Cameron the Chancer

By Marjorie Smith

David Cameron’s pontificating about cutting ministers’ pay and MPs’ perks demonstrates a blatant and contemptuous hypocrisy that seems to know no bounds. It also reveals a shallowness of thought that does not bode well if the Tories win the next election.

Cameron has the gall to accuse others of abusing the parliamentary expenses system, when it can be convincingly argued that he and Shadow Chancellor George Osborne have acted with the most mendacious avarice.

Both are independently hugely wealthy. Cameron has in excess of £30 million. Osborne is worth £4 million and will inherit a great deal more. Yet they structured their personal affairs so that British taxpayers financed mortgages on their second homes of approximately £300,000.

Neither needed to have mortgages on their second properties. Neither needed to claim the lucrative second home allowance from the public purse, yet both did so. And Cameron still seeks to occupy the moral high ground over the expenses furore and lectures other MPs of all parties about how they must mend their ways.

He is increasingly resorting to gesture politics. His proposal to reduce ministers’ pay by 5 per cent is reminiscent of the calls Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair used to make for pay restraint from others. This was while they were anticipating the millions they were going to make once they quit British politics.

A 5 per cent reduction in the Prime Minister’s salary is nothing to a rich man such as Cameron. However, he will use the gesture to cut public service pay and jobs and impose worse jobs. It’s going to be very bad news for thousands of low-paid workers in public services.

The Tory leader’s idea of introducing a big hike in the price of subsidised food and drink at Westminster is typical of this calculating chancer who fails to think things through as he chases the cheap headlines Britain’s pliant and lazy popular press are increasingly happy to provide. The more upmarket media then follow suit, as they do not wish to be seen as out of step on a hot political topic.

Cameron and Osborne are penny-pinching political parvenus. They have only been in Parliament for eight years and neither has any ministerial experience. They combine social ignorance with an astounding duplicity.

The Tory leader has been extremely sanctimonious over the MPs’ expenses scandal. He was lauded in his local newspaper, the Oxford Mail for having expenses records that took up only 20 pages, while some of his colleagues needed 90 to itemise everything. What the Oxford Mail neglected to point out was that Cameron had claimed very close to the maximum amount, so he had no need to pad out his expenses any further. Cameron claimed a total of £141,820 over a five-year period on his second home allowance.

Cameron and Osborne are happy to advocate cuts in living standards for the many while they are featherbedded by family wealth and the taxpayer-subsidised purchase of lavish second homes. Osborne was also able to avoid paying significant amounts of capital gains tax.

Cameron asked why MPs should be able to buy a pint of Fosters for £2.10 in a House of Commons bar when it can be nearly double that in a pub. For his information, Wetherspoons is currently selling Fosters for £2.89 in its Whitehall pub – that’s just 200 yards from the House of Commons. Cameron may pretend otherwise, but is out of touch with ordinary people and the everyday costs they face.

He claimed £5.8 million could be saved if subsidies for food and drink in the House of Commons were scrapped. He is not so much in tune with public anger as pandering to crude populism.

The people who would mainly suffer if Cameron’s proposal were implemented are low-paid parliamentary support staff and MPs’ frequently under-paid employees. As the recent report from House of Commons Administration Select Committee states: “The refreshment department serves drinks, snacks and meals to several thousand customers a day. The vast majority of these customers are not Members.”

One reason why the Commons subsidises its refreshment department is the unsocial hours which its employees have to put in because of Westminster’s variable working day. With sittings often ending late in the evening and with no consistent finishing time, it is no wonder that the cost of doing business in politics does not correspond to the financial demands of the tuck shop at Eton.

And the main reason why the Commons has traditionally kept unsocial working hours is so that MPs could pursue their primary and more lucrative income source (often in the City or the law courts) and pop into Westminster later in the day. The main beneficiaries of these arrangements have invariably been Conservative MPs.

Incidentally, the approximate size of the unnecessary mortgage on Cameron’s second home, which enabled him to chisel in excess of £20,000 a year in parliamentary expenses (more than £140,000 over five years) is nearly matched by his wife’s annual salary of £300,000 in 2006 alone.