Why there is nothing worse than seeing the British public getting all high and mighty

And so the MPs expenses “scandal” had reared its ugly head yet again. And this time in the same week that we learnt that the bankers are paying themselves billions of pounds worth of bonuses again. Great.

At least this time though we’re finally seeing some sense in the form of the proposed reforms. As headline grabbing as the duck-houses and moat-cleaning escapades were they only scratched the surface and hardly told the whole story.

According to BBC News, 415 of the current 646 MPs (about two-thirds) claim a mortgage allowance of up to £24,000 per year. If they all claimed that full amount, it works out at about £10 million per year (or 6,049 duck-houses, if that’s your currency).

I don’t have a problem if the taxpayer is contributing towards the 5-year rent (a maximum Parliamentary term) of a London property. But paying for an (often already very wealthy) MPs mortgage of their private property from which they will personally financially benefit from in the long term seems a step too far. It’s the small items that look ridiculous and great for the papers, but it’s the seemingly mundane accumulation of mortgage payments which are far worse.

To be honest though, I was never overly bothered by the “scandal” in the first place. There are many civil servants who have a higher wage than the MPs. Yes it’s impossible to deny many of the MPs have been proven to be morally bankrupt in the way they’ve swindled the system. Tony McNulty is a case in point – claiming for a house his parents lived in 8 miles from his own home.

But it was a bloody stupid system. And can they really justify demanding money back again? Talk about changing the goalposts. It’d be like your boss telling you: “You know that week of holiday you had? Well it turns out we need it back – so to make up for it you’ve got to come back into the office and work overtime. On Christmas Day.”

In my opinion they should just have been given a higher wages and taken away all expenses completely. They had the chance to do this in the 1980s, but bungled the decision and chose not to. In all of this people seem to forget that the reason MPs are paid is to prevent only the very wealthy from becoming MPs in the first place. Otherwise all of our politicians would still be called Rupert Urquhart-Smythe or Tarquin Fillongley-Rogers.

The thing that outraged me the most was the apparent outrage of the population. There is nothing worse, in my opinion, than seeing the British public getting all high and mighty. If, as in the case of many of the MPs, they had received phone calls from the expenses office asking “why don’t you claim this on expenses?” then it’s certain that 95% of people would have done exactly that. Their “holier than thou” attitude makes you want to sob into your pillow.

At least they’re doing something worthwhile like running the country. But compare this to the city bankers who seem to have got off scot free. Now that the markets are picking up again they’ve decided to compensate themselves for all that stress with massive bonuses again. No-one’s seemed to clock that this might have had something to do with the monumental global-recession in the first place. At least Sarkozy and Obama are trying to stop them doing it in their respective countries.

What makes me laugh (in a sadistic kind of way) is that they seem to justify it by saying “well we all work 80 hour weeks”. So? Why do long hours in our society mean you are more ‘worthy’ of obscene amounts of money? I’m pretty sure nurses work incredibly long shifts. Making rich people richer for a living hardly seems to warrant a vast pay cheque.

What these people seem incapable to recognise is that when they screwed up it had catastrophic consequences for people all over the world. As usual it’s those at the bottom of the ladder that end up worse than anyone. And the only reason the banks are doing well again is because they’re just plugging the gaps in the market caused by the failures of some of their rivals.

Still things could be worse.

Since day one of the expense-gate I’ve said all along that people from outside Britain looking in are going to find our “scandal” hilarious. I mean come on guys, this isn’t a real scandal – we should be embarrassed. It doesn’t even compare to Blagojevich trying to sell Obama’s Senate seat. Or we might have this guy in charge.

Image this conversation:

Brit: “The corruption of politicians these days is just appalling – it’s the same for you Italians isn’t it?”

Italian: “Yes well, I mean given that our President is the self-proclaimed ‘most prosecuted man’ in our history after being involved in that case where he allegedly paid off a lawyer to lie in court, the recorded tapes of him and that prostitute, calling the first black American President ‘well tanned’ on a number of occasions, being allegedly linked to the Mafia, monopolising the media, supposedly dodging tax fraud and being accused of having sex with an 18 year old actress – things could be better. Is it the same for you in the UK?”

Brit: “Yeah well there was this one guy, right, and he bought this house for his ducks…”

Why I was one of the 22,000 who complained about Jan Moir

Last week I had the misfortune of reading Jan Moir’s Daily Mail ‘article’ suggesting that the late Stephen Gately’s death was not “natural” and rather a result of his “lifestyle”. Although briefly blinded by the outrage, I struggled through to the end of the piece where she questioned the legitimacy of same-sex marriages (let’s ignore the fact that at the moment they are not in fact marriages but civil partnerships according to UK law – we’ve still yet to get to the stage where they have equal legal status) and attempted to relate Gately’s death to that of M

att Lucas’ ex-husband. I say struggled to the end, the column flicks from casual homophobia to a light-hearted ‘story’ about Tara Palmer-Tompkinson’s risqué dress-sense with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer, at which point my patience had long-since been excessively tested.

I have yet to work out quite what I’m most appalled about; is it:

a) That someone with such a large potential readership has he temerity to insinuate that gay people are victims of their own sexuality?

b) That it is still legal to get away with saying something like this in modern twenty-first century Britain?

c) That the second most-read newspaper in the country is willing and able to publish such material?

d) That the people reading such an article nod their way through it and actually agree with the dross which is being written?

I think for all liberal-minded Guardian readers the answer is sadly probably ‘d’. We don’t necessarily fear what is being written; the real fear is that British people might genuinely agree with it.

It seemed rather bizarre that Moir challenged the verdict given by the coroner’s report which stated quite clearly that there were no suspicious circumstances involved whatsoever. Her words are extremely disrespectful not just to gay people, that’s a given, but to all of those healthy people who do in fact die with no prior symptoms.

Anyhow, by the time that I had digested the abhorrence of the spouted drivel, I had a Charlie Brooker-inspired compulsion to vent my feelings to the Press Complaints Commission. At the time about 4,000 others had done likewise. I joined the accompanying Facebook group and posted urging others to do similarly.

As you read this more than 22,000 have. The PCC have had more complaints in the last 7 days about this than in the whole of the past 5 years. Of course they’re not going to do anything about it, other than perhaps a strongly worded letter of irrelevance, as only complainants involved in a story can make anything happen.

But I partly made the complaint out of principle. After all Middle England loves complaining. If we all lived in an ethnically-cleansed, sanitised, Clarkson-esque world they strive for they’d still be complaining that there was nothing to complain about. Let’s not forget the 40,000 people who complained about Jonathan Ross & Russell Brand being rude (and actually not very funny) to Andrew Sachs – when 39,998 of them hadn’t even listened to the programme in question. I’m not an especially big fan, but I watched Ross’ show for weeks after it came back on air just in protest to contribute to getting the ratings as high as possible.

In any case, to my dismay I later discovered that the head of the Press Complaints Commission is, you guessed it, the Editor of none other than the Daily Mail…

The now infamous Question Time episode waded

happily into this debate though, with BNP leader Nick Griffin true to form describing gay couples as “creepy”. Well what did you expect?

It was disappointing in a way that the programme didn’t run on its more regular format in order to oust Griffin from society by bringing to light his horrific fascist policies. In the end he ended up being defensive and was able to take a moral stance that he’d been ‘victimised’. Oh how the irony was lost on someone who if he had his way would be doing an awful lot of said victimisation.

It was right though that the BBC allowed Griffin on the debate. In our culture of free speech it would have been hypocritical to have banned him from appearing – and would have given him far more credibility had he not been permitted to attend.

Griffin came off badly as the despicable man should have with his pathetic attempts to side-step his holocaust denial and ludicrous suggestion that Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke was a non-violent figure. It was a shame though that the senior members on the panel that night were unable to make any killer blows - but kudos to the magnificent member of the audience who suggested sending Griffin to the South Pole – “a colourless landscape that will suit you fine”.

One final thought from the superb News Quiz – along with Have I Got News For You by far and away the best topical satire around – who quoted this Nick Griffin line:

“Sadly it’s not the indigenous, hard-working, middle class tax-paying population that’s exploding; my worry is how many immigrant mums have contributed anything to this country before landing us with another child to educate…”

“…Oh wait hang on, no that was Amanda Platell in the Daily Mail, that’s odd…”

Enough said.