Our ruling elite
It's long been known that those who are in charge of this country, our government and our MPs, can be a little bit cheeky when putting in the expenses claims, that was no secret at all, but thanks to a whistleblower and the Daily Telegraph the full appalling extent of the wholesale abuse of public funds has been opened up and we are now treated to the unedifying spectacle of many of our MPs grubbing about in the spotlight like woodlice in the sunshine when you pick up a long abandoned brick from the garden. It really isn't at all pretty.
Bearing in mind that the second homes allowance is supposed to provide an MP who lives too far from Westminster to reasonably commute there on a daily basis and 'expenses' are meant to reimburse essential costs incurred by doing one's job, let's have a little look at what has been claimed for shall we?
Oliver Letwin (Chairman of the Conservative's policy team): More than £2000 to replace a leaky pipe under his tennis court. I shit you not, it's true. Now leaving aside the fact that I'm sure it's essential to have your tennis court properly heated so that you can play in your underpants in mid December, why the fuck is the public paying for it? Is tennis an essential part of the job of high level opposition MP? I suspect not and it's just that the cheeky twat is taking the mick.
Alan Duncan (Shadow leader of the House of Commons): Given a warning after attempting to claim more than £7000 in two years for....wait for it...gardening. How lovely, he must live in the hanging gardens of fucking Babylon to require gardening services costing that much. If he can't handle the garden at his house for a reasonable amount, may I politely suggest that he either buys a flat or has the whole damned lot concreted over? Prat.
Gordon Brown (Useless twat): £6777 for cleaning his Westminster flat for 26 months. This works out at £260 a month. Now my mother used to pay her cleaner £25 a week to spend 2 and a half hours making her 4 bedroom family house spotless. This means either Gordon Brown's flat is 2 and half times larger than a 4 bedroom family house, making ita very large flat indeed, or his cleaner was ripping him off. Considering he was the fucking chancellor you'd have thought he'd have worked out that this wasn't good value. Although considering the royal mess he's made of the economy, perhaps not.
Lord Mandelson (Business secretary): Claimed for improvements on his constituency home AFTER he announced he was leaving Parliament to become an EU Commissioner. He then promptly sold the property for a profit of £136000. He insists that he didn't shaft the taxpayer in order to maximise profit on the place. Pull the other Mandy, it's got fucking bells on. On a scale of one to ten would anyone care to hazard a guess as to exactly how stupid Lord M thinks the electorate are?
Barbara Follett (Tourism minister, married to multi-millionaire author Ken Follett): Has claimed over £25000 PER YEAR for 'security patrols' at her London home after she was mugged and apparently also because she opposed apartheid in South Africa 30 odd years ago. While there's no doubt that it's amusing that the tourism minister is so scared of London that she feels the need for security, I can't help thinking that the fact she got mugged might not be anything to do with her being an MP. This assumption is based on the fact that the other however many dozens of people get mugged in London on a daily basis aren't. So therefore the cost of not getting mugged shouldn't be borne by the taxpayer but by either herself or her utterly loaded husband.
There are dozens more examples, including the interesting practice of 'flipping' second homes, i.e. changing what is registered as your second home and what is your main residence allowing the venal bastards to claim expenses for doing up and kitting out more than one property, but I can't be bothered to list them all because it's long and depressing and frankly, just a little bit embarrassing. God knows what the rest of the world thinks about what's going on over here, they must be howling with laughter. The stock excuse for this disgusting display of trough-raiding is that "I was operating within the Commons rules" which in most cases is technically true. This doesn't look quite so impressive as an excuse when you consider who makes the rules and votes on any changes to them. Yep, you guessed it, the rules are made by MPs themselves. And so there we have it ladies and gentlemen, the impressive spectacle of our ruling elite, a collection of a few honest people who want to improve the country and a massive number of mendacious wastes of space whose main concern is ram-raiding the taxpayer and making as much profit as they can in their time in power. Back in the days the French overthrew and executed theirs for less. Come the revolution I don't suppose there's going to be any shortage of members of the public willing to polish the guillotine....
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I think your line "the unedifying spectacle of many of our MPs grubbing about in the spotlight like woodlice in the sunshine when you pick up a long abandoned brick from the garden." sums it all up doesn't it?
I listened to a minister being interviewed on the radio at the week end who somehow was trying to put a better light on it by saying that ours wasn't the most corrupt system - BUT IT'S STILL CORRUPT FFS!
You know the system is screwed when the best defence of it that anyone has yet come up with is 'some countries are worse'. Some countries have a murder rate 4 times that of London, does that mean that the Met should stop bothering to investigate if someone is killed in the capital? Bloody ridiculous. They should all be ashamed of themselves. The only bright side of all this is the fact that the eternally vile Hazel Blears might get kicked out of office over her fiddles to avoid Capital Gains Tax.
The rest of the world is too busy focussing on their own grubby little oinkers with snouts in the trough of public money.
Thank you for keeping me up to date with what is happening in your country.
You jest. Let me edify you with just two examples from countries from which I have passports:
Italy: Silvio (prime Minister) is indicted for various and multiple things. Fraud, being probably the least of them. He changes the law retroactively so his deeds are no longer a crime. I shit you not. He still gets caught out on more stuff and he changes the laws again. The other conspirators/thieves generally avoid full sentences but some actually go to jail. I think one of them is currently in deep shit and he's a husband of a UK minister, i forget which one. On top of this Silvio regularly makes the kind of remarks, or gaffes that would probably have a normal person flogged in the public square. When the earthquake in Italy that killed over 200 people and left thousands homeless he said publically that the people now living in tent-camps should just pretend they are on a camping holiday and enjoy it. He is Europe's Bush, but with celebral palsie and an incontinent bowel. He also lechers at 18 year old girls so we can add potential pedophile to the list.
Jacob Zuma: President of South Africa. Massive fraud over the arms deal. Billions of Rand spent to buy armaments that no one knows what use they have, other than subjugating SA's own population I suppose since there isn't a country in the whole of sub-saharan Africa that is capable of maintaining their own road networks, education, basic human rights etc etc, never mind invade SA. His accountant went to jail, he somehow is still free. But he's president now so he can just pardon himself. Also, the previous president began, and this one finished the process of disbanding the police unit that indicted him in the first place. Pardoning various guilty parties and firing anyone in the criminal justice system that didn't side with te fraudsters. Zuma is also a rapist. He raped an HIV positive woman but he felt "safe" because he showered after the rape even though he raped her without a condom.
So ...yeah...it's not the main reason I live in the UK, but it's one of them. Your politicians limit themselves to mass-murder in other countries (as opposed to their own) and grand-larceny on what are really lillipudianly ridiculously small scales compared to the dagos, wogs and niggers I hail from. And yes, the pejorative racial slurs on my own people are a necessity. I insist on it myself!
If we go even further afield we can gawp at the mighty specimen of utter insanity that is Robert Mugabe, one of my favourite genocidal dictators due to his rabid hatred of England (and no, he hasn't yet figured out the difference between Britain and England, not that I think he cares) and his fantastical blaming of us for absolutely everything that's wrong with his country. It suggests a lunacy so complete and deep-seated that even heavy duty medication and a spell in a cell with squishy walls and strait-jackets wouldn't dent it.
The husband you couldn't remember is the husband of Ruth Kelly, who insists that she had no idea at all what he was up to. Pull the other one darling, it's got bells on.
Well, Bob's congenital siphilis aside, the line that England is to blame for all his ills is only a little further removed from the one that the SA government has now been touting for 15 years, i.e. it's all the white man's fault due to apartheid. For 5 years..ok, maybe. Hell, let's say for 10 years, because after all, you are an ignorant bunch of ex-slaves supposedly (the fact most of the ANC elite studied abroad and lived with their ass in butter as opposed to Nelson who was doing hard labor on probably a bit of gruel and a few kicks for the better part of his life is going to be ignored here just to be fair), but 15 years later? Still the same shit?
I mean the Romans had slaves back in the day too...but you don't hear the Britons complain of it much these days! (Though I do admit their women are still partial to being taken roughly by us latins).