The Members of Parliament in the UK have not been 100% totally incontrovertibly honest. Well fuck me, get out the logbook, Martha, I gots to know wheres I woz when I heard this 'un!!!
The overblown coverage of this distinctly tepid series of events, events that have excited less interest in my household than the bowel happenings of the water-based insects in our birdbath, events that have already caused at least two of our cats to take their own lives through sheer force of mediocrity, such happenings that I cannot possibly have less interest in now my own toenails have disintegrated because the sheer, frank, undeniably vast non-enormity of it (did I already use the word `tepid`?) has cast them into chilly oblivion, these events and this coverage therof has made me a little peeved, as you may be able to tell.
I am damn sure these things are pointless in themselves, and in most ways and most cases something of a mask for the paper-based media who are surely guilty of much in this vein, and are shitting words in an attempt not to shit themselves at the idea that what has happened to the MPs might happen to them. On the flipside, and bearing in mind that the press and the Parties in this circle - MPs and the media's parliamentary correspondents - are deeply associated both in and out of the office and the commons antechambers, it may not be so shocking that the press has seized upon this chance to expose the expense claims they never enjoyed themselves but must have had rubbed in their faces over the years.
In any case, whatever the bullshit behind it and the backstabbing, sniping and woe-driven fecaloid nightmares of the slimy shits ramming it down all of our throats, it has always seem these past weeks that no-one left in Britain has any functioning sense of perspective.
An MP claimed some-thousand-£££ for a duck pond, or a duck house, or something. Wowee. More - and I stress that, MORE than 30 children DIED of AIDS in Africa every hour of every day of every fucking week last year, and if we so much as smack our kids or tell them they have to put their knives down before entering the classroom it makes the bloody paper.
But 740+ kids, babies and teenagers die from just one disease every goddamn fucking day and not only do we not care, but we don;t even report it any more. Nearly all of these deaths are preventable by the way.
Anyway it's all been too much bullshit, too much of a smokescreen and far too much of a cloud if virulent smug on the part of the media. I'm so disenchanted with the whole affair I could almost do something about it myself.
Well, I did some maths. The cost of the total transport claims for the past year has clocked in at about 6.2 million quid. We've all heard the reports of some MP or other claiming for 14,683 miles when his house is 11 miles from Westminster or similar, and the 40,000 mile claim for the woman living 50 miles away in one house and 5 miles away at the other, so generally we've been primed to call bullshit on it all - but even of this maybe half a million quid was justififed. But no matter - let's say it was all phony, outright naked theft by our ministers (and MPs are just soooo noble by default, aren't they? I amazed that anyone was even surprised by all this to be honest).
So, transport claims weigh in at a little over 6 million, duck houses, wigs and whisky must account for another couple of mil, so let's say, with all claims, and allowing for the genuine within the false (which is probably a far larger percentage than any newspaper would ever like us to imagine, that would almost amount to thinking for ourselves, after all) let's make a gross generalisation and say that the total naughty expenses of all 650-odd MPs comes in at £12 million. That would amount to an average false claim of nearly £18,500 per MP per year, by the way, which seems to me a little bit of an exaggeration seeing as we've only heard of a dozen or so outrageous £30,000+ claim totals, but hey. Let's err on the side of the media. Lets skew it all in their favour in the spirit of the thing.
Now, the total number of income tax payers in the UK last year was about 26-28 million, plus people who pay capital gains tax number around 1.4 million, and of course we all pay VAT and booze tax and petrol is around 60% tax (and we do love to burn through that stuff) and ciggies cost a fortune, around 70% of which is pure tax, and all the rest of it.
Given the nature of the tax we all pay, plus the CG taxpayers handing over tenfold the average man in the street, I think we can err a little on the side of `we unhappy few` taxpayers, and give a sort of rough working estimate that there are, in proportion to regular earners (each of those 26-28 million `normal` people who earn regular sorts of amounts and pay tax on most of it) a virtual taxpaying community of about 35 million individuals. I have to stress again that 1) this is a virtual figure used to approximate an average figure for the average taxpayer, to give an idea of how much it costs each one of US, and 2) this is once again being seriously generous to the media's side of the argument.
Basically, at the end of all this we have an average cost of this expenses scandal to you and I. re you ready?! Ta-da! ;
Real people, like us, are being forced to pay a whopping 34pence PER YEAR for all the MPs and their expenses put together, or to put it another way, about half the cost of a single copy of the Daily Telegraph. And I wonder how many of them this bullshit, hyper-inflated nonsense of a story has sold off?
