I am not interested in what the Tax Dodgers Alliance (I think that’s what they’re called, but if they’re not, then they should be) has to say on anything, but I find it hard to disagree with their criticism of John Bercow, the House of Commons speaker, and his expenses claims. In the last year, he claimed over £31,000. On what, exactly? Let’s have a look, using information obtained by the Guardian:
£13,000 for a seven-day trip to Australia with an aide.
A £172 bill for a 0.7-mile chauffeur-driven journey that would have taken 15 minutes on foot.
He also spent £367 taking a car to Luton to deliver a speech on how MPs were restoring their reputation after the expenses scandal, figures released under the Freedom of Information (FoI) Act show.
His car to Lady Thatcher’s funeral at St Paul’s Cathedral, 1.8 miles from the Commons, cost £158, while he used an official car to travel to Canterbury to see Archbishop Justin Welby enthroned in 2013 at a cost of £524.
In April 2013, he spent £172 taking a car to Carlton House Terrace – just 0.7 miles from the Commons – to open a conference on alternative and augmentative communication. A taxi fare for the round trip was likely to have cost less than £15.
There’s more:
In 2013 Bercow claimed £144 for transport to a dinner organised by the charity Stonewall at the Dorchester Hotel, 1.5 miles from parliament.
A one-way drive from King’s Cross station to Speaker’s House after a day trip to Leeds in July 2013 cost £168 and in May 2013 there was a £367 bill for the Speaker to be driven to the University of Bedfordshire, where he gave a lecture on reforming parliament to ensure it was a “credible institution”.
In January 2014, the Speaker and his staff ran up expenses of nearly £1,300 attending a funeral for the Labour MP Paul Goggins.
A Foreign Office car picked him up at Manchester Piccadilly station, ferried him and a staff member around “as directed” at a cost of £298, before they stayed at the Park Inn Radisson hotel in the centre of the city.
The following day, it took Bercow and two staff members to the service in Salford, waited there, and dropped them back at Manchester Piccadilly at a further cost of £276.
There are only three words that can accurately describe Bercow’s expenses claims: taking the piss. We were told, weren’t we, that MPs (and Bercow remains an MP) had put their own houses in order since the scandal exposed our elected leaders of ripping us off. What has changed?
Now, when I worked in the Civil Service, carrying out important work on the front-line, I too was able to claim expenses. I leased a car under a private user scheme which essentially meant I paid to use it myself, was taxed on it and was reimbursed at around 12p a mile for official mileage. If I drove from Bristol to London, for example, I would receive around £14 in expenses. If I ate a meal that I would not normally have had, I could claim an amount some way short of a fiver. Otherwise, I got nothing. As a public sector worker, I lost money in relation to the money I got back. Bercow has no such problem.
It was hard to pick out a specific example of piss-taking, but here goes. How about claiming £367 to take a car to Luton to deliver a speech on how MPs were restoring their reputation after the expenses scandal? Call me naive and out of touch, but does it really cost £367 to get from London to Luton? I know London is an expensive place to live, but surely there must be the odd supersaver train Bercow could have caught? And what was the speech about? Condemning the likes of George Osborne who “flipped” their homes in order to rake in more of our money? Attacking Lib Dem David Laws for claiming over £40k to pay rent to his landlord who turned out to be his boyfriend? (If Laws had been a benefit claimant and claimed £40k in Housing Benefit to pay to his landlord, who was actually his partner, he’d have been prosecuted. But Laws was ‘punished” by being restored to the cabinet after a suitable interval when we forgot what he had done.)
If proof were needed, which it isn’t, that we are plainly not all in it together, Bercow’s extravagance proves beyond doubt that we are not. Whilst the House of Commons over which he presides brings in the Bedroom Tax, slashes benefits to the working poor and dumps all over the sick and disabled, Mr Speaker does what the hell he likes. His excuse, like with all MPs before him, will be that it was “within the rules”.
We’re all in it together? Really? Are you serious? The snouts are still in the Westminster trough and Bercow’s snout is in as deep as anyone else.
