Chaytor was expelled from the Labour Party, the Press Association reported.

Chaytor, who had previously denied the charges, faced a maximum of seven years in jail, but had been expected to receive a more lenient sentence because of his eventual guilty plea.

He will also have to foot the legal bill for both his defence and the costs of bringing the prosecution against him.

At the time the expenses row broke, Chaytor, apologised "unreservedly" for what he called an "unforgivable error in my accounting procedures."

Three other former MPs and two members of the House of Lords, the upper chamber of parliament, were also charged by police in relation to their expenses and are due to face trial.




So when we see people lower down the class ladder commiting crimes and thinking they can get away with it why should they think twice when they see MP's and bankers taking liberties and helping themselves to the pot having the hand and grabbing waht they can. What sort of example does this set. I would suggest all MP's and elected representitives including councillors should only take the average skilled workers wage. Just like Dave Nellist and Terry Fields did in the 80's when the yrepresented Covernty and Liverpool as Militant MP's. Not taking anymore than they needed to do their job of representing their voters who had placed trust in them to represent them and their views.

Maybe the distrust of MP's and polititians has been encouraged by the fact they are just as greedy as the bankers and in affect are no better than a banker. The media, polititians and the police are all entangled in a vicious greed bubble which they cannot escape from and to make matters worse they do not wish to. They are the have's and we are the have not's and they do not wish this to change. Be under no illusions who the real criminals in society are.