Two loos, two jags, two homes, two women, two chins……
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A provocative farce of unremitting horror, the finale can not come soon enough. The script is packed with devious manoeuvres and well-honed fiddles. 646 fine actors, under the parliamentary fees office inventive direction, execute slapstick accounts and deliver receipts with near-perfect timing. But the onslaught of escalating troughing seems to grow more desperate as the intermissionless show goes on. It excites a demand for justice which is never satisfied. With its splendid grasp of the effective pause, the Daily Telegraph brings out something easily missed by a mere reader – the pure narrative value of loose ends left hanging. Let moral values go hang themselves: Robert Winnett enjoys himself immensely with his tale and so do we. Sympathy may not be stirred but interest is securely held. This production has managed to capture the tragi-comic nature of the tax payers’ endless struggle with the thieving gits in parliament perfectly whilst emphasising the desperation of the human condition. It will undoubtedly go down as one of the “did you hear?” performances of the decade due to the spectacular performances by Jacqui Smith and Tony McNulty – a showcase of two world class rip-off artistes working together in perfect harmony. The penultimate scene of the bulimic, adulterous, croquet playing, over-weight steward on the old Rangi line, queuing at the fees office to be recompensed for his latest shattered toilet seat was one of undignified pathos, relieved only by the thundering cloven hooves of Scotland Yard’s finest beating a path to the door – not of the thieving gits – but of the whistle blower who exposed them. In a crowded year for Best Political Scandal direction, Heather Brooke should receive an Oscar. |
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05.09.09 at 8:18 am -
I’ve just shoved a few beads around on my abacus and it seems that if 646 MPs can claim £24,000 every year for their second homes that comes to £15,504,000. That’s over fifteen and a half million EVERY YEAR in second home allowances.
I know we have very quickly got used to bandying around figures in the millions, billions and even trillions, but this is a nonsense sum to have available to them each year, especially when they get a salary of around £60,000 anyway and many of them have ‘2nd jobs’.MPs should do what we have to do if we want a new bath-plug and that’s put their grubby little mits into their own pockets for a change and not demand a police enquiry into who tittle-tattle-tell-tailed to The Telegraph who told it to the taxpayer. You couldn’t make it up.
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05.09.09 at 8:35 am -
Brilliant post Anna. Well done.
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05.09.09 at 9:51 am -
Brilliant.
It’s comedy, tragedy and horror. Or is it science fiction – the everyday goings on in a colony of parasites systematically infesting our national life with its insatiable spawn?
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05.09.09 at 10:28 am -
(It’s all in the rules we made up to scam the Taxpayer to feed our greed; we did not think people would ever be finding out).
What scum these scrounging MP’s are, these are the real benefit cheats.
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5
05.09.09 at 10:33 am -
Gloria
the total expenses these corrupt people have helped themselves to in the last year amounts to £95 million.
Time for a cull of all of them.
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05.09.09 at 10:43 am -
i just think armando iannucci must be banging his head against the wall..
when he was directing ‘in the loop’ he must have been thinking ‘Crikey, this seems a bit ‘over the top’ and overblown, people will never believe it..’
and now this – to go with stories of ’smeargate’, flying printers there are real scandals about covering up expenses violas on a ‘Lympic scale.
In fact one of the better ideas I saw yesterday was to take the 2012 ‘Olympic Athletes’ village and turn it into cheap and cheerful homes for MPs.
Or maybe we could have an Olympic team of ‘grifters’ – It would be worth it just to see the looks on the faces of the russian mafia and nigerian scamsters when they are denied the gold medal..
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05.09.09 at 11:09 am -
just reading the coverage this morning.
they seem to be infected with a ‘groupthink’ that this is just ‘custom and practice’ among the political class, and ‘if we don’t take the money, someone else will make it disappear..’
the problem is that in terms of the total public spending this is pretty small beer – even £ 15 million quid is not going to very far to help the NHS and schools. the REAL scandal is how their incompetence is seeing far more money pi$$ed up against the wall on things like the NHS IT Project.
If paying £ 15 million in second homes allowance bought us quality governance and ‘reassuringly expensive’ competence in MPs it would be something.
But it seems to contribute to the mindset that ‘whatever happens, however pear-shaped things go, the taxpayer ‘milch cow’ will always pick up the tab…’
THAT is the real scandal – it stinks, but at least we can do something about it at the ballot box..
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05.09.09 at 11:12 am -
Two loos Prescott.
Yes please.
Maybe in the woods…
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9
05.09.09 at 11:15 am -
Oh Anna this is vintage comment.
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05.09.09 at 12:23 pm -
Charlie Chipmunk – I was going to post earlier about the idea of using the Olympic Village to house the ‘out-of-towners’ and I’m glad you got it in. As an alternative, there’s the Tower of London.
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05.09.09 at 1:22 pm -
Just a comment re using the Olympic village. Sounds a good idea, until you realise they would then have to commute in from Stratford, which is far, far too far to travel when you work in a place that works like clockwork [copyright Eric Pickles].
Oh, and somewhere in amongst all the venality and greed there are SOME MPs who actually do (more than) a fair week’s work for a fair week’s pay!
Pip pip
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12
05.09.09 at 2:03 pm -
I’m sure there will be plenty of buildings for sale in the vicinity of Westminster village with the credit crunch in full flow. They’d probably cost less than MP’s combined plug bill for a year. How about sending details of all vacant properties in the area to PM Brown? If he puts this sort of plan into action at the right moment it could win him an election.
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05.09.09 at 2:06 pm -
Dales has rather a good one. £22K spent on a holiday home…..
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14
05.09.09 at 2:11 pm -
Put them all on an enormous barge, a kind of hybrid ‘Priso-tel’ on the Thames and tug them all in to work nice and early each morning.
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15
05.09.09 at 3:02 pm -
How about an out-of-service prison ship? Or one or more of the growing number of out-of-service tankers that are cluttering up harbours around the UK and, no doubt, the rest of the world.
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16
05.09.09 at 3:12 pm -
Ha, ha Old Holborn (and thanks Iain Dale) – £22k payout for dry rot! The majority of the house seems to suffer from it but Margaret Moran is the only one who has the nerve to claim expenses to have it fixed. I look forward to her next speech to establish whether the problem has been cured.
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05.09.09 at 4:15 pm -
I note claims for mole catchers and rat catchers and they never gave me a call – my rates must be too low. I gues I will have to “bung” up what I charge.
Oh I would recommend handing them over to Robert Mugabe as they are starting to make him look and sound like a paragon of virtue and a real father of democratic principles. Well I am sure he could find some use for the obvious talents of corrupt ballot rigging economically inept NuLabourites in partcular.
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05.09.09 at 4:59 pm -
My god, what a load of seasoned bullshit merchants you lot are; I’m guessing you’re all members of the Westminster Establishment (twilight zone division), the Tory party, UKIP, BNF (all the same thing) or Liberals.
Get a real job you septic sceptics. My neighbourhood would still be a slum if it weren’t for the EU. You obviously have way too much time on your hands, yet still time to blog – must be journos or politicos. -
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05.09.09 at 5:21 pm -
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05.09.09 at 6:35 pm -
franki-c
your funny
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05.09.09 at 6:58 pm -
‘My neighbourhood would still be a slum if it weren’t for the EU.’ said franki-c
how is life in brussels ?
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05.09.09 at 9:14 pm -
Great stuff, thanks!
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05.09.09 at 11:09 pm -
Franki_C – Nope, not I!
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05.10.09 at 2:16 am -
This poor old rightie despairs of a lifetime of effort and hard work being trampled under the Socialist yolk of equality for the masses but untold wealth for the inner crowd. Today I met Lord Heseltine and my local Tory MP. The contrast was painful. One on the make the other comfortable in what he has returned to the world, in thanks for his own good fortune. One a true nobleman, the other a wimp and grasper, who ought to be in Labour.
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05.10.09 at 3:54 am -
Oh dear. Poor Franki [sic]. BNF? What have context-free grammars got to do with troughing MPs?
It is a rather revealing stance though: if you’re not a fully paid-up EU sycophant you’re tantamount to a Nazi (despite the fact that the BNP is about as diametrically opposed from a philosophical standpoint to UKIP or UKLP as it’s possible to be.) It still remains a matter of astonishment to me that someone can use the word ‘Libertarian’ as a pejorative.
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05.10.09 at 9:15 pm -
Anna. Just spotted this. Yet again, brilliant and thanks for reminding me what an awful human being is Prescott.
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05.10.09 at 9:48 pm -
Why have a go at poor old Steward Prescott? We all know he is full of shit, and ridding himself of it for replenishment is bound (loosely speaking) to strain the best-built lavatory and seat. Of course, it’s a real problem to determine which shit comes out of his mouth and which from “the other place”. Perhaps we ought to stump up for a Vomitorium (look it up!!) as well.
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