Matthew's Website

I feel I owe a retraction from my previous piece: matthewhutton.com/2009/03/uk-democracy-s…

The MP’s last week published their expenses in full after blacking out almost all of the detail – unfortunately they didn’t quite black out enough:

Now aside from blacking out the class of travel, the number of people travelling, the ticket type and the destination and start points – none of which are actually national security issues (which is the only reason not to publish them) – ultimately if you are doing something you don’t want to reveal you have to use your £60k salary to fund it.

Unfortunately he hasn’t quite blocked out all the useful information on the ticket. The ticket says Y-P on it, which means that it was bought with a young persons railcard. Now my MP is quite young, but he’s been in power since 1997 so he can’t possibly be under 25.

So either he was travelling illegally under a young persons railcard – or he is claiming other peoples rail journeys under expenses and hiding it.

I suppose he could be claiming for some of his staff, and they could be under 25, but that is stretching the excuses.