What they took was what they felt to be their earnings
when Maggie "readjusted" salaries in the last recession so that they got less actual cash and more expenses, rather than just actual cash that they'd got before. It's just semantics, but most MPs felt that that 24k was just their salary called under a different name (as that's what it was pre-1990), so no ethical crime was commited.
( Grrrmachine the indifference engine, Thu 4 Jun 2009, 20:18, archived)