Thursday, May 28, 2009

Troughers Poll.

Julie Kirkbride & Margaret Moran have become the 10th & 11th MPs to announce they are standing down of the expenses story. A far larger number of MPs look completely untenable so I'm going to put a poll up:

How many MPs are going to resign or stand down specifically because of the expenses story?

How many MPs are going to resign or stand down specifically because of the expenses story?
11 to 20.
21 to 50
51 to 80
81 or more.
pollcode.com free polls

At the moment it looks as though the Conservative's are getting rid of the most MPs but that might just be because they have acted the most quickly. One Labour blogger suggests that the Cameron strategy is to throw obscure back benchers to the sharks in order to protect the front benchers, which seems to apply much more clearly of the behaviour of Gordon Brown who refuses even to criticise the likes of James Purnell, Alaistair Darling and other cabinet ministers (except for Hazel Blears but that was a revenge knifing for her criticism of him last month).

6 comments:

Matthew said...

Maybe I'm mistaken, but no MPs have resigned so far, have they? Why is that? Do pension rights not get paid if you resign?

Ross said...
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Ross said...

Michael Martin's going to resign as an MP when he steps down from the Speaker's chair.

I assumed that the others didn't want to cause their parties a bye-election problem.

Matthew said...

I can't help but think they probably get more pension this way.

Really, if you think you've behaved sufficiently badly at work to quit, you should quit now, I'd have thought.

Ross said...

From what I understand they do continue to make pensions contributions, but they have less than a year to go and I'm not sure that increasing their pension pot by a couple of percent makes that much difference.

James Higham said...

Hey, I'm with the majority.