The expenses bill run up by the 129 members of the Scottish Parliament went up by more than £1 million last year, to almost £8 million, it emerged yesterday.The top spender was the MSP for Kilmarnock, Margaret Jamieson, who:
refused to talk about her extraordinarily high expenses claim yesterday.Surely the backs of the pre-paid envelopes could have been used for creating Labour's next lot of policies.However, a Labour Party spokeswoman explained later that an "over-zealous" official in Ms Jamieson’s constituency office had simply ordered too many pre-paid envelopes and this was the reason for the £16,000 Ms Jamieson claimed for stationery.
In fact, so many pre-paid envelopes were ordered for the office that 13,000 have already had to be returned because there is no room to store them all.