Attack Ad running from 6 pm tonight in Morley and Outwood on local media websites Yorkshire Post, Yorkshire Evening Post, Morley and Outwood Observer and Wakefield Express from 6pm.

Transparency and anti-corruption campaigners at the Sunlight Centre have bought advertising space for a video which attacks Ed Balls for expenses abuses including flipping his house three times, claiming for a remembrance poppy wreath and taking an £89,000 payment for producing two pamphlets for the Smith Institute in 9 months.  The Smith Institute charity was closely linked to Gordon Brown and was criticised by the Charity Commission for supporting Brownite political projects.  Gordon Brown’s allies Lord Myners and Wilf Stevenson resigned from the Smith Institute follwoing the report and it was widely considered to be a slush fund for Brown’s leadership ambitions.

The advert includes footage of Ed Balls at Oxford University wearing a Nazi uniform.

”A flat rate of £25 may be claimed for any night which a member spends away from his or her home on parliamentary business.  No other payment in repspect of subsistence may be claimed”

After the expenses scandal, MPs voted for measures that included the production of receipts for everything claimed.  This was pending the outcome of the inquiry by the Committee on Standards in Public Life chaired by Sir Christopher Kelly.  To which the Sunlight Centre for Open Politics is planning to complile a more hardline report to be released at the same time as the Kelly report.  It has been reported by a House of Commons spokeswoman that MPs voted for the flat-rate £25 payment last year.

The flat rate £25 subsistence allowance replaces the £400 a month allowance which also required no receipts.  If  we take a typical MP who works 4 days a week over a month at their second home in London and claims the flat rate subsistence for each night they are away this will be the same as the £400 food allowance and again it will require no receipts.  To the public this will look as though little has changed in the expenses system, there is still no accountability, transparency or responsibility!

We must continue to wait for Sir Christopher Kelly’s report for real reform.

Rennard Headed

Brian Binley Liquor Letter