Our tax fuels bonfire of Nationalist vanity

ALEX SALMOND’S vainglorious boast was that Nationalist MPs would ‘hold Westminster’s feet to the fire’. Little did we know they would stoke their braziers with taxpayers’ £50 notes.

For the public are paying a very high price indeed as those MPs rack up astonishing expenses, including juicy bonuses for staff.

Of course, travel costs for Scotland’s MPs are always high – it’s a long and winding road to London. But it is hard not to conclude that the SNP cabal are milking the system when eight out of ten of the biggest expenses claims come from Nationalists – and that their bills dwarf those of MPs they replaced just a year ago. Mr Salmond, MP for Gordon, claimed £48,470.66 in travel for 2015/16 according to Parliament’s watchdog. His Lib Dem predecessor Malcolm Bruce claimed £13,201.75.

Steven Paterson claimed £41,506 for travelling to and from his Stirling constituency – almost five times as much as Labour’s Anne McGuire, who claimed £8,462.29 in 2014/15.

Ochil and South Perthshire MP Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh billed the public £39,258.20 for travel. That’s nearly five times the £8,565.20 claimed by Labour’s Gordon Banks a year previously. Stewart McDonald, MP for Glasgow South, billed the public £9,550 for ‘staff rewards’ and paid the single largest bonus of any MP at £3,000.

John Nicolson, a former broadcaster and the MP for East Dunbartonshire, handed out £7,000 to staff in extra bonuses. Though the SNP maintain they are Stakhanovites, selflessly giving their all in pursuit of the betterment of constituents, it stretches credulity that they are working five times harder and that their staff are also deserving of lavish largesse.

We know Westminster’s subsidised hostelries have done a roaring trade since ‘the 56’ bellied up to the bar – and some have found time to conduct flings and affairs.

In the end, it is the hypocrisy that sticks in the public craw. MPs posing as single-minded, pious monks while filling their boots in the manner of so many money-grubbers before them will be harshly judged.