Blah blah blah expenses again...

The English are pretty good at tolerating unnecessary nuisances. Take the bad weather, for example; snow in the middle of June is about as big of a pain in the ass as even the most robustly callipygian of us could handle. Or what about the rising gas and electricity prices that everybody keeps complaining about? The knives on the streets? Or the collusion between supermarkets? As Bruce Horsnby crooned in 1986, somethings never change. It's just the way it is.

Our ability to deal with these vexations no doubt comes from our being able to justify their existence in some small way. Nobody can control the weather, after all. If there's a fuel shortage then it can only be expected that the cost of energy would increase some. The kids have knives because they're scared of each other. Supermarkets collude because that's how business just is these days. For all of these things there is, ostensibly, a reason.

So when politicians start claiming expenses to pay the rent on properties that they already own it really doesn't feel right...

Yes, we know it's an old issue. Yes, we know we've complained about it before. But it really does seem that politicians and their expense accounts are once again beginning to take the piss. Today's revelation comes in the form of a plump Tory MP called Sir Nicholas who, along with his wife, Lady Winterton, claimed just under £130,000 to cover the rent of a property that they already owned. All of the funds that they collected were paid into a trust fund for their children.

Nothing more needs to be said really, but isn't there anything we can do to stop these people ripping the rest of us off? We're always hearing about the evil benefit cheats that steal sixty quid a week from the tax payer, but nobody seems to be doing anything about the bigshots who take twenty times this amount every month....

Written by Oli Anderson on 19 Jun 2008 12:46 PM. Permalink