British crooks in office are more interesting than the home grown version

[DanaC]

This has pretty much rocked the political system in Britain.

Most of it's pretty smallscale stuff. What's depressing is the scale of abuse as you say, in terms of the number of MPs involved.

In some ways I feel sorry for some of them. Not the Chaytors and the Morleys who appear to have committed outright fraud; but the ones who've claimed extras through the second home allowance so forth. Wardrobes and carpets. As I mentioned in another thread, this situation is directly related to a decision made about 20 or so years ago, in which the then government, against the advice of the independant wage setting body advised MPs to vote against a rise in their salary and sugar coated it with a new allowance system. After that successive govts have tacitly approved and even outright encouraged MPs to use that allowance, on the grounds that it's in lieu of wages. Much of this behind closed doors but it's an open secret and has been for two decades.

Some of them are funny though. I mean moat cleaning? and duck islands? from a party desperate to shed it's old wealthy, Eton boys, landed elite tag :p

One of them. It may have been the duckpond guy, had the audacity, in a live interview to suggest that people were angry because they were jealous of his big house.