Crikey, this is bizarre, so let’s take things one by one.
1. Ken Follett (husband of Barbara Follett, Labour MP and Equality Minister) tells Andrew Marr’s Sunday AM program that, “She [Barbara Follett] spends all of her allowances and all of her salary running her office and I actually subsidise it to the tune of at least a hundred thousand pounds a year.”
2. The Huntsman blog posts saying that (a) these subsidies need to be declared under the law, and (b) there’s no record of any such declarations.
3. Barbara Follett responds with a statement, exclusively published by Pink News, which states: “There are no donations involved”. Ah, that sounds nice and clear: no money from husband going to her office.
But wait, she then goes on to say, “The funds are either from my parliamentary income, or from the joint accounts that I hold with my husband, Ken Follett. As most of the money in these joint accounts is earned by my husband he is quite correct to say that the taxpayer is not subsidising his lifestyle. In fact, it is the other way around.”
But the opposite of her office funds subsidising her husband is, er…, her husband subsidising her office funds. So doesn’t that mean she’s just said there really are donations after all? And doesn’t her husband know what’s going on with their joint bank accounts anyway?
All in all, not the most convincing or clear denial of wrong doing we’ve seen in the last couple of weeks.
UPDATE: As The Huntsman points out in the comments, he’s now posted a piece pointing out that on another occasion Barbara Follett issued a joint statement with her husband unequivocally stating that her work “is heavily subsidised by her husband” and “Ken subsidises her”. Now, a subsidy means the provision of money, which in turn means, er…, giving a donation, doesn’t it?
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I think the more damaging thing are the 2 houses when many of her constituents can’t afford even one!
I have a follow-up today on the Follett story at http://tinyurl.com/2q6xtm
I think the more damaging thing are the 2 houses when many of her constituents can’t afford even one!
Pah, 2 houses? That’s nothing
Islington South Labour MP Emily Thornberry & her husband reported as having FOUR houses! Needless to say, she has been running campaigns for affordable housing …
The latest acquisition is covered here: http://andymayer.blogspot.com/2007/08/housing-hypocrisy-from-labours-5th-most.html
This is really all pathetic. So if an MP pays for part of their office out of his/her joint account with their partner, it has to be declared as a donation?
It may be so but if it is so it’s bollocks. The whole system is bollocks and I am disgusted by the pernickety and vindictive attitude taken by much of the media to trivial amounts of money (including too many people in this party – and it’s dodgy ground because sooner or later they will go for one of our people anyway).
As for attacking people for owning two houses, how infantile can you get?
It’s time for a sense of perspective on these things.
Two points Tony:
1. In itself, you don’t have to declare money from a joint account; it’s only if it’s someone else’s money and is used in a way that counts as a donation that you do.
That seems to me quite reasonable. After all, if joint accounts were exempt, I could give a large sum of money to the spouse of an MP who in turn could pay it into a joint account and the MP could then spend it: so I could give large sums of money to an MP in a completely secret manner. Would that really be desirable?
2. Depending on what the true sums are, in total they might well add up to over £1 million. I wouldn’t count that as trivial when you’re talking about one person’s finances (Bill Gates and co aside!).
Why is she having to donate her salary and spend £100k on top of that and her parliamentary expenses just to do the job of MP?
Is every other MP therefore not providing a good enough service?
Can only people who have spouses who can afford to subsidise their activities as an MP or are wealthy enough to do so themselves able to be good MPs?
In reality this amounts to a £100 000 annual bribe to her constituents in the form of more case workers etc which a less wealthy MP would not be able to afford to provide.