Day two of Blackoutgate, and the great sleaze-hunt continues, as we humble taxpayers continue to plough through the sorry trough that is the MPs’ expense claims to find out what they’ve been spending our money on.
And with 456,000 documents of spindly writing, crumpled receipts and, lest we forget, enormous black blobs to trawl through, all we can say is – thank heavens for you lot. The Guardian’s crowdsourcing experiment, in which we are asking readers to help us work through the documents and flag up anything interesting, has brought you out in force.
(Bear with us while we load every MP’s documentation into an interactive format; it’s a huge job for our IT team and I’m assured we’ll have everything up very shortly.)
Two claims are currently leading the way in terms of numbers of readers flagging them as interesting: this nonsensical claim by Gordon Brown for £3,817.38, which is apparently what the PM considers freedom of information in action, and the £1,000 claimed by George Galloway for food covering a period which, he clearly feels, he has no obligation to reveal. As reader cake_eater notes: “Reasonable for a long period of time, ludicrous for a weekend!”
Gerald Kaufman’s £225 pen (“Wholly … necessary, don’t you know” notes steveroe) has also excited plenty of interest, and why is Celia Barlow, Labour MP for Hove, claiming for a rail ticket bought with a Young Person’s Railcard? Well spotted, goodcaptain and others. Barlow later explained that the ticket was for a member of her staff.
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I’m laughing. This is like a treasure hunt and it is catching on.
Can we do this in Canada?
If it would help us find where the Sponsorship Scandal money disappeared into the Liberal coffers, I say bring it on!!