Fitaloon at MicroShaft

Erm, what about the £500,000+ that’s just been spent on the Calman report which DC intends to kick into the long grass FL? Come on now, let’s be fair here.

Congratulations. This is the first blog post I have seen which gets to the crux of the matter. (I’ll add your link to my blog.)

I will confess that I am a big supporter of Tony Blair, something I do not feel about Mr Salmond.

Still, even if I thought Blair was the devil incarnate THIS is not the point. Salmond and his mean-minded nationalist colleagues felt SO strongly in 2004 that the then PM should be impeached – (obviously he was worse than any other PM in the last 150 years, since impeachment hadn’t been used over that period) – that they used OUR money … voters’ money for legal advice on how to do it!

WHAT?! Including the money of those Labour voters who had voted in Blair’s government twice and soon to be three times (2005), even two years after the Iraq war? And they thought THIS was the right thing to do?

If they felt so assured in their cause, couldn’t these MPs have begged or borrowed or raised at coffee mornings this kind of cash? Especially since Salmond insists (wrongly) that MOST people were against the Iraq war?

And why, if it was NOT a stunt, did they not pursue the matter, since the legal advice from Cherie Booth’s Chambers(oh, the irony) were supposedly favourable to the would-be impeachers? Did they have second thoughts on using any more public money for this wrong-headed pursuit?

Compared to ALL the other expenses in the recent furore I DO think this is the MOST CORRUPT misuse of public money from ANY of them. “Office expenses” were described in the MPS’ Green Book as for “constituency work”. Nowhere does it say they can be used for advice aimed at destroying a prime minister and, probably as a result, bringing down a government.

Is there a clue in the fact that this government was BRITISH and not Scottish?

Not that I’m quick to accuse people of treacherous/seditious acts, mind you!

Sadly, I don’t see Salmond being criminally charged for this, though there are probably historical precedents.

This ‘awful’ government – the one that brought devolution to Scotland – is now re-visiting the repealing of sedition laws, because it seems the whole country is seditiously inclined! That’s free speech and human rights for you, Messrs Blair & Brown.

It’d be a nice historic footnote if the last entry into the sedition entry on Wikipedia read something like this:

“The last use of the Sedition Laws in Britain was in 2009 when Alex Salmond and several other SNP MPs, along with three Plaid Cymru MPs, were found guilty of using taxpayers’ money for legal advice on bringing down Prime Minister Blair. They were each sentenced to six months’ community work and ordered to pay £100,000 each into Tony Blair’s “Campaign for Democracy” fund (initially aimed at informing third world states on the meaning of true democratic accountability.)”

In the end all I really expect is that Salmond will be ordered to pay the moneys back by Lyon, probably soon, to avoid an official hearing. Ditto his coup-plotting friends.

They should have done that already if they were really “honourable ladies and gentlemen”.