Libertas challenges MEPs to bare all on expenses.

Libertas today organised a publicity stunt to highlight the lack of transparency over expenses from our MEPs. While MPs are under the spotlight, our MEPs are getting away with expense abuse on a massive scale.

Libertas today challenged them to bare all by publishing their expenses in detail, including receipts, for the last five years BEFORE the 4th June so that the voters can see where their money has been going.

 

Moral authority in politics?

Shocking news from Scotland. According to Alex Salmond, First Minister,

political institutions have lost their "moral authority" in the row over MPs' expenses

I beg to differ. Politicians lost their moral authority long ago. Before any of these expense scandals came out, trust in our politicians was at an all time low, and they were regarded as a money-grabbing sell-outs. People thought that they were crooks before. After the expense scandal, people know that they are crooks.

All of these politicians calling for the 'trust' to be rebuilt are living a fantasy. There was no widespread trust before, and there is almost none now. Publishing expenses doesn't rebuild the trust, it just means that we, the public, get to watch how they are spending our money because we definitely don't trust them to do it in private.

Do our political elites really think that paying money back and publishing expenses is seen as anything more than damage limitation? The fact is that they would NEVER have paid the money back OR published their expenses in detail if it hadn't been for the Telegraph.

If our politicians really want to build trust, they will need to be consistently trust-worthy over a very long period of time. Deselecting every single MP who has had to pay money back is only the first step. That includes David Cameron.

And next they need to surprise us. Reacting to public anger is not going to build the trust. We need innovative leadership.

The Stamp Out Sleaze campaign from Libertas is a good start, but it needs to be applied in practice. Unless we have MEPs and MPs following the principles and leading by example, we will be stuck with the same old politicians stuck in the same rut.

Stamp Out Sleaze Days 4 & 5

I am coming to this a bit later than I should, but Libertas has now released the final two pledges on its Stamp Out Sleaze pledge cards:

4. I will publish the details of all meetings with lobbyists.
5. I will never abuse my expenses to reward my family.

I can certainly see the importance of full disclosure with regard to lobbyists. It's not a pledge that will excite the masses, but hopefully those more interested in the working of Government will understand the importance.

As for hiring family members, there was a great news item out from Libertas today that summed this up: Tory MEPs are three times more likely to employ their wives

What has amused me immensely though is how much the Tories totally copied our pledges idea today for their launch, even down to using five of them. It's really quite outrageous:

“One – Conservative MEPs will publish online a breakdown of all office costs, signed off by a certified accountant. 
 
“Two – they will publish online details of all travel: to Brussels, to Strasbourg, to any other country. 
 
“Three – they will publish the names of each member of staff they employ.
 
“Four – they will publish details of all meetings with lobbyists and interest groups. 
 
“And five – all of the above will be subject to examination by a scrutiny panel. 

They already do number 3, so it's no big deal. Number five isn't a pledge; they should be doing that already. 1 & 3, however, are largely the same as our first pledge - to release all expenses in detail. Their number 4 was the same as our number 4. At least Cameron has realised the significance of this.

It's all very encouraging really. You know you are important because the other parties start copying you wholesale. 

Noticeably absent was a Tory promise not to hire family members, and it looks like they are happy for their MEPs and MPs to carry on accepting bribes too.

Stamp Out Sleaze Day 3

We are into Day 3 of Stamp Out Sleaze week. The pledge launched today was: "I will not accept 'gifts' of any kind". 

This addresses one of the most serious problems in politics today - our politicians are for sale. Few people can forget Peter 'freebie' Mandelson's Caribbean cruises and other 'gifts' that he has accepted. But this is just the most visible abuse of power. Politicians of all levels are being targeted with bungs/bribes/gifts/whatever you want to call them. 

Yet, despite all of the publicity, it still goes on. Our politicians claim that as long as they declare them, they are in some way no longer obligated to the businessses and billionaires buying their attention. Does anyone really believe this?

Given the shocking moral vacuum in Westminster exposed by the expense scandal over the past week, there is nothing that we shouldn't question. We simply cannot trust our politicians any more. We certainly can't believe them when they tell us that the 'gifts' don't compromise them in any way.

We pay our politicians well enough that they don't need to accept freebies - it is pure GREED that drives them to do so.

Libertas is the ONLY party that has pledged to refuse freebies. Let's hope some of the other parties copy our policies soon.

Libertas.eu most visited party website in the world

Today's bulletin from Libertas head office included this amazing snippet, about the continuing surge of interest in Libertas:

Libertas.eu, the website of the pan European people’s movement for more democracy, accountability and transparency in the EU, had more visitors mid-week than any other political party in the world. Figures from Alexa, the web tracking company, for Wednesday May 13th , show Libertas blazing ahead, leaving even the US Democratic party website trailing.

You can see the Alexa ranking information here: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/libertas.eu

Stamp Out Sleaze Day 2

The second pledge has been released today: "I will attend at least 90% of Parliamentary days."

It is accompanied by a report that the average attendance of MEPs in the European Parliament is just 77%, dragged down somewhat by UKIP's pitiful voting attendance of just 60%!

So why is the voting important? Because that's why we have so much bureaucracy coming from Brussels; it gets voted though in the Parliament. If our MEPs aren't there voting for or against it, we are unrepresented. Every time an MEP fails to vote, 800,000 British people lose their vote in the Parliament.

The fact that UKIP MEPs are the worst offenders by a wide margin is astonishing. For a party that claims to be the primary opposition to Brussels, they seem to be spending rather more time in the bar than actually voting and arguing against the mass of unnecessary laws spewing out of the EU Parliament.

In contrast, today's pledges makes it clear that Libertas MEPs will be there every day, working hard to change the EU and fighting against unwanted bureaucracy and waste.

I just wish the pledge had been for 100% attendance, but I suppose that it impossible due to other commitments.

Party Election Broadcast

Party Election Broadcast

There will be a Libertas Party Election Broadcast for the European Elections on BBC1 & BBC2 (England) on Tuesday 26th May

- BBC1 22:35
- BBC2 23:20

Sorry seems to be the easiest word

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Over 550 candidates!

It was announced today that Libertas is fielding over 550 candidates across Europe for the June elections. This is a monumental achievement, especially given that the party didn't even exist six months ago.

As far as I know, no other party has ever managed to stand in more than one country, let alone right across Europe.

Stamp Out Sleaze Day 1

In what has to be one of the most exciting political moves in a very long time, Libertas today began a Stamp Out Sleaze campaign designed to establish a whole new set of standards for political behaviour.

There will be five pledges in total, with the first one launched today; a promise to print all expense claims in detail, including receipts and discussion of why the payment was necessary.

Libertas MEPs will be the first to offer us real and detailed information about how they are spending our money, and to offer justification for why each payment was needed. If only we could have this level of analysis in every level of Government!

One only has to compare this to the disgusting display of greed and abuse of the expense system by the Tories and Labour, as exposed by the Daily Telegraph, to see just how far ahead of the game Libertas really are.

No other party has even come close to providing this level of information. The Tories claimed to be offering 'full disclosure' last year, but a quick look at what Cameron thinks of as 'full' shows that it was a lie. Here's one of the Tory expense documents. What does it tell us about our Tory MEPs? That they make phone calls, travel, hire their wives and... well that's it. It's hard to imagine how they could have made this information any less useful. 

UKIP, the supposed champions against the EU haven't even bothered to pretend to publish their expenses. Perhaps Nigel Farage doesn't want people knowing that he hires his wife too.

All in all, the election just changed to becoming a choice between the same old has-beens and the flag-bearers of honesty in politics; Libertas.

I can't wait for the next pledge release. 

Klaus won't give up yet.

It would appear that Vaclav Klaus isn't giving in as easily as Graham Watson and the other anti-democrats would like. Here is a press statement from him from last week (sorry for the poor translation in places):

Press statement by the President of the Czech Republic after the Senate vote on the Lisbon Treaty

I must express my disappointment that after an unprecedented political and media - foreign and domestic - pressure some senators resigned to the views they had publically held until recently, and with them also to their political and civic integrity, and they agreed with the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty. They thus turned their back to the long-term interests of the Czech Republic and what they put above them was the short-term interests of the current political representations and their own.

It is a very sad evidence of another failure of an important part of our political elites which we know so well from various similar moments of our history. Our politicians have always found some cowardly reasons of this sort: We are small, weak, we do not mean anything in the European context, we must conform, despite we do not agree with it. This is something I refuse. We either regained our sovereignty after November 1989, and together with it the responsibility for the fate of our country, or it was all a tragic mistake. This is a very up-to-date reminder in the year of the twentieth anniversary of November 1989.

Now, I will wait if a group of senators, as some of them announced, asks the Constitutional Court for another scrutiny of the Lisbon Treaty in relation to our Constitution. If this takes place, I will not be considering my decision to ratify the Lisbon Treaty or not before the Constitutional Court issues its decision.

My views on this matter are known and clear. I can’t afford to be resolutely against at one moment, and then, because it begins to fit my personal political and career objectives, easily change my opinion.

Let me emphasize that for this moment, the Lisbon Treaty is dead, because it was rejected in a referendum in one of the member states. That is why my deciding about the ratification of this Treaty is not the issue of the day.

Sign the Lisbon Treaty in Blood?

According to the Prague Monitor today, "The leader of the European Liberals in the European Parliament, Graham Watson, said, "Václav Klaus should now sign the document in blood - ahead of the EU summit in June. What we need now is certainty, not more obfuscation." 

It would seem that Graham Watson, Lib Dem MEP for the South West, still hasn't grasped the concept of democracy and is, like so many other european elites, applying undue pressure on Vaclav Klaus, the President of the Czech Republic to sign the Lisbon Treaty. Klaus has already publicly stated that he won't sign it until every other country has ratified it. 

Ireland is due to hold another referendum in October. In theory, the Lisbon Constitution should be dead and buried - killed off by the only country that allowed its citizens a vote. However, Graham Watson and the rest of the anti-democrats have run out of ideas and insist on pursuing their immensely unpopular federalist agenda.

Let's hope Watson and the others lose their seats in June.