Gimmicks'R'Us

One aspect of the Labour government's "spend spend spend" policy that perhaps hasn't received as much coverage as it should, has been the cost of the Cabinet Awaydays, of which two have already been held in Birmingham and Leeds, and another is planned for later this week, in Liverpool.

The second of these trips out for the Labour Cabinet members, at public expense, apparently cost somewhere in the region of £200,000 when the inevitable policing costs are also taken into account. Accurate figures are not known for the Birmingham event, though there is no reason to suppose it was significantly lower than the Leeds one.

As always, this shows a casual disregard for the use of public (i.e. taxpayers') money by Labour — an old, old story — and especially in the present circumstances within Britain it has to be considered to be nothing more than an expensive gimmick at your and my expense.

The argument about "meeting the people" is just an excuse for pre-electioneering: a good local MP would already be representing constituents' interests to Cabinet Ministers — that's why they are there (among their other responsibilities). Therefore one inference that could be drawn from these exercises is that those (Labour?) MPs aren't doing a proper job at representing their constituencies; because if they were doing so, this kind of exercise and the stated reason for having these events wouldn't even have been devised.

Perhaps the cost of holding each of these events should therefore be recouped in its entirety from the relevant Labour MPs' income...