Monday, February 4, 2008

Nothing to report?

The leaders of all three major political parties have urged MPs to come clean about whether they employ family members, resulting in almost 180 confirming that they do.

As far as I know, not a dickey-bird relating to MPs from any of the other parties represented in the Commons.

Also a strange silence in the Northern Irish, Scottish and Welsh newspapers on the subject of their MPs' expenses. Of course it could simply be a fact that all the Plaid Cymru, SNP and DUPer MPs have no skeletons rattling about in the expenses cupboard. Or maybe it's just because the relationship between these MPs and their respective regional press is just that little bit more cosy?

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

I do not know about Wales and NI, but there is certainly no cosy relationship with the Scottish national press and the parliament.

If there were any major scandals in this area the Scottish editions of the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail would have been on them like a pack of wolves. These two papers are still campaigning against home rule over ten years since the referendum.

O'Neill said...

I find it hard to believe that MPs representing Scottish, N.Irish and Welsh constituencies are operating ona higher moral standard than their English counterparts.

Hen Ferchetan said...

It's a simple maths equation - there's so many more MP's in England then clearly there will be more scandals there.

Anyway, the biggest one yet has been a Welsh MP - our very own Mr Permatan.

O'Neill said...

HF
But out of the 200 plus MPs employing family, there is only our mutual friend Mr Hain from the Welsh, N.Irish and Scottish contingent?

Also it wasn't the Welsh press that brought Hain down...

Hen Ferchetan said...

The Welsh press consists of one national newspaper and the BBC.

That means that we don't have the partisan press which England has. It's the partisan press,a lthough very annoying in their bias, who do the best job of digging into the other party's problems.

The Western Mail does very little digging on controversial issues, happy to take it's lead from the London media, or on quotes from AM's, on such things.