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Originally Posted by Matt D
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The point I made was that when you are diverting public money in to someone who is a relative - be it family or lover - then that transaction should be held to a higher level of scrutiny. This makes sense as when there is a relationship, it is much easier to cheat the system. Hence why it was presumably banned in 2006.
I'm not going back and forth on this. Its obvious that the Lib Dems and their supporters have a lot invested in this man and need him to remain in power. They want to mitigate this man's actions down to irelevence. That's when I got fed up and spoke up. He doesn't deserve to be hung but likewise his offence wasn't exactly a parking ticket. Especially from a political party that campaigned so much on transparency and honesty. He has been caught, he has resigned, paid back the money and whatever censure he gets the parliamenary standards committee will presumably be fair and draw a line under it.
---------- Post added at 21:41 ---------- Previous post was at 21:37 ----------
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Originally Posted by Osem
Tend to agree with Matt here - there's no doubt he did wrong but, unlike so many of his colleagues, the motivation for doing so clearly wasn't to extract as much money from the poor old taxpayer as he could. It was about preserving his private life and for that I have some sympathy although I do think he was right to resign.
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That's the thing - he was brought down by £900/month that he refused to pay for himself and thought we ought to. Had he just paid for his own lovenest, he'd still be in office. Not too dissimilar from some of the MPs that claimed for small amounts that really they ought to have paid for in the first place. Had they did, they would have still be in office.