Throughout the current global economic downturn, the Tories have been very keen to try and put the blame for everything on the Labour party - foreclosures in the US? unemployment in Japan? Bank failures in Iceland? All Labour's fault apparently,The Tories have been running a concerted campaign to use the phrase "Gordon Brown's recession" at every opportunity in the belief that if they repeat it often enough it will be true, or at least people will believe it is.
The truth is that this is a global phenomenon, but if you were looking for anybody in Britain to have caused it, our own MP, Francis Maude would appear to be as likely a culprit as anybody else.
In today's Observer there is a story about one of his business interests, his chairmanship of Prestbury Holdings. Very interesting reading. Despite (because of?) Maudes 'expert advice' for which he was paid handsomely - more than £100,000 - the company went into liquidation last month.
Before the company went bust, it was heavily involved in so-called sub-prime mortgages, one of the financial instruments that are widely blamed for starting off the credit crunch. At the same time as he was presiding over a company which was in the business of lending money to those who could not afford to borrow it, Maude was being quoted in the media criticising the culture of easy credit:
"Gordon Brown said there would be no more boom and bust, [but he] presided over the boom and this is the bust, fuelled by excessive debt and excessive lending," he told a meeting of business leaders last October.Former Labour minister Denis McShane called Francis Maude's behaviour 'blatant hypocrisy' and said:
If Cameron had a shred of integrity, he would be cleansing the Tory temple of the money-grabbers in his shadow cabinet and shaping a party leadership that is supposed to serve the public, not their own bank balances.Maude says he acted within parliamentary rules, as he also stated in relation to the expense claims of his that dominated the letters page of the West Sussex County Times this week. At least this time he did not have the chutzpah to also claim to be 'good value for money'.
It is time for MPs to take their job seriously and to stop having such extra jobs which are a source of conflicts of interest and a distraction from the job of representing the constituents who elected them in the first place. Our own candidate, Andrew Skudder, is on record as saying he would not take other employment if elected, but we would prefer it if taking extra jobs was not an option.
Too many MPs see their elected position as being a means to an end, a way to open to door to more lucrative employment. We believe that the job of being an MP is an end in itself, which pays well enough, and which is onerous enough to make extra employment both unnecessary and impossible - if it is being done properly.
Under current parliamentary rules we only know what extra jobs MPs have, but recent changes to those rules will make it necessary to also list how much time is spent on those jobs and how much is earned from them. Although we would have preferred an outright ban on extra jobs, this is a change that Horsham Labour supports 100% and we look forward to seeing just how much time our MP spends on other activities and how much he earns from them.