Analysis Breaking

Right-winger Byrne found guilty of using public-paid staff for mayor campaign – but let off

Yet again ‘it’s ok if you’re a right-winger’ as bullying Blairite MP receives no sanction despite using public money to run his failed mayoral run as Skwawkbox revealed exclusively two years ago

Blairite MP Liam Byrne has been found guilty of using publicly-funded parliamentary staff on his failed West Midlands mayoral campaign – as Skwawkbox revealed exclusively in April 2021.

But Byrne will face no penalty, despite the finding – and won’t even have to repay the money he misused. The parliamentary panel decided its own investigation took too long and it would be ‘difficult’ to calculate exactly how much he would have to repay.

The Parliamentary Standards Authority (PSA) decided Byrne had misused a single member of staff on his campaign. However, sources from Byrne’s team said at the time that he was using half his parliamentary staff on his campaign:

Basically half his team have left and the rest are his parliamentary staff and he’s making them work full-time on the mayoral election [which is] not parliamentary work.

MPs are not permitted to use staff paid from public funds for political work. However, Byrne – who was also found guilty of bullying sick staff in a separate investigation last year – is being let off scot-free and appeared barely able to contain his glee in a statement from his office in which he claimed it’s MPs who need protecting – and, with no discernible trace of shame, that he agrees with ‘protecting the public purse’:

…stronger safeguards are needed for MPs, such as volunteer agreements and contractual clarity around delivery of set hours where time was worked flexibly, to guard against lines ‘getting blurred’ between political and parliamentary work.

As such, Mr Byrne strongly supports the recommendations made by the IPSA investigator that IPSA contracts now need reform to ensure protection of the public purse and profoundly thanks [the PSA investigator] for her exhaustive investigation.

Let off on the excuse that the investigation took too long and it would be ‘difficult’ to work out how much. The saying that ‘it’s ok if it’s a right-winger’ rears its poisoned head again.

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12 comments

  1. Are Red Tories mors or less corrupt than Blue Tories
    Its Close
    One thing for sure, neither would pass the Smell test

    1. Thanks for this.
      I naively thought it was because there was “no money left…….”

  2. Un-f’kin-believable. The slimier you are, the more you get away with.

    And the prick has the temerity to call for the protection of the public purse? I want the knobhead a fight, I’m that angry.

    1. Leave it out Toffee. It ain’t worth the effort. He’s vile. The system is bent. Corruption is taken for granted and strikers are greedy extreme right-wingers. Be happy with our leader, not knobhead but our real unelected one, with the offshore missus and the rolled-up shirts. We’ve got to get ready to fight China. Just as soon as we have worked out how to sanction them without harming all of our economies which are not in recession. I’ve got a plan. Can’t say too much yet, but it involves parachuting Jason Statham and Idris Elba into Bejing. Ah, you can guess the rest.

  3. And apparently, neil coyles’s been readmitted to the shower o’ self-indulgent overly-arrogant, racist retards.

    They’re welcome to him. They’re NEVER getting my vote.

    1. It was ‘alcohol wot done it’ don’t you know! Alcohol does not turn you into a racist, just accentuates or lets slip what is already there. Bloody disgraceful.

  4. Mr Rules, Sir Keir, No-leader of Labour Starmer is like all stalinist authoritarians. He thinks rules are to control people and keep them in their place/ keep ’em down. If he doesn’t want (need) to control you, then you can break every rule in the universe and it hardly matters.

    I can’t wait till our toy-town political system makes Starmer Prime Minister. It’ll b like Boris on Steroids – kosher steroids of course!

  5. Toffee
    By the skin of your teeth
    Backed them to stay up
    For my Brother in Law
    Respect kidda

  6. On another matter:
    I have just come across this quote which appeared in The Atlantic, a determinedly pro-establishment US magazine, in 2016.
    [“The competition between the Saudis and the Iranians,” Barack Obama told The Atlantic, “requires us to say to our friends as well as to the Iranians that they need to find an effective way to share the neighborhood (sic) and institute some sort of cold peace.”].
    Obama’s VP is, of course, now US President and he is spitting feathers that the Saudis and the Iranians appear to have done just what Obama wanted, and even more – what appears to be developing into a “warm peace”.

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