ElectionLeaflets.org

Can you spot what’s funny about this leaflet?

That’s right, it’s paid for out of MPs’ expenses, as you can see from the obvious fine-print.

Therefore this is not an election leaflet, even though it contains lots of photos of the candidate incumbent MP cutting ribbons, kissing babies, and generally doing the sorts of things that working politicians need to do in order to get elected in these unenlightened days.

This is what a real election leaflet looks like:

Can you spot the qualitative difference? No? That’s because, unlike the self-appointed committee of MPs who oversee the rules, you are not an expert. The difference is that one goes on about how great the party is, while the other is published by and for the interests of the candidate sitting MP who is up for re-election.

The mandate for devising this Communications Allowance “to assist in the work of communicating with the public on parliamentary business” was given to the Members Estimate Committee by a vote on 1 November 2006.

Now, the Committee could have checked out the sterling work being done by the volunteer websites TheyWorkForYou.com, PublicWhip (my one), and WriteToThem when considering how to facilitate effective communication between Parliament and the public, but instead they simply granted a new £6.46million annual allowance (£10,000 per MP on top of the £7,000 postage allowance) — with predictable results.

The Communications Allowance was formally established by a vote on 28 March 2007.

One month later the three Plaid Cymru MPs had used their allowances to place full page ads in the local press outside their constituencies in which their party logos were “not proportionate and discreet” during the run-up to elections for the Welsh Assembly. After a forensic analysis of the rules that were not broken, the Committee on Standards and Privileges asked the three MPs to refund the value of their expenses claim.

That was it.

Other MPs who have been busted for breaching the woolly rules…

… include Malcolm Bruce MP who showed photos of himself with a fellow LibDem MSP during the Scottish Parliamentary elections (report here), Sadiq Khan MP who featured his Labour Party rose logo too big (report here), and David Tredinnick MP who printed 40,000 copies of a glossy 4-page leaflet featuring numerous photos of fellow local Conservative Party members standing for re-election ahead of the June 2009 elections, as well as a three year old photo of himself shaking hands with David Cameron (report here).

For his impropriety, Tredinnick was asked to repay £1,945, which was “half the cost of printing and distributing the newsletter”. In my opinion, proper democratic compensation would have been to donate £1,945 to the campaigns of each of the opposition candidates in his constituency for the up-coming General Election.

For the most recent news, I recommend checking out Mr Stephen Byers – Third Report of Session 2009-10 where the original complaint was thrown out by the Committee on a technicality (his endorsement of the mayor standing for re-election on the Labour ticket came outside the new 28-day-prior-to-the-election rule), but the Department of Resources found issues with other parts of the leaflet.

Mr Byers was not amused by the fact that the Commissioner had “widened his inquiry beyond those specific issues that had been complained of”, to which the Committee replied: “This is not the first time that a Member has challenged a Commissioner’s interpretation of his remit.”

The lesson is that the politicians are going to sail as close to the wind as they can on this one. There will be problems wherever you look. This allowance is too new to have been through a General Election cycle, so we are entering new territory.

The Department of Resources receives the expenses claims for printing these so-called communications leaflets, and will they give free advice to any MP who wants to know if they are considering printing something dodgy.

So why the heck don’t they also take the opportunity to demand an actual copy of every single leaflet they are funding with public money so we can have them all put up on-line to see?

In the meantime, we — the public — will have to muddle along with only TheStraightChoice.org website, and occasionally we’ll grumble about how all the money is going to the pointless picture-fest of a website on the left, and not to the one on the right that contains actual political content of — you know — whipped votes and stuff.