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Denis MacShane MP gets party suspension lifted

July 4, 2012 1:27 pm

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Back in October 2010, Denis MacShane MP had his expenses file referred to the Metropolitan Police by the Standards and Privileges Committee. He was subsequently suspended from the PLP. In a statement released by the party at the time, a Labour Party spokesperson said:

“Following a referral by the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards to the Met Police Service, the Labour Party has today suspended Denis MacShane from the Parliamentary Labour Party and the Whip pending the outcome of any investigation.”

Yet today, it has been announced that the Met will take no further action. MacShane has therefore had his administrative suspension lifted by the party. A spokesperson this afternoon said:

“In view of this decision the Labour Party will lift its administrative suspension of Denis MacShane with immediate effect.”

The question is – why did it take the Met nearly two years…?

jaime taurosangastre candelas

I had no idea that a “damp and ramshackle” garage could be worth £125,000 in rent to the owner of the house (Mr D MacShane) over 7 years as a constituency office, or that an MP needs 11 laptop computers.

It is a very good thing for taxpayers that these things are legal.

Does anybody want to rent my garage? It is well made with a concrete floor, shelves all around (although I need to sand them a bit, the wood is still rough) and light and power sockets with access to running water with a tap on the out side. It is not “damp or ramshackle” at all. I only have 6 separate power sockets, so if you want to charge all of your laptops at once I will have to install extra sockets. I do believe I can beat Mr MacShane’s rate of £17,857 a year – shall we agree on only £15,000 a year? This seems to me to be very cheap.

I will certainly tell the domestic and VAT tax inspectors, my mortgage company, my house insurance company, the local council and anyone else who needs to know of the change of purpose in the use of my garage, should anyone rent it from me.
- treborc
  
  Well of course he would say the Police found no case to answer.
  - jaime taurosangastre candelas
    
    That is the point. The rules are ridiculous, and it is the body of MPs themselves who voted in the rules. We now find that some huge proportion of the claims made were technically legal, because those were the rules, but morally completely unsustainable.
    
    Renting your own garage to your CLP for £125,000 and claiming the money from the public account for 7 years does not in my judgement sound very moral, even if it is was technically legal. I wonder what the CLP did with the garage without public access, and every photograph showing it to be just a garage that needs some paint, not an office. Maybe they stored election materials there.
    
    It is certainly expensive to rent a garage for nearly £18,000 a year, but it is the taxpayer who pays, so no one cares. Except I do, because that is not right and not a good use of public money.
    
    Dennis MacShane should be ashamed of himself and pay back the money, and the Labour Party should be ashamed of him and tell him to leave. It should have done that on Day One, not suspend him and now allow him to creep back like the moral slug he appears to be.
    - Peter Barnard
      
      Jaime,
      
      A constituency office is not a CLP office and Mr McShane did not “rent his own garage to his CLP.”
      - Peter Barnard
        
        Correction : “An MP’s constituency office is not a CLP office ….”
      - treborc
        
        The bloke has been an idiot but the charge was he had cheated on the £125,000 since the police investigation has I take it not proven, then it will be the constituents who will decide his fate at the next election.
        
        But we have all seen the greed of these people and sadly a lot of voters are being turned off politics by the day.
      - Bill Lockhart
        
        An idiot? On the contrary, I’d say he has been just clever enough.
      - treborc
        
        Well of course your right, but then again will people like this get the voters back that labour needs.
      - jaime taurosangastre candelas
        
        Peter,
        
        you are correct – I was too loose with my phrasing. I do not believe that undermines in any way the point I make about Dennis MacShane, but I am very happy to make clear that the Labour Party at constituency level (or by implied sanction, at national level) is not associated with the taking of public money for the use of his garage.
        
        I still believe the Labour Party should have sacked him instead of suspending him, however. To put this into context, the nearly £18,000 a year is about what a national average wage earner takes home in their pay per year after paying tax, and MacShane rented out an old and shoddy garage in return for that sum. It is not what you would expect of a Labour MP. You expect the tories to be up to tricks like that, but not Labour.
      - Peter Barnard
        
        Thanks, Jaime.
        
        I could not possibly speculate about (in this context) tricks that Conservatives may get up to, but certainly I was horrified that Labour MPs had been on the fiddle.
        
        As Dennis Skinner remarked in the HoC about two years ago, “No-one starves on £65,000 a year.”
Bill Lockhart

” The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson.
john p Reid

The Mcpherson report took two years, Should people be judged sentence and found guilty straight away
- treborc
  
  Well they did with the Riots John, may of them stole bottles of water, and yet labour MP’s who stole thousand walked free in months, one law for one group another for labour MP’s
  - john p Reid
    
    Well they did with the Riots.may of them stole bottles of water,and that (being found guilty judged and sentenced by magistrates within days) was wrong too.
Daniel Speight

It’s a shame that the suspension has been lifted. I guess I must be very old-fashioned in that I hope for, even if I no longer expect, a higher level of morality from Labour than I do from the Tories. I know we often don’t live up to this, and I’m being unfair to some of the old ‘One Nation’ Tories from before the phrase was devalued by the likes of Cameron, but MacShane has been fiddling and deserves to be sent packing.

This Party is a moral crusade or it is nothing.

You see if it is Wilson’s moral crusade then we shouldn’t be carrying the crooks and spivs along with us. It almost makes one want to convert to protestantism.
Hugh

“why did it take the Met nearly two years…”

Maybe the police had a hard time believing that such flagrant dishonesty for personal enrichment wasn’t against the law. You’re wrong, incidentally, about the question this poses. The question is, as so often is, Are the CPS totally bloody useless or just moderately so?

Still, now that there’s no ongoing investigation it’s a relief to know Denis will be able to speak openly about these expenses and resolve any concerns the public might have about paying himself rent on his garage and shoveling money to his brother for translations.

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