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walsworth

walsworth

Journeyman
Joined
Jul 19, 2006
Messages
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Just watched Shahid Malik being iterviewed about his expenses fiddle, oops sorry legitimate business costs.
He reminded me of a worm on an anglers hook!
 
All adding up to quite a satisfying Revengefest on the part of an over-penalised, over-fined, over-ruled, over-patronised public, I'd say. It's probably the tip of a fairly large Iceberg of Fraud, but thank God for the Freedom of Information Act, or whatever it is that has finally unearthed the despicable at their venal best (or worst). And whether one votes right, middle, or left, well done the Torygraph!
 
krizon said:
And whether one votes right, middle, or left, well done the Torygraph!
Click to expand...

Really? Paying well into six figures (was reportedly being hawked for GBP300,000) for a stolen disk containing information that was due to be released in July anyway. Not sure that's all that commendable myself.
 
I didn't know about that, tracks. On the other hand, it's the Torygraph's own dosh, not the taxpayers', and perhaps they just felt now was as good a time as ever to let slip the Rottweilers. There'll be a lot that's trivial and silly about the witch-hunt, of course, but the rules which everyone seems to think they adhere to so well are very clear - they should only bill for items which support their work as MPs. Hard to find how a mucky moat or a leaky tennis court qualify under such a simple instruction.
 
First capitalism consumes itself and only limps on by virtue of government subsidy (£1.3Tn) and now parliamentary democracy (not that it ever existed of course) is in the process of imploding in a cesspit of greed.

I love this notion that these MP's are trotting out though that it isn't their fault; :lol: but it's the rules.

For Gods sake, this is the Nuremburg defence for crying out loud. :blink:

They just don't get it do they? The rules might be so badly constructed (circa 1983 incidentally) that they allow the crooked, unprincipaled and morally bankrupt to fraudlently exploit them, but critically, they still require the acquiessence of a conscious mind to take this decision to do so.

This abbrogation of repsonsibility and desparate attempt at blame transference on to an inanimate third party entity such as rule book, is nothing short of a scandalous insult. Again, I'm reminded of the Nazis. I was only obeying orders/ read.... "I haven't done anything wrong. The ruel s said I could do it. I have not broken any rules".

A rule book might have allowed you to do something, but that doesn't make it right to have done so. Where is the burden of judgement here? An artifically created concept such as a rule book, shouldn't be the arbitor over fundamental moral judegments concerning the difference between what is right or wrong.

To use another analogy to do with guns;

A gun is harmless. It is a pice of inanimate metal. It doesn't speak, it doesn't think. However, if it comes into the possession of someone who is minded to use it aggresively, then it most certainly becomes dangerous. Do we lock guns up in prison though?

Similarly the system might be useless, but that in itself doesn't cause corruption. It still requires conditions to co-exist between a system that permits abuse, and individuals who have no sense of conscience and are therefore prepared to do so. MP's in seeking to blame the rule book for leading them into temptation are frankly in one of the worst cases of collective denial I've seen and are cravenly pointing the finger in the wrong direction. Perhaps if they repeat the mantra that it's 'the rule book' and not them enough times they might actually start to believe it? I think it's this whole attempt to deny and transfer blame everywhere else but themselves that I find more insulting then the various tennis court refurbishments etc.

So where is Gordon Browns great 'moral compass' that he's so proud to tell us he possesses? Perhaps he's submitting an expenses claim on its second binnacle? The issue of right and wrong and shouldn't be confined by the boundaries drawn up by something that bares the hallmarks of the creation of those who benefit most from its adoption. Surely the threshold should be more fundamental, and be called common decency and moral conscience. This should be instinctive, and shouldn't need to be enshrined in a parliamentary green book of commandments. If MP's are unable to distinguish between the basics of moral right from wrong then clearly its time to strike them from office. Their pitious attempts to blame the rule book just masks their own fecklessness.

In many respects it goes back to one of the basic judgements of mythology. The serpent tempted Eve to eat the apple, because she could, and despite having everything else, she couldn't resist doing so. And so it came to pass that the rule book tempted MP's to exploit every last little penny they could, and to this day the rule book must slither on its belly for its part in leading our indisputable custodians of moral decency and governance into a lapse of momentary greed.



Spoil your papers in June:ninja:
 
A very similar scenario is played out in every work place, anything not bolted to the floor is regarded as fair game. When I started work, shortly after the last legion had been recalled to defend Rome against the Barbarians, people were afraid to take home so much as a pen or pencil.
 
Warbler said:
They just don't get it do they? The rules might be so badly constructed (circa 1983 incidentally) that they allow the crooked, unprincipaled and morally bankrupt to fraudlently exploit them, but critically, they still require the acquiessence of a conscious mind to take this decision to do so.
Click to expand...

Joe Public is guilty of hypocrisy in these issues.

How many workers, who are allowed to claim expenses, claim for as much as they can screw the system for? How many are guilty of adding 0.7 miles to every journey they claim for. How many claim air fares but travel by cheap train ticket? How many claim for a £15 lunch when they actually bought a pre-packed sannie out of Tesco en route?

It's nothing to do with the amounts. It's the principle of the matter. If you wrongfully claim for a penny more than your entitlement you're not in a position to cirticise any of these guys no matter how mcuh they've screwed the system for.

I'm not going to criticise them. I'm just waiting for my next expenses form...
 
Not sure what expenses regimes you operate under, but its pretty damn difficult to claim an air fare if you haven't got a receipt. Most people I know tend to lose a bit of money, as no receipt equals no reimbursment, and it's only a matter of time before you lose one
 
The requirement to produce receipts is relatively recent in my experience although the air fares thing was more tongue in cheek than serious.

I now can't claim fuel for business travel unless I have a VAT receipt which pre-dates the day of the travel and which shows the actual amount of VAT paid at the point of transaction. I lost £6.70 on a parking charge because I forgot to tell the machine I wanted the ticket back.

When management is as picky as that it's hard to resist the temptation to add fractions of miles to journeys in order to claim back what you've actually paid out.

A climate of distrust and mistrust is a very unhealthy climate in which to have to work.
 
Sounds like teachers have been lucky DO. We've been operating receipts only for years, and as i said, most people will eventually lose. Indeed, I know of people who stand their own expenses for fear of accidentally claiming incorrectly and ending up on a disciplinary for it. All of which of course, makes the decadent and lavish behaviour of the very hypocrits who've introduced this level of micro accountancy into the public sector, all the more galling for those who've actually experienced net loses.

Prospective employers for instance, no longer pay interview travel expenses unless you can produce receipts proving you've used public transport. Private car equals no claim
 
Crikey, the teaching profession's had it a bit jammy, then! We had to produce receipts for anything we expected reimbursement for when I worked for the oil co. in Saudi, and that's going back to the early 1970s - and they'd been in place well before then. I can put hand on heart and say I've never fiddled the receipts and never nicked anything out of work but the odd pencil - for work at home! Not that I'm being pious about it, but as I wouldn't like anyone to steal from me, I wouldn't like to steal from anyone, faceless, bureaucratic, or not. One's supposed to be guided by a personal moral compass, surely, which transcends whether something's in a rule book or not? Unfortunately, it seems that the people who should be the standard bearers for the country's integrity have about as much moral compass as any venal, corrupt African despot living off British aid.

Mordy, it's not about Left or Right, or medium rare, is it? It's about personal integrity - one's own sense of what's right and wrong. And a number of those transgressing are of around my age, when most kids were brought up to Do The Right Thing. Stealing was definitely not on the agenda, however easy the pickings and how lax the guardianship.
 
No. You misunderstand me. Probably my fault for not making things clearer.

As a teacher, I went for interviews outside of teaching in the UK and was offered £15 for lunch, which I accepted then paid about £3 for a snack. Another time I was sent a cheque to cover air fares and got a cheap rail return for a fraction of that money. Another time (possibly another aspect of one the above interviews) I was given a (modest) cheque to cover hotel expenses and I stayed with my brother.

It would have been about 25-30 years ago.

Teachers tend not to claim most of the expenses to which they may be entitled. I only started claiming a couple of years ago after realising I could have been claiming for three or four years for taking my own car to another school to help them out. Most teachers I know have no idea what they can claim anyway. My wife does a lot of work-related travelling (she's in a loftier post) and I doubt she's ever claimed, much to my annoyance.

Hopefully this thread won't degenerate into yet another teacher-bashing tirade.
 
Again I take a different view to most people. I want the sharpest minds running my country. Anyone who operates within a framework and doesn't try to get maximum from it needs a pretty good reason.

Plus why not pay just pay politicians like rock stars? That way we might attract some talent rather than just phoney idealists.
 
What got me was listening to Kelvin McKenzie pontificating about politicians on 5live yesterday morning. A lackey of Murdoch`s for feck knows how many years preaching about ethics and the trust of the people. Unreal.
Journalists inhabit the same shit tank as bankers and politicians - but they will never get called on it of course.
 
Do auditors no longer exist? I certainly haven't see any little flour graders for years.
I can remember working in smaller firms where you had to account for anything that the auditors thought was strange. I wonder if this all has something to do with accounting software, everyone expects the 'puter to pick up the anomalies instead of a real person. The software is then analysed or whatever, by a youngster who is a computer wiz, but not a suspicious old b******d of an accountant.
This is what has happened to a large degree in my ex-trade engineering. When CAD became readily available in the 80's lots of very experienced engineers took early retirement rather than re-train. Hence you got youngsters straght out of college taking charge of projects that they really were not qualified to do, not their fault, they were left holding the baby very often. Management didn't help either, lots of them seemed to think that the bloody computer did all the work and you didn't need an engineer at all!
 
Journos tend to operate on one of parenting's mad maxims: don't do as I do, do as I say. Unfortunately, most of the governance of this country does that all too well! There'll always be hypocrisy, but that doesn't mean that when wrongdoings are unearthed, that we should ignore it. Otherwise, everyone might just as well take the view that we're all out for as much as we can get, stuff everyone else - oh, hang on! That's already been done, hasn't it - unless banking's gegamillion meltdown's already fading into history in light of a few thousands 'mistakenly' and 'accidentally' misplaced by politicos?

Wals: good point and probably the right answer. In addition, the ridiculous 'team culture', where no single person bears full accountability and responsibility for what happens, good or bad. I got some damn-fool letter signed by 'the xxx team' the other day - so, do I write back to "Dear xxx Team" instead of "Dear Mr Cholmondeley-Warner"? There's an overall abrogation of responsibility and the devolution of power and control to an amorphous goo called 'the team'. Thus, it's no one person's responsibility to ensure that this or that person, company, or project is run on budget, to time, or honestly. You only have to watch the flounderings on 'The Apprentice' to realise that its 'project managers' rarely seem to understand what their project is, what its aim is, how to deploy the best talent, or how best to reach the optimum goal. When the projects fail, as they often do (even when they don't, it's usually still not at its optimum) you can see that no-one's had a proper briefing on their own targets, or has any understanding of what their job - and its responsibilities - entailed. Just 'wind that out' (ugh!) to N number of organisations and businesses, and you have the cause of so much of the malaise of incompetence and fallibility now the norm.
 
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Euronymous said:
What got me was listening to Kelvin McKenzie pontificating about politicians on 5live yesterday morning. A lackey of Murdoch`s for feck knows how many years preaching about ethics and the trust of the people. Unreal.
Journalists inhabit the same shit tank as bankers and politicians - but they will never get called on it of course.
Click to expand...

Might have been interesting to ask him about Murdochs own tax returns
 
krizon said:
J
There's an overall abrogation of responsibility and the devolution of power and control to an amorphous goo called 'the team'. Thus, it's no one person's responsibility to ensure that this or that person, company, or project is run on budget, to time, or honestly.
Click to expand...

Been bemoaning this particular ailment for years. In the public sector its normally called a 'partnership' and is the much lamented talk shop thta allows a disparate group of 'value adding' senior management to pontificate and spectate on performance management. The genrral rule seems to be that if every agrees to divide repsonsibility for non-delivery into parcels of equal 5%'s, then no one will get held accountable. In essence therefore, this little cadre will oerate in its own self-interest, and despite having the authority to act dynamically, normally has the least incentive to do so, as it exists to protect itself, and the best way of doing this, is to do as little as it can get away with
 
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