Parliament's Latest Scam.

While Britain is facing the worst economic and social crisis for nearly a century, while the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, while corporations steal money from both customers and taxpayers alike, while children can't get enough to eat and old age pensioners face a freezing winter unable to afford the cost of heating their homes, what are our MP's doing? Last week they were busy discussing whether they should award themselves a 40% wage increase. This week they are busy trying to hide their latest scam from the public on the grounds of "national security." So what is their latest scam? It goes like this. An MP buys a very expensive London house as a "second home" to live in while performing his duties in Parliament. The mortgage on this is paid by the taxpayer, even though, once its paid for, the MP gets to keep it and any profit he or she can make out of it when its finally sold. Unfair enough, you might think - but it gets better, at least if you're an MP. Once bought it can then be rented out, the profit from this pocketed and another house can be bought using taxpayers money to build up the MP's property portfolio. But two MP's acting together can, it seems, go one better - renting out their houses to each other paid for - you've guessed it - by the taxpayer and effectively getting the public purse to pay for their property portfolio twice. Of course this would be obvious if MP's had to publish their addresses and who their landlords are - so they've blocked this by citing "security" concerns. You can see their point. Not only would we then know which MP's are exploiting this loophole, we would also know where they live and where we can find them when an angry public start throwing hangmen's nooses over lamposts.