Knights in Parliament and their Corruption

In my last post on this subject I posed a few suggestions of how to examine the significance of knighted mps in parliament and whether one particular party was any more corrupt than the others. So below I've started with a list of Knighted MPs

(7 Featured on Nasty Knights Blog)
Sir Michael Spicer (Con)
Sir Alan Haselhurst (Con)
Sir John Butterfill (Con)
Sir Gerald Kaufman (Lab)
Sir Nicholas Winterton (Con)
Sir Menzies Campbell (Lib)
Sir Peter Viggers (Con)

And the rest with any allegations against them (or at least the rest I could find)

Sir Alan Beith (Lib) (see http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/mps-expenses/5364659/MPs-expenses-would-be-Speaker-Sir-Alan-Beith-and-his-wife-claimed-177000.html)
Sir Peter Soulsby (Lab) (see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8039273.stm#soulsby_peter)
Sir Stuart Bell (Lab) (see http://www.opendemocracy.net/blog/ourkingdom-theme/guy-aitchison/2009/05/12/sir-stuart-bell-wrong-again-on-expenses and http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8039273.stm#bell_stuart)
Sir Malcolm Rifkind (Con)
Sir Anthony Steen (Con) (see http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/may/21/mps-expenses-anthony-steen)
Sir Peter Tapsell (Con) (see http://www.louthleader.co.uk/news/Sir-Peter-Tapsell-MP39s-expenses.5325277.jp)
Sir Patrick Cormack (Con) (see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8043530.stm#cormack_patrick)
Sir George Young (Con) (see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8043530.stm#young_george and http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/mps-expenses/5364194/MPs-expenses-Sir-George-Young-claimed-127000-on-London-flat.html)
Sir Paul Beresford (Con) (see http://www.thisissurreytoday.co.uk/ashtead/MP-denies-dental-surgery-claim/article-1009276-detail/article.html)
Sir Michael Lord (Con) (see http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/mps-expenses/5431758/MPs-expenses-Sir-Michael-Lord-claimed-8000-for-garden.html)
Sir John Stanley (Con) (see http://www.thisistotalessex.co.uk/searching/MP-reveals-expenses/article-231597-detail/article.html)

So that puts the parties having (Total MPs for each party from UK parliament website http://www.parliament.uk/mpslordsandoffices/mps_and_lords/stateparties.cfm)

Conservatives - 13 Knights (Out of 193 MPs total = 6.7%)
Labour - 3 Knights (Out of 349 MPs total = 0.9%)
Liberal Democrats - 2 Knights (out of 63 MPs total = 3.2%)

Now the above information needs going through but one or two I think may be clean (if you call having huge salaries and then claiming a fair bit of money legitimately clean!), but certainly there are several more which can be added to the list that has featured on the Nasty Knights blog. It would be interesting to see whether knighted MPs are more likely to have dodgy expenses than 'normal' MPs too.

NB. This is a follow-on post to Knighthoods and Corruption

Knighthoods and Corruption

Okay, so I'm late posting about all the expenses stuff - criminal!

Well it should be, I'm not the first one to point out the comparison between the treatment of MPs who get to keep their gains with the minor punishment of resigning their seats and experiencing public shame to that of people struggling to get by on benefits who face possible imprisonment. If anything surely the punishment should be high for MP's who have both stolen more and are public figures who should be more accountable. Obviously, within the Socialist Party we have a policy of workers MPs on workers wages and expenses open to inspection which I think would be a damned good way of stopping this. But this isn't what I wanted to blog about today.

In the last few months a rather interesting website, Nasty Knights, has been set up after one of the authors of the Bent Society blog noticed that several knights (sir) had been involved in somewhat dodgy dealings. But over the last two weeks or so the blog has been inundated with posts as the expenses scandal broke and knighted MPs were up to their necks in it. So far the blog has chronicled 7 Sir MPs, they are

Sir Michael Spicer (Con)

Sir Alan Haselhurst (Con)

Sir John Butterfill (Con)

Sir Gerald Kaufman (Lab)

Sir Nicholas Winterton (Con)

Sir Menzies (Ming) Campbell (Lib)

Sir Peter Viggers (Con)

Personally, I think studying corruption and knighthoods is actually a farily interesting idea - especially seeing as it seems to be so common. I do have some suggestions to move this forwards though, especially with regards to knighted MPs.

Firstly, of the 7 presented above, 5 are Conservatives - does this mean that Tory knights are more corrupt or that only these have been highlighted? Also is the scale or type of claim important as regards to the party?

Secondly, how many more are there? What proportion of all the knights in parliament are they? And just how many knights are there in parliament anyway?

I think looking at these questions may help us get a decent picture of the extent of corrupt knights in parliament and help in getting some sort of baseline to study other areas of knighthood and corruption.

MP’s Pay and Student Funding

Over the last weeks story of Tory MP Derek Conway has been pasted all over the press. On top of his salary (of £60,675) and personal allowances (and paying his wife over £30,000 a year to be his assistant) he has been paying his sons roughly £10,000 a year as research assistants whilst they have been studying at university, all of this from public money. However, a House of Commons standard committee found that it was ‘unlikely’ that his sons had actually done this work, which has seen Conway suspended from parliament and the Tory whip removed from him.
It’s been suggested by some that he paid these allowances because his sons wouldn’t qualify for student loans whilst at university and needed some other money. I suppose this is what Tories and free-market proponents mean when they say people should be able to pay their own way! What is needed is a fully funded education system with living grants for all students.
This isn’t the only story of fraudulent behaviour by MP’s of late either, they seem to be appearing at a rate quicker than one a week at the moment. But fraudulent use of public funds is not the only way this system wastes public money, hospital trusts, local councils, universities and many other organisations have wasted billions on consultants advising them how to cut public services, sometimes spending more on consultants than they wished to save. To end this colossal waste, we need to end the capitalist system that creates it and replace it with socialist planning.