Repaying Members of Parliament must stand down.

David Cameron on GM TV this morning has stated that Conservative Party MPs requested to repay cleaning and gardening expenses will not be allowed to stand again for Parliament in his party if they refuse repayment. This is not good enough. Let it be quite clear what has happened here. There were no previous limits on what may have been considered reasonable in so far as cleaning and gardening costs for MPs were concerned. The investigating, former and senior civil servant has decided to set some retroactive standards as a yardstick for determining what the general public might consider reasonable. BUT all MPs when submitting their claims signed a declaration stating that the expenses were incurred exclusively and necessarily in the fulfilment of their parliamentary duties, there is very little way that cleaning or gardening expenses could really be seen to meet that criteria. Therefore those being asked to repay money have seriously broken all bounds of decency and perjured themselves when signing the expense declaration. The mortgage, capital gains problems remain to be resolved. An incoming parliament of honest, non-Labour, non-Tory and non-LibDem MPs might choose to consider the pension packages payable to the presently retiring MPs, who have presided over the destruction of the country's democracy, economy and sovereignty in the period since 1992, as this blog has previously and frequently suggested.