Thought Id start this one going because its rather dead on this board at the moment and I suppose all my usual muckers are either at the Stella tennis event watching Dim Tim (lose again) or at Henly Regatta eating cucumber sandwiches (they wish,...NOT).

Anyway please feel free to just talk to yourself blast away and let it go on any company or subject you wish. Just wish Id thought of this one before.

cheers GF.

Maria Miller and White Dee have more in common than the Tories would like
Apr 09, 2014 15:00
OPINION BY ROSWYNNE JONES

But with previously a regular on Downing Street and the other from Benefits Street, their treatment is very different

Maria Miller and White Dee both receive money from the taxpayer

Maria Miller and White Dee both receive money from the taxpayer
The resignation of Maria Miller will do nothing to bridge the gap between MPs and people. It is now a gaping chasm.

It’s not just the fiddling of expenses and the flipping of homes – it’s the utter lack of humility of those in power, frozen for a moment in that 32-second ‘apology’.

It’s the total failure to understand what ordinary people are living through, how hard times are. It’s the petty claiming for bathplugs still remembered when so many families can’t afford to put the hot water on for a bath.

Not since John Major’s Back to Basics has a government put itself on a more moral mission to correct the wrongdoings of the working classes. This is a government that has made a mission of attacking the feckless poor.

People have had enough of being told they aren’t hardworking enough, that they don’t know how to cook their leftovers properly, that they need to pull up their socks and get on their bikes.

So when they see that the very people who are lecturing them have got their sticky fingers in the till, and are living lives they could only dream of on the back of the taxpayer they are rightly angry.

Since Monday, 170,000 people have called on Miller to resign via a change.org petition. Look at the people dismissing the petition as ‘clictivism’ – politicians, media commentators, all those who usually like to decide these things for themselves.

I can’t be the only person to have noticed the similarities between Maria Miller and Benefits Street's ‘White’ Dee – both beneficiaries of the taxpayer with uncanny physical similarity.

White Dee, a disabled 42-year-old mother-of-two receives about £200 a week in benefits – or around £10,400 a year.

She is entitled to the help because she suffers from depression. As a mother-of two she is entitled to £33.70 child benefit per week, a maximum of £100.15 disability payments, plus £115 per week child tax credits.

White Maria (although we don’t really need to call her White Maria as there are clearly no Black Marias on the Tory front bench), is a 50-year-old mother-of-three who has managed to make a million pounds on her Wimbledon home helped by abusing parliamentary rules. But she doesn’t suffer a great deal of shame.

Meanwhile, for White Dee to make a million quid off the taxpayer like her Basingstoke MP doppelganger, she’d need to live to be over 100 and never work again.

The Standards Commissioner has said that White Maria over-claimed her benefits by £45,000. Yet until last night she continued to have the Prime Minister’s “full, strong, very warm support”.

Grumbling Tories have suggested she only held on so long because her name is Maria “not Mark” – a reference to the Tories' extremely poor number of women on the front bench. But if her name had been Dee and she’d been from Turner Street and not Wimbledon village, she’d already be off to jail.

At the weekend Iain Duncan Smith called for benefit fraudsters to have their homes taken away from them. But in the case of White Maria – who has just sold the Wimbledon house and bought a barn conversion – he says her critics are leading a “witch hunt”.

Well, he should know – he’s been leading one against poor, disabled and unemployed people since 2010.

Maybe it’s time for White Dee to have a crack at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport.

And, while we’re at it, let’s make some more reality show substitutions. Would anyone actually notice if we exchanged the cast of Made in Chelsea for the entire front bench?



http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/maria-miller-white-dee-more-3392250#ixzz2yPbJ0swP
Follow us: @DailyMirror on Twitter | DailyMirror on Facebook

Miller’s punishment for being found out – more cash than she had to pay back
09
Wednesday
Apr 2014
Posted by Mike Sivier in Conservative Party, Corruption, Crime, Politics, UK

Money, money, money…

Having resigned from the Cabinet, it seems the fraudster Maria Miller is entitled to a payoff totalling £17,000 – equivalent to three months’ ministerial salary.

This means that, as punishment for behaviour that, anywhere else, would lead to a criminal conviction (if not imprisonment), she is to receive a payment that not only negates the £5,800 she had to pay back, but includes an additional £11,200 – nearly twice as much again!

Other MPs are urging her not to take the money but it seems likely that she will.

And people wonder why we doubt her in her displays of contrition.

She’ll be laughing all the way to the bank.

Meanwhile, David Cameron is left to stew in one godawful mess. Not only has he been exposed as a critically weak leader, but this affair has shown that a Conservative-led government makes crime pay.

Maria Miller is donating her severance payment to charity.

What about the £40 grand she still owes.?

Where is plod?

hays - bloody good job but she should be paying out an awful lot more ..... she has brought disgrace not only to her party colleagues but to the whole of parliament

As my previous correspondence to the PMs office clearly had the desired result, I may consider a further missive suggesting Maria Miller should face investigation and potential prosecution.

I think any chance The Tory's had of re-election has all but disappeared, unless they ditch Cameron.

Difficult to prosecute Miller as she was cleared of fraud

Following a complaint by the Labour MP John Mann, the parliamentary commissioner for standards starting investigating the case in 2013.

In her report, Kathryn Hudson cleared the MP of making false expenses claims

The commissioner has no powers and just makes reccomendations.

The discrepancy sprung from the difference between the size of Mrs Miller's mortgage, which was £525,000 when she entered the Commons in 2005, and the £237,500 purchase price of the five-bedroom property.

The commissioner believed she should only have been able to claim expenses for interest payments on the original 1996 mortgage of £215,000 and additional claims were outside the rules.

The committee disagreed and said the claims should extend to additions to the mortgage. However, it also said Mrs Miller should apologise to the House of Commons because her "attitude" to the commissioner's inquiry had breached the parliamentary code of conduct.

She was milking the systems, but it is not fraud.

Hazy one.

You are living up to your name.

Who has cleared her of fraud?

Milking the system is not fraud???????, come off it if she knew she was milking the system by claiming too much in mortgage payments when she should have claimed less....that is fraud and she had hoped she wouldnt get found out on it.

Shes a crook. She should go before the law.

Ignorance is no defence when someone claims too much in benefits. Why should it be with MPs expenses.

It's very well known, that only Labour MPs commit expenses fraud:

In the 'MP's Expenses Scandal', when Denis MacShane eventually pleaded 'Guilty' it brought to six the number of MPs who had been convicted or pleaded guilty.

Not a single one was Tory, Lib Dem or from one of the nationalist parties. All six were Labour.

Well lets say its only labour MPs who have been CAUGHT fiddling expenses.

Instead of party point scoring I would have thought you would have had a look at the answer I gave to you on your query from this morning.!!

Perhaphs if we get the result from the petition it will be 6-1 in favour of labour.

But lets not forget Miller and Camoron are both guilty of stoking up this entire controversy AGAIN and at a time when MPs Street Cred is at an all time low.

Little wonder their is much increasing apathy among the electorate when it comes to voting day as the poster Cynic as pointed out time and time again, and he is right to do so.

Labour it would appear have learnt their lesson, Im afraid the same cant be said about the Tory party after this pathetic ongoing episode.

Big Dave is going for broke....




http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2600968/Well-time-Tory-vice-chairman-Michael-Fabricant-sacked-tweeting-relief-resignation-Maria-Miller-expenses-row.html

Hundreds of millions of pounds may have been wasted on a drug for flu that works no better than paracetamol, a landmark analysis has said.

The UK has spent £473m on Tamiflu, which is stockpiled by governments globally to prepare for flu pandemics,

The Cochrane Collaboration claimed the drug did not prevent the spread of flu or reduce dangerous complications, and only slightly helped symptoms.

The manufacturers Roche and other experts say the analysis is flawed.

The antiviral drug Tamiflu was stockpiled from 2006 in the UK when some agencies were predicting that a pandemic of bird flu could kill up to 750,000 people in Britain. Similar decisions were made in other countries.

Hidden data

The drug was widely prescribed during the swine flu outbreak in 2009.

Drug companies do not publish all their research data. This report is the result of a colossal fight for the previously hidden data into the effectiveness and side-effects of Tamiflu.

It concluded that the drug reduced the persistence of flu symptoms from seven days to 6.3 days in adults and to 5.8 days in children. But the report's authors said drugs such as paracetamol could have a similar impact.

On claims that the drug prevented complications such as pneumonia developing, Cochrane suggested the trials were so poor there was "no visible effect".

Goldie'

Here it is , 1.30 hours drive from Manila airport in Marikina city

Exec,

"ONLY Labour MPs commit expense fraud."

I would recall this and and consider.


"Expenses claims[edit]
Main article: United Kingdom Parliamentary expenses scandal
In May 2009 Jenkin was reported by the Daily Telegraph to have used £50,000 in expenses in order to pay his sister-in-law rent on the property he uses as his constituency home. Jenkin claimed that he was just paying "an honest and reasonable rent" for the property.[3]

On 27 October 2009 it was initially recommended that Bernard Jenkin pay back £63,250 by expenses auditor Sir Thomas Legg. This is the highest amount known to have been recommended after an audit of MPs' claims on second homes expenses.[4][5] This amount was reduced to £36,250 following an appeal.[6]


And of course if you live in a "duck house in a moat" there is a different interpretation of the laws!


-==============

I wonder sometimes about the departure of the Fox Liam and The Hunt and Murdoch.

But what do I know!


If you pay £50 for a bottle of wine that is petty cash, but more than somebody deserves on the "dole" when they can't get a job.

--------------
Stuff it.

This government standards stink.

Perhaps the cartoon has a solution!