Baron Hanningfield will not pass go and not collect £200 expenses
Sometimes it looks like the guilty always walk free (as long as they can pay up that is), but every now and then, the Justice system has to throw us all a bone to stop us getting stark-raving furious and burning it all down.
And so it is that we’re being fed the latest story of a ‘bad apple’ ruining the system for everyone else. This time around, it’s our very own Baron Hanningfield, of Chelmsford, Essex (or, to give him his real name, Paul White). Former member of the probably corrupt and definitely crap Essex County Council, life long Tory and member of the Court of Essex University, White found himself in front of a less friendly court earlier this month and has been jailed for 9 month for fiddling his Peers expenses in the House of Lords. While it does look like he’s been sacrificed to make it look as though the courts do work when it comes to punishing theft from the public pocket, we shouldn’t feel too sorry for the 70 year old Peer – he has after all stolen around £14,000, claiming to have used it for overnight stays in London when he was actually at home and for travel expenses on days when he didn’t even go to work. There aren’t many jobs where you can not turn up and still get paid.
Of course the bigger picture here is that while he’s in prision, the rest of us are still being robbed – White’s childish-sounding deffence that “all the other peers were doing it” holds alot of truth. We shouldn’t celebrate too much (though it is bloody tempting) when one rich theif gets sent to jail – its where all of them belong after all!