Dirty Thieving Bastards: Chris Davies Berates Bournemouth Libs

I'm not sure Mr Nick Clegg will be thanking Mr Chris Davies for this contribution by election time. Hat tip: A tweet from Political Scrapbook. Perhaps not even by the end of the week. Never mind over-shadowing Cable's weaselry as Sky News suggest this one could overshadow even the great leader's speech.

You know the way you're taught to focus on an individual or two in a large audience you're speaking to? Or in this case ranting at. Even now protractors are being applied and the whereabouts of PR Paul Rowen MP in the conference hall is being established.

OK, it's bloody silly really focusing on 40p spent on an intern's meagre luncheon rations. A banana! He's bananas! Ho ho ho.

But not as silly as spending seven paragraphs rebutting such normally water off a duck's back free speech now is it? Or threatening legal action with a false start and then even more whipped up hysteria. Largely about bananas. With deadlines coming and going with not a squeak from old banana boots who gamely admits to having had a million pounds of salaries and expenses.

PR Paul Rowen's far greater crimes against allowances may or may not be entirely "within the rules" but this does not make them any less despicable when the public can scent blood and have totally re-calibrated what's acceptable.

PR Paul Rowen MP's office tenancy is one contrived with a local Lib Dem landlord and a share with the Lib Dem political activity. Don't let those two doors fool you. There is a bat staircase and no demarcations between MP, Lib Dem group, party politics!

PR Paul Rowen MP pays a tithe to his Regional Office, which incidentally has an office share with Chris Davies MEP seen ranting above, which tithe Rowen can scarcely explain.

PR Paul Rowen MP employs people who are expressly described in Lib Dem documents as being party political. That would surely be against the rules?

PR Paul Rowen MP takes stupid little adverts in party political literature. Using tax money. Looks like cross subsidy that. Certainly a grey area. At best it's really appalling value for money.

PR Paul Rowen's receipts included countless beverages and also TV Services £9.99.

PR Paul Rowen's mortgage is twice that of the admittedly slightly thinner John "Weightwatchers" Leech MP.

PR Paul Rowen paid tax pounds to some local loons for a video we've never seen.

PR Paul Rowen also pays an unswervingly partisan local publisher tax money to build his web site.

PR Paul Rowen claims he gave his Councillor allowances to (mostly) Catholic Charities but he has failed to produced the promised account of all this.

PR Paul Rowen's Rochdale Lib Dem Party have not submitted accounts for YEARS and have recorded precious few donations. Yet they lost a member defecting because of a regular donation scheme or "tithe" which has been calculated to raise some three times the threshhold for accounts and some seven times what will be the permitted election spend.

If Chris Davies MEP was NOT looking at PR Paul Rowen MP and his ilk he bloody well should have been, though to be fair most of these Lib Dems appear to be "at it" squirreling away your tax money for campaigning. By hook or by crook. Within the rules or not quite.

And let's be clear here Chris Davies MEP can hardly be seen as in the clear himself. He uses tax pounds to take adverts in political literature and he uses tax pounds to make political donations to all forms of Libdemology. Not to repeat the mention for the big slice of the office rent.

Lib Dems appear to think that little gags and gimmicks to separate cash from the tax payer pot and divert it into the campaigning pot are fair game. It is almost institutional and endemic among their cadre it sometimes seems. Chris Davies MEP states bold as brass on his website that he gives travel money that he is forced to claim from the EU to party politics (and charity).

To my eyes putting money into a fund that pays for the cost of getting you and your chums re-elected and which pays for your political chums to be employed is extraordinarily close to pocketing it directly. It is simply called delayed gratification.

Filling political campaign coffers with such expenses-to-donations schemes, bold as brass in Chris Davies MEP's case, with a certain amount of shamefulness in PR Paul Rowen's with use of gaming "Printing Societies" that are unaccountable money generators, this is FUCKING WITH DEMOCRACY and USING THE PEOPLE'S MONEY.

Other MPs and MEPs pocketed a bit of money in the here and now. Davies and his ilk appear to be reinvesting it so they can go round again. "Another five years!" And for Rowen "Another Million Pounds!"

If and when all these Lib Dem chancers are caught out and their "within the rules" (possibly) tricks are exposed I suspect that Mr Chris Davies MEP's rant will be on power play in some TV stations. I look forward to that day.