PANTOMIME FARCE..

Yesterday Lord Taylor of Warwick was jailed for 12 months after being convicted of  fiddling his  House of Lords expenses and allowances to the tune of £11,000.   However, rumour has it that he might well be released after serving just three months of his sentence.

Now this is a peer of the realm, appointed to the highest office of the land with all the privileges that entails. But having cheated the taxpayer, sullied what little is left of the reputation of the House and generally brought the game into disrepute, we taxpayers might feel entitled to expect that with his kind of record he would not be allowed back to resume his seat once he`s been released.

Not a bit of it.   There seems to be no legal power by which Lord Taylor can be debarred from re-entering the Lords, turning up when he feels like it (the Tory whip having been rightly withdrawn) and trousering the £300 a day allowances and any other expenses to which he may be `entitled` under this daft regime.

Yesterday I went on about the lack of natural justice in football - a world which is peripheral to the things that really matter in life - but the bloated, insular world of the House of Lords seems to be immune not only to any  natural justice for the fiddled taxpayer but also to any sense of propriety, accountability or common decency if they continue to allow the Taylors, Uddins and shortly to be joined Hanningfields of their world to carry on regardless.  

Incidentally, there seems no evidence that `Baroness` Uddin, who brought fiddling to an art form by pocketing over £100,000 through false claims has paid any of it back, as she was ordered to do.   She may have been suspended from the House of Lords until August 2012 but again there will be nothing to stop her going back to claim whatever allowances and expenses she can.  Not sure you could make it up.

In a way, it`s a bit like FIFA - an unelected fiefdom, unfit for purpose - and yet another example of an institution where reform is sorely needed but unlikely to happen.  Turkeys don`t vote for Christmas, of course.....but still the pantomime goes on.  Oh yes it does!