It looks like cash-strapped Stephen Williams MP has come up with a new and imaginative way to squander taxpayers money.
How about paying to publish – in the local glossie for the yoof, Venue – a sartorially challenged picture of yourself hanging about in Clifton looking like yet another overpaid and underworked middle class local? Then, to cover the £500 cost, plonk a contact phone number on it and charge the whole thing to your brand new £10k MP’s communications allowance.
MPs were given this new allowance from April last year “for the purpose of assisting members with expenditure incurred wholly, exclusively and necessarily in communicating with the public on parliamentary business.”
Quite what Parliamentary business Williams thinks he’s urgently communicating by standing in front of the suspension bridge wearing Harris tweed and announcing “I’m on Youtube kidz” is not immediately obvious to the casual observer. But hey, what do we know?
Further news on Williams’ and his fellow MPs expenses also emerges. On top of the “paltry” £61k salary, the tax free £18k housing allowances and the receipt-free £250 a week cash mountain comes news of heavily subsidised parliamentary refreshments.
Just a week after revelations that the Frenchay and Southmead hospitals were spending just 50p on each patients’ meal, The Blogger’s reminded that hard done by MPs get subsidised meals and drinks at the House of Commons. A massive £5m a year is spent on this, equivalent to a 40% subsidy.
This works out at around £7k a year per MP or enough to buy 14,000 dinners at Frenchay hospital!
Stephen williams uses 5% of his communications allowance to make it easier for him to… Communicate. Bastard. The youtube link has videos including, amongst others, the petition to prevent the extension of Bristol International Airport, not gangsta rapping on the hood… kidz. He has all the contact information needed to lookup everything he has on the internet, not just a photo of him in tweed.
You still haven’t sent me your e-mail address. I’ll have to keep on posting on your blogs.
Yes. We’re getting there very, very slowly aren’t we? The comment function on this blog is there for you to post on. Well done!
‘Paltry Williams’ has clearly become ‘Podgy Williams’ on those free lunches.
I bet ‘An African’ is a member of his paid staff of sychophants.
Greed will get him no where.
The number of times people complain that… they don’t know who their MP is, their MP doesn’t make any effort for people to know how to get in touch, that MPs don’t bother communicating….
… and as soon as one of the Bristol MPs is seen doing so, people complain that their MPs are spending money!
You can please none of the people most of the time…
Glad to see you’re not letting the Lib Dems off Bristol Blogger – wouldn’t want Bristoltravelplan to think this blog is a Lib Dem front organisation after all now, would we ?
There is no excuse for anyone not knowing who their MP is, and how to contact them. Unless, possibly, they’re housebound, don’t have the internet AND never have any human contact.
Williams is definitely wasting money here.
Harris tweed? Nice to find a blogger who knows his/her fabrics.
Or he might just be betraying his age and his boyhood reading tastes 😉
boyhood – so the Blogger isn’t a girl?
I’m disappointed
DG
It’s Richard Hannay, isn’t it?