Tuesday, October 20, 2009

Justice 4 MPs

Astonishingly, Gordon Brown seems to have more political sense than the rest of his party’s MPs.

His enemies in the PLP have contrived to put themselves on the unpopular side of the hottest political issue of the year:

the Prime Minister had become the focus of backbench discontent after he urged MPs to accept the repayment demands of Sir Thomas Legg…
Brown allies said the Prime Minister was trying to bring "closure" to the expenses controversy. They said the public would not understand resistance to the paybacks ordered by the Legg review.
But Barry Sheerman, Labour chairman of the Children's, Schools and Families Select Committee, branded Mr Brown "cowardly" over his response to the crisis and complained that innocent MPs were being "thrown out of the lifeboat".
He confirmed he was considering running as a "Brown must go" candidate against Tony Lloyd, a Brown loyalist whose post as chairman of the Parliamentary Labour Party comes up for re-election next month. He said someone needed to "look the leadership of the party in the eye and say, 'This isn't good enough.'"

I have some sympathy with the view that MPs are being treated unreasonably harshly, but to campaign on that position is political suicide.

Trying to oust Brown because he’s colluding in the horsewhipping of the political class would be, as Sir Humphrey Appleby puts it, “courageous”.

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