Mortgages and morals

I'm Scottish, I'm an accountant and I don't have a high maintenance girlfriend. I am therefore about as stingy with money as you can possibly get.

So it's no surprise that I find this whole mortgage allowance scheme more than a little bit dodgy. I accept that Stewart Stevenson hasn't done anything wrong in selling a house that doesn't qualify for the allowance and then buying one down the road that does. And even though he hasn't done anything wrong, as Holyrood Chronicles puts it,

when you wake up sweating in the middle of the night, do you really believe that what you have done is morally right?

A fine question, but then I've always struggled with morals after stealing £20 from my parents and buying 200 packets of stickers in the hope of getting Viv Anderson to complete my English Premier League sticker album many years ago.

So what happens now? Well, no doubt this very loose expense claim system will continue apace and MSPs will make large property profits off the public purse. Why are we financing this?

There isn't much that my brother and Tommy Sheridan have in common. A dodgy tan is one thing. And a strong preference for a pool of publicly owned flats that MSPs can use when in Edinburgh is another. And I have to admit, they have both won me round.

If instead Holyrood bought a bunch of Edinburgh flats, then the asset value would sit on the Balance Sheet growing year on year and the savings in the long term for the Scottish people would be huge. There would be no interest payments/legal bills/stamp duty claims etc etc for MSPs to claim every 4 years and there would be a simple allocation of flats to new MSPs each time a new one was elected.

I think most people would agree that this is a scheme worth looking at, and it's entirely possible that the main reason it didn't get much credence in the parliament is that Tommy Sheridan has been the loudest backer of it.

Well, without Tommy lighting up the hall (in a bright orange, Des O'Connor kind of way, aswell as any other kind), the floor has been cleared for another MSP to grasp this thistle of a subject and make a name for themselves. The Herald reports that Tommy wrote to all 129 MSPs with Helen Eadie being the only one to answer the call.

I can see the Tories backing her on this one, and surely Labour will back her aswell if she decides to push ahead with suggesting that the Parliament can save a lot of money by changing the mortgage rules. And the Lib Dems might even emerge from their torpor and have some sort of say on it too.

So it's all eyes on Helen Eadie for now, hopefully she will see that it's not right that the system is open to be fiddled with. It's not enough to ignore the moral argument and claim to have not broken any rules. I never did get my Viv Anderson sticker and it was a good lesson for me, denying MSPs a heavily subsidised house they can make a big profit on in the future might just help them to sharpen their minds too.