British Prime Minister Gordon Brown on Saturday was forced into a humiliating retreat over the expenses of members’ of parliament (MPs) to avoid defeat in the House of Commons.
Ministers are now frantically seeking a compromise deal after accepting that the proposed flat-rate allowance for attending parliament, announced with great fanfare five days ago in a ground-breaking YouTube video, would be rejected in a vote.
One Cabinet aide said the government faced a “humiliating defeat” if it put the measures to a free vote, adding: “Even our lot won’t have it.”
CLIMBDOWN
The climbdown came as Stephen Byers, a former Cabinet minister, called on Brown to scrap ID cards and the replacement of the Trident missile program because of the recession, warning that it would be a “fraud on the electorate” if all the parties were not open about cutbacks needed to balance Britain’s books.
His words reflect a growing divide in Cabinet over whether ministers should now admit that specific major programs will have to be axed after the election, with the British Business Secretary Peter Mandelson pushing for what would be a major change of strategy and Brown resisting.
Byers has long supported both identity cards and the nuclear deterrent but said he could not justify to vulnerable constituents the respective £5 billion (US$7.3 billion) and £70 billion bills when basic public services were threatened by the economic crisis.
The humbling over expenses and the remarks by Byers mark a challenge to the authority of the prime minister that the opposition Tories (also know as the Conservatives) moved swiftly to exploit, accusing Brown of bungling.
“He should never have put his ideas on YouTube,” a senior Tory source said.
“He should have waited until the three leaders had had a meeting and then he wouldn’t have to have this embarrassing climbdown,” the senior Tory said.
Harriet Harman, the leader of the house, signaled a rethink when she said that the government “still have to find a formula which will reassure the public and MPs” on replacing the controversial second homes allowance, which compensates MPs for having to maintain a base in their constituency and the capital.
Brown wanted to ditch the allowance and introduce a flat-rate payment that MPs could claim for every day they attended parliament.
That was rejected by both the Tories and the Liberal Democrats, the UK’s third biggest party, which say such a system has been abused in Brussels.
MPs are privately concerned that a similar overnight allowance in the Lords is open to abuse.
Harman and Nick Brown, the chief whip, are now in talks over modifying the proposals, which would still involve an attendance allowance but with new scrutiny to ensure MPs actually spend time in the Commons or stay overnight, rather than just clocking on and leaving.
“We want to ensure the system is not open to abuse and it is tied to direct need,” a source in the prime minister’s office said.
Brown still wants MPs to vote on the issue this week as planned.
There is cross-party agreement on other reforms including ensuring that the House of Commons, rather than MPs, employs staff — so politicians’ relatives cannot be hired without scrutiny — and clamping down on earnings outside parliament.
SKEPTICAL
However sources close to David Cameron, the Tory leader, said that while he was prepared to renew talks, he was skeptical that a flat-rate system could ever be acceptable.
He favors a form of second homes allowance that would only cover the costs of accommodation and domestic bills, with MPs required to provide receipts.
Cameron himself will today promise to run a “government of thrift” where ministers would be sacked for wasting money and promoted for finding cuts.
Civil servants would also be legally bound to save taxpayers money.
He will tell the Conservative spring conference in Cheltenham: “On my watch it will be simple: If you do more for less you get promoted; if you do less for more, you get sacked.”
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
STOPOVERS: As organized crime groups in Asia and the Americas move drugs via places such as Tonga, methamphetamine use has reached levels called ‘epidemic’ A surge of drugs is engulfing the South Pacific as cartels and triads use far-flung island nations to channel narcotics across the globe, top police and UN officials told reporters. Pacific island nations such as Fiji and Tonga sit at the crossroads of largely unpatrolled ocean trafficking routes used to shift cocaine from Latin America, and methamphetamine and opioids from Asia. This illicit cargo is increasingly spilling over into local hands, feeding drug addiction in communities where serious crime had been rare. “We’re a victim of our geographical location. An ideal transit point for vessels crossing the Pacific,” Tonga Police Commissioner Shane McLennan
RSS