By Muhammad Haque
0545 Hrs GMT
London Sunday 29 March 2009
KHOODEELAAR! evidential update on the unreliability of a ‘career-politician’: the incredibly glib words of Brian Coleman on the ‘Tony McNulty’ ‘news’
When I went on the record and stated any agreement with anything that Brian Coleman had ever said, I did so with precision. Precision and condition and qualification. I had been aware of Brian Coleman’s mutterings. And I had noticed over so many of Coleman’s stray utterances that he was not reliable at all.
On his record, Coleman has not sustained anything. Except his career. For what it is worth. And it can not be worth anything to the people of London. Except to Brian Coleman.
In October 2007, not long after Gordon Brown played his role as a peddler of Big Business Crossrail, Brian Coleman popped up in the New Statesman saying that the City of London should be scrapped.
The City of London exists as a highly brazen Tory tool. Tory in the Norman Tebbit sense. Tory in the Margaret Thatcher sense. Tory in the Tony Blair sense. Tory in the sense that it has behaved in over the most part of its existence as a ‘world crass grabbing centre’ that has been central to bringing to its knees whatever financial system [!!!] existed in the ‘free trading world’…
My immediate trigger for addressing the role of the City of London in October 2007 – a full year before the financial calamity began to show – was of course the peddling role the City of London had been playing for facilitating the looting of the UK public by Big Business in contracts to the tune [initially] of £16 Billion via Crossrail. That is before taking into account the additional £Billions in expected overruns.
So I put in a brief sentence as follows:
“
11 October 2007 at 11:19
I fully agree with and endorse the statement in Brian Coleman’s column as follows:
“Never mind that it has no benefit at all for most actual Londoners as opposed to commuters from the Home Counties.”
Muhammad Haque
Organiser
Khoodeelaar!
No to Crossrail hole Bill
London E1
1118 Hrs
Thursday 11 October 2007”
I had expected that Coleman would follow up his utterances ‘against’ the City of London. If not about the City of Lo London itself, I had expected him to elaborate on the grabbing irrelevance of the place. But I have not noticed anything.
In fact Since October 2007, I had not come across Brian Coleman in print again.
Until last night .
Coleman appeared on the BBC News Channel along with a person from the ‘Guardian Weekly’. To ‘review’ the front pages of the Sunday papers. On the item about MPs’ expenses, allowances etc, Coleman took the very same line that Eric Pickles had done on last Thursday’s’ Question Time.
In fact Coleman went one further and sought to undermine the Mail on Sunday for trying to find credible information on MPs behaving greedily…
Coleman decided to attack the Mail on Sunday ‘s particular reporting and investigation instead of saying anything about the subject that the newspaper had been focussing on…
taken together, the performances of Eric Pickles on the Question Time and Brian Coleman on the B BC News Channel over the same issue raise the question: what chance is there that a Tory ‘win’ at any general election will make things any better?
CRASS prospects indeed!
They will carry on the Crossrail crass scam too.
I am saying this in the full knowledge of the hype and the spin around Daniel Hannan and the plugs for Daniel Hannan and the Tories in the Times by Crossrail scam-backing Matthew Parris
[To be continued]
‘We were told: Go and spend it, boys,’ says MP who claimed £310,000 for his holiday home
By SIMON WALTERS, GLEN OWEN and BRENDAN CARLIN
Last updated at 3:47 AM on 29th March 2009
Scroll down to sign The Mail on Sunday
Stop The MPs’ Gravy Train petition…
Is this a record? MP Harry Cohen has pocketed a total of £310,000 in expenses
The Labour politician with the highest expenses claim of any London MP has denied that he was cheating taxpayers by claiming a second-home allowance while maintaining that his main home is a single-bedroom schoolhouse and seaside caravan 70 miles from his constituency.
Defiant Left-winger Harry Cohen said: ‘When MPs were given this allowance they were told “Go and spend it, boys” and that is what I have done. It is my right.’
His comments come as The Mail on Sunday launches a petition to demand a full enquiry into MPs’ expenses, to report within three months and NOT after the general election as is currently suggested.
Mr Cohen has claimed every single penny of the maximum £104,701 in Commons expenses in the past five years for his £375,000 property in his Leyton and Wanstead constituency in East London, on the basis that it is his ‘second home’.
Astonishingly, he says he has claimed the full second-home allowance since 1990.
It means he has pocketed a staggering £310,714 in total – believed to be the largest amount ever claimed by any MP.
Yet he declares on his Labour website that he and wife Ellen ‘live’ in Leyton and ‘spend weekends at their static caravan’ on Mersea Island, an unspoilt stretch of the East Anglian coast.
If his real main residence is the Leyton house, it means his Commons allowance has funded a holiday home completely unconnected with either his parliamentary or constituency duties.
Sea views: The holiday park in Mersea Island, Essex, where MP Harry Cohen has a caravan, 70 miles from his constituency
The couple also own a quaint one-bedroom former schoolhouse in Colchester, 20 minutes away, providing them with an ideal ‘twin holiday centre’ for weekends and summer.
Mersea Island is full of second homes and Mrs Cohen said there were big advantages to having another home away from her husband’s constituency.
‘We can get drunk in Colchester and no one knows who we are,’ she joked.
Commons rules for the second-home allowance are very clear: you cannot claim the money for your main home ‘where you spend more nights than any other’.
By his own admission, Mr Cohen spends most nights in London. He would therefore be unable to claim expenses for his Colchester home because it has no connection with his political duties, either in his constituency or at Westminster.
Mr Cohen tops the Commons expenses league after last week’s row over the housing claims of Employment Minister Tony McNulty, a fellow London Labour MP.
Mr Cohen spends weekends at his at his caravan or his Colchester home, above, which is 75 miles from the Commons
McNulty was under fresh pressure last night over the £60,000 expenses he claimed for his parents’ home in Harrow – as he registered for the 2009 electoral roll there, even though he now admits he lives permanently in nearby Hammersmith with his wife, Ofsted chief Christine Gilbert.
Mr McNulty denies any wrongdoing, but making a false declaration on the roll is a crime with a maximum penalty of £5,000 or six months’ jail.
Mr Cohen is one of three MPs who claim for ‘second homes’ in London while maintaining other homes by the sea, far from their constituencies.
Commons rules allow Outer London MPs to claim for second homes even though their constituencies are within commuting distance of Westminster.
It is one of several loopholes to be examined in a review of MPs’ expenses ordered by Gordon Brown after The Mail on Sunday’s disclosures about Mr McNulty last week. The review will not report until after the next General Election.
Mr Cohen’s detached three-bedroom Leyton home is nine miles from Westminster, a journey that takes 25 minutes on public transport.
His house in Colchester – which has a large open space downstairs with a bedroom on a mezzanine – is 75 miles from the Commons.
The MP insisted he had done nothing wrong. ‘Colchester is my family home and I am entitled to claim a second-home allowance on my constituency home,’ he said.
Mr Cohen claims his house in Leyton, East London – nine miles from Westminster – is his second home
When The Mail on Sunday pointed out that Commons rules say an MP’s main home is where they spend most nights of the week, and that he admits to spending most nights of the week at his London home, Mr Cohen replied: ‘Traditionally, lots of MPs never lived where their constituencies are. They would swan in to their constituency and swan out the same day.’
Mr Cohen, 59, bought the Leyton house in 2005 for £375,000, upgrading from a previous home in the constituency, also bought on expenses.
‘It is a nice home and I use the allowance to make it a nice home,’ he said. ‘I moved because I wanted to be near the woods so I can walk our Jack Russell dog, Rosa – named after German socialist Rosa Luxemburg.’
Mr Cohen bought his Colchester house for £180,000 ten years ago. The properties are now worth an estimated £700,000 between them. Mr Cohen says he has a combined interest-only mortgage on the two. He said he paid about £7,500 for the caravan, plus an annual rent of around £2,000.
‘We like the area because of the sea and it has a very good arts scene,’ he said.
The MP insisted he was not abusing his expenses. ‘The logic of what you are saying is that wealthy Tory MPs could live where they bloody well like but Labour MPs would have to live in their constituency. My dad was a hard-working taxi driver and I work hard as an MP.’
He claimed that when the second-home allowance, officially called the Additional Costs Allowance or ACA, was introduced by the last Tory Government, MPs were encouraged to claim the full amount.
When Mr Cohen entered Parliament in 1983, he had only one property, in Leyton. In 1990 he bought a flat in Wapping and started claiming the second-home allowance, then £9,914 a year, on the basis he needed it to perform his Commons duties.
In 1998, he sold the flat and bought the home in Colchester. To carry on receiving his ACA, he had to declare Colchester as his main home.
His website leaves little room for doubt about which is Mr Cohen’s real ‘main home’ and his second home. It states: ‘He enjoys living in Leyton with Ellen, his wife . . . Harry also spends weekends with Ellen and Rosa in their static caravan.’
It goes on to say that he likes to spend Friday evenings in The Essex, a popular pub in Leyton.
Mr Cohen caused a minor stir last year when he disclosed his passion for writing erotic poems, some of which border on pornographic.
£100,000 for flat nine miles from Commons
Expenses: Jacqui Lait and, left, her Beckenham flat, nine miles from Westminster
Senior Tory MP Jacqui Lait has claimed more than £100,000 in second-home allowances on her constituency base nine miles from Westminster.
Ms Lait, until recently a member of David Cameron’s frontbench team, declares her five-bedroom farmhouse on the Sussex coast as her main home. But her constituency of Beckenham, Kent, on the outskirts of London, is just nine miles – or about 35 minutes’ drive – from the House of Commons.
Since 2001, she has claimed an average of about £18,000 a year in Additional Costs Allowance on her Beckenham flat, including £15,301 for 2006-07, the most recent year for which details of MPs’ expenses are available.
Ms Lait was the MP for Hastings and Rye between 1992 and May 1997, when she lost the seat. She returned to the Commons by winning a by-election in Beckenham in November 1997.
After her victory, she gave up a flat she kept in the Barbican, Central London, and bought one in Beckenham.
Rural retreat: Tory MP Jacqui Lait’s luxurious £1million country home in the village of Playden, East Sussex
She retained her old constituency home, which is worth more than £1million, in the ancient village of Playden on the East Sussex and Kent border.
Ms Lait has insisted she complies with the rules, saying: ‘That is the way I have claimed ever since I became the member for Beckenham in 1997. My main home is where I live with my husband. It has been cleared with the [Commons] Fees Office.’
Ms Lait has been married to former stockbroker Peter Jones, the leader of East Sussex County Council, for more than 30 years.
She was a Minister in the dying days of John Major’s Government and spent ten years in the Tory Shadow Cabinet. But she took the ‘personal decision’ in January this year to quit as Shadow Minister for Planning to retire to the backbenches.
In 1996 Ms Lait became the first woman to serve as a Conservative Whip.
£22k second-home bill in just nine months
Costly: The block housing Mr Neill’s flat in Chislehurst, about 11 miles from Parliament
‘Within rules’: Bob Neill’s home in Southend
Bob Neill
Tory MP Bob Neill claims the second-home allowance for a flat in his constituency just over 30 minutes’ drive from Westminster.
Mr Neill said last night that the flat in his Bromley and Chislehurst constituency – about 11 miles from Parliament – was his second home while his ‘main home’ was in Southend-on-Sea, Essex.
This substantial home, shared with his partner and Southend Tory councillor Daphne White, is in a street where houses sell for about £1million.
Mr Neill bought his flat in Chislehurst, a sought-after part of his constituency, in 2007 for £365,000. He also owns a flat in Poplar, East London – about six miles or 20 minutes’ drive from Westminster.
In 2006-07 he claimed £22,110 Additional Costs Allowance – the maximum for that year – even though he was elected in a by-election three months into the Commons’ financial year.
Last night a Tory Party spokesman insisted that Mr Neill had fully complied with Commons rules on allowances, saying: ‘He spends most of his time in Southend. He probably does three nights at week at Chislehurst. Southend is the main home.’
The spokesman explained that the MP’s second-home claims were initially on his East London flat and then on his Chislehurst constituency base.
‘Once Bob was elected in 2006, the ACA was correctly claimed in accordance with Green Book rules, which includes covering one-off costs incurred when buying the [Chislehurst] property,’ said the spokesman.
‘Since then, ACA claims relate only to his property in Chislehurst. No claims are made in respect of any other property.’
Mr Neill won the Bromley and Chislehurst by-election after the death of sitting MP Eric Forth.
Stop the Expenses Gravy Train
I, the undersigned demand a full enquiry into MPs’ expenses, to report within 3 months and NOT after the general election as is currently suggested. There should then be fair and clear rules which must be enforced rigorously with proper sanctions for those who break them.
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