Official: MPs Would Rob Taxpayers Blind, Given The Chance
The leeches and bloodsuckers who make up the assortment of otherwise unemployable has-beens and no-hopers of the mother of all Parliaments cannot be trusted with knowing how much their pilfering allowances might be, for fear that they would not be able to control their own lust for money, it has been revealed by one of their own number.
Commons finance chief Andrew Walker, in refusing to say what an MP could spend on one item an still get away with it, said: “My concern is that if we say the maximum price it will become the going rate.”
It is quite possible, therefore, that the tin of baked beans which MPs can buy with public money could, despite being available for between about 15 and 55 new pennies in a variety of shops, be claimed for to the tune of £249.99, as MPs are not required to submit a receipt for items valued at below 250 squid.
How many times a week can MPs make these spurious claims for non-existent expenditure at just below 250 pounds sterling? Nobody seems to have asked and probably nobody knows, but Andrew Walker admits that a system of oversight, checks and balances is not actually there at all.
“You don’t check they have actually spent the money on what they say they have spent it on - you just check the paper trail.”
We all know that MPs are not the cleverest people around, but perhaps somebody needs to tell this particular incompetent that if there is no need to offer a receipt, the paper trail goes pretty cold before it even starts.
But you knew that they are not really interested in controlling their own fleecing of the taxpayer, didn’t you? Whatever enquiry Michael Martin and his mates set in motion, you can be sure that it will conclude that everything is above board and satisfactory, but also noticing - quelle surprise! - that MPs are actually severely underpaid and need extra buckets of taxpayer swag to soften their arduous lives.
Keep Eurozone Blair-Free
If you subscribe to the view that Tony Blair’s whole life has been nothing more than a desperate attempt to make people love him, it is, of course, both a monumental and abject failure.
Not in the sense of being a tragic, heroic struggle played out on a stage of vast scale, but just a petty waste of everybody’s time - and, of course, a great many lives lost in an attempt to bolster the mental instabilities of a fundamentally small and inconsequential person, suffering from simple delusions of grandeur.
The sigh of relief when Blair finally left office was only saved from being deafening by the fact that the process took so long that everyone had given up holding their breath.
Off he went to perform a non-job to perpetuate the pretence of being a statesman and then the overriding love of money appeared as if it would finally take over as expected. Everyone thought that the world would be a safer place if he and his cronies simply thrust their snouts in the trough and we could be rid of the spectacle of a grinning imbecile at the helm of anything more significant than a pedallo.
Then he saw the job of Emperor of Europe advertised and obviously, lacking any sense of his own catalogue of incapabilities and probably thinking that his mate God would want him to take the job, he starts making overtures to secure it, despite the fact that nobody else thinks he should be in charge of anything beyond an end of pier whelk stall.
In The Guardian, Malcolm Rifkind said this:
Ultimately, however, the question is whether Blair is the appropriate person to do the job. The answer to that has to be no. At the time of the Iraq war, he divided Europe in a way not seen for 40 years. His foolish decision to side so unequivocally with George W Bush has damaged his own credibility across Europe to such an extent that he would find it difficult to forge a consensus on political issues or to speak on Europe’s behalf.
Blair’s own political record on Europe is hardly covered in glory. He came to office promising to put Britain at the heart of Europe. He left office with Britain no closer to Europe’s heart that when he began.
Which pretty much covers the whole of Blair’s record in office: empty promises, spin, sound, fury and artificial nonsense. Except, of course, in the case of war, where his achievements in getting millions of people killed are beyond doubt, but where the purported aim of bringing about a better regime has been a total failure.
Despite the fact that the Blair legacy for New Britain is nothing but eroded freedoms and a government dominated by a class of avaricous idiot never before seen in politics, there are some chaps who are helping you to have your voice heard with regard to whether Blair should be allowed to play any part in Europe’s forthcoming top job.
Stop Blair! is brought to you by The European Tribune and you can sign a petition if you agree with what they have to say about the grinning tea-boy who got promoted way beyond his level of abilities, which is this:
We, European citizens of all origins and of all political persuasions, wish to express our total opposition to the nomination of Tony Blair to the Presidency of the European Council.
The Treaty of Lisbon provides for the new post of President of the European Council, to be elected by the Council for a mandate, renewable once only, of two and a half years. Under the terms of the Treaty: “The President of the European Council shall chair it and drive forward its work” and “shall ensure the preparation and continuity of the work of the European Council”. Further, “The President of the European Council shall, at his level and in that capacity, ensure the external representation of the Union on issues concerning its common foreign and security policy”.
The future President of the European Council will therefore have a key role in determining the policies of the European Union and its relations with the rest of the world. This first Council Presidency will also have a major symbolic weight for both citizens of the European Union and for the image of the Union in the rest of the world. In this perspective, we believe it is essential that the first president embodies the spirit and values of the European project.
For some time now, increasingly insistent news reports have made evident a wish, in some quarters, to see Tony Blair appointed the first President of the European Council. This appointment, were it to take place, would be in total contradiction with the values professed by the European project.
In violation of international law, Tony Blair committed his country to a war in Iraq that a large majority of European citizens opposed. This war has claimed hundreds of thousands of victims and displaced millions of refugees. It has been a major factor in today’s profound destabilisation of the Middle East, and has weakened world security. In order to lead his country into war, Mr Blair made systematic use of fabricated evidence and the manipulation of information. His role in the Iraq war would weigh heavily on the image of the Union in the world, should he in fact be named its president.
The steps taken by Tony Blair’s government, and his complicity with the Bush administration in the illegal programme of “extraordinary renditions”, have led to an unprecedented decline in civil liberties. This is in contradiction with the terms of the European Convention of Human Rights, which is an integral part of the treaty.
The European Charter of Fundamental Rights formalises the founding values of the European project and is one of the pillars of the new treaty. Tony Blair fought its inclusion in the Treaty of Lisbon, and eventually managed to secure an exemption for the UK.
Rather than move European integration forward, the former British Prime Minister set a series of so-called red lines during the Lisbon negotiations, with the intent of blocking any progress in social issues and tax harmonisation, as well as common defence and foreign policy.
Furthermore, it seems unthinkable that the first President of the European Council should be the former head of a government that kept its country out of two key elements of the construction of Europe: the Schengen area of free movement of people and the Euro zone.
At a time when one of the priorities of the European institutions is to reconnect with its citizens, we believe it is essential that the President of the European Council should be a person with whom a majority of citizens can identify, rather than one rejected by a majority. Therefore, we declare our total opposition to this nomination.
- Treaty of Lisbon, Article 1, point 16, inserting Article 9 B into the Treaty on European Union, points 5 and 6 (2007/C 306/17, 18)
- Blair sets out EU treaty demands, BBC, June 2007
- Table 6 in FT/Harris poll, June 2007
Shock Revelation: Free Markets Are Not Heaven On Earth
Remember one of Mrs Thatcher’s catchphrases: “You cannot buck the markets”?
Yes, but you can certainly get bucked by them. Quite.
When Mrs Thatcher ended up in Downing Street, some observant commenter noted ‘You are the first woman prime minister’ to which she replied something like: “And the first prime minister with a science degree”.
We were all stunned. Suddenly, we had the cleverest person on earth running the country and for the next thirty years (a whole generation) we all lived under Thatcher’s Law or spiv rule.
Any system, from picking your own nose to the entire world, could be turned into a market, where some moneygrubber would be able to filch from others to get rich and those with less sharp elbows would be trampled underfoot by the mighty onslaught of the free market in all its terrible grandeur.
Because this was sold to everyone by such a clever person, who sufficiently terrorised all around her that their brains melted and they were unable to raise even the weakest line of defence, we have all had to suffer the nonsense of this delusion.
Thatcher sold the idiotic and childish dream that everyone could get richer and the poor lapped it up because, quite naturally, they wanted some of the wonderful things that the rich had always had. The fact that the poor would be taxed to make the rich even richer beyond the dreams of avarice was never declared. Everyone suddenly forgot their infant school sums, which said that if Tommy eats 99 per cent of the pie, Timmy is going to go very hungry indeed.
Ordinary people also forgot Michael Moore’s First Law of Economics, which is this: “You are never going to be a millionaire”. He also said: “These bastards who run our country are a bunch of conniving, thieving, smug pricks who need to be brought down and removed and replaced with a whole new system that we control”.
Still, it’s only a game with money, after all. It is hardly life and death.
Oh, woops! Apparently it is.
It now seems that the free market which was imposed upon the NHS by Thatcher and gleefully endorsed and developed by the man with the big brain, Gordon Brown, may actually kill you after all.
The theory was that patients would be converted into chattels with a price tag to be traded by competing hospitals. The hospitals which accumulated the highest aggregate value of price tags would be rewarded financially: paid for by the taxpayer, of course.
Whether this would actually lead to an erosion of patient care and the chances of being cured by a hospital rather than having it kill you was never part of the equation.
This is the result, according to AOL News:
Competition between NHS hospitals may lower the quality of patient care, researchers have warned.
When hospitals are forced to compete with each other death rates from heart attacks actually rose, they found.
The decline in standards means patients are worse off even though waiting lists and waiting times have fallen, according to a paper published in the Economic Journal.
Professor Carol Propper at the University of Bristol examined the “internal market” in the NHS created by the Conservative government in 1991. Labour has introduced similar market-based reforms intended to improve health service performance.
She found deaths from heart attacks actually went up in hospitals covered by the reforms. Heart attack death rates are used as an indicator of overall hospital performance.
So, you already knew that successive governments are picking the money from your pocket to give to their rich friends; you knew that this government is selling you down the river to their corporate masters; now you know that they are glibly killing you for profit.
Thatcher’s Britain, New Labour’s New Britain: all the same thing.
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