newsflash: MPs "made to feel as if they're crooks", in which Ms B resorts to the use of capitals
I don't mind telling you, my trusted readers, that my TV cost £350: I wanted a flat screen - it's a smallish room - but not by some make I'd never heard of. I bought the cheapest Philips flatscreen I could find. My previous set, which lasted years, till the picture turned green, was an ex-rental set from Radio Rentals. My stereo arrangements are ad hoc and involve the computer...
My kitchen is rented.
My wardrobe cost about £150 from the Place That Must Not Be Mentioned, and I had to put it together myself. My desk came from a junk shop.
Why do I ever even watch the news?? For I now know some of the contents of the House of Parliament's famous "John Lewis list" - the list of prices that are the most an MP can claim for his (or her) "essential expenses," i.e. those pesky costs associated with having to have a place in London and another in the country - which, by the way, you can claim on expenses for the mortgage or rent payments for. John Lewis may be "Never Knowingly Undersold;" but nonetheless it is a jolly expensive shop. Anything you buy in there you can easily get something just as good as for half the price elsewhere. But nonetheless, MPs can claim: £700 for a wardrobe; £750 for a TV; £10,000 for a new kitchen. Watch the papers tomorrow for new details of what you are buying for your MP. (Edited in: here it is.)
We in Baroque Mansions are (to put it mildly) DISMAYED to find that, while one has been scrimping on one's own expenses - the VCR doesn't work because I'm too thick to understand what cable to get for it, and anyway it's about 15 years old, and there is no DVD player; the old G4 still has no working hard drive, British Gas are chasing me for £98, the rented carpets are fraying, the living room ceiling light has no lampshade, my nicest lamp needs a new fuse (I think) and my other pineapple one needs rewiring completely; it took me three goes to fix the bloody Ikea bed to stay up with the slats all relatively stationary, I'm perishing for a new duvet cover, every pair of shoes I own needs re-heeling, my best tights just bit the dust, I have no curtain in my bedroom, and the front has come off one of the kitchen units - as I say, while all this is going on, I HAVE BEEN PAYING for all these MPs to have the flipping best of everything! In their second homes! AND their basic salary is nearly £62,000!! Fucking hell. If I got paid anything LIKE £62,000 I think I'd be able to buy my own sodding furniture. God damn it.
Oh, and then there's the small matter of having not paid into my work pension all those years because I needed the money, annoyingly, to live on. And before that, all the stay-at-home 3-babies-in-4-years years when it wasn't legal for the Baroque name to be put on the then-Mr Baroque's pension fund, because I wasn't (sic) "working."
I know. It's not exactly news... Except that at the moment it is, and one doesn't really like having one's nose rubbed in it.
And now they're worried about being misunderstood? Poor lambs.
5 comments:
The expense accounts seem shameful, but the 62K salaries seem, well, pretty reasonable, especially compared to what we pay our US reps for providing us average Joes with wonderful service--by accepting legalized bribes in the form of corporate campaign donations:
http://usgovinfo.about.com/library/weekly/aa031200a.htm
Even with the strong pound and the weak dollar, I'd say y'all are getting off rather cheap.
Shame about the pineapple lamp, though.
That is the thing that gets me, Katy, the fact these fuckers want to get paid for the things that normal people pay for anyway. I work with quite a few consultants - and it annoys me that I can't claim my bus fare and lunch but they, on their inflated "daily rates" do.
Italian MPs are the highest paid in Europe, and that doesn't take into account all the 'perks', which often amount to thousands of pounds per month (as you'll know from my blog: just click on Mastella). In the meantime, just to rub our tax-paying little noses into the injustice of it all, Italian salaries are the lowest in Europe, lower even than in (gulp) Greece. I do two jobs, because teaching at a university as a 'lettore' (i.e. exploited foreign worker) doesn't even pay the mortgage. I haven't had a pay rise at either of the two jobs in the last decade. Bread and petrol prices have recently rocketed. Oh yes, my last gas bill was €567. I must get round to paying it...
Phew. This might not make you feel better, but it's helped me!
It probably isn't the time then to tell you about my pet hate, which is the subsidised restaurants:
http://cricketandcivilisation.blogspot.com/2008/02/feeding-fat-cats.html
It makes me seethe and you know when they get caught out for subsidising their sweet little sons to work the posh London nightclub scene, and they say they'll stand down but - not immediately - why is that? Well, could it have anything to do with the fact that they have to see out a certain timeframe before claiming their substantial pensions? When a certain MP in Windsor embezzled almost £100,000 on expenses for a non-existent flat in London, he held on just to get that pension...you or I would be in court and no doubt in prison by now... but hey, he said sorry, he paid it back and, after all, it was only tax payers money. Grrrr.
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