Let them eat swan...

The BBC recently told us that the British monarchy cost every man, woman and child in the UK £0.69 per year. This figure was meant to show us just how little our monarchy costs, and that this was amazingly good value. Just think of all the hand waving and ribbon cutting we get for our money.

But this isn’t the whole story, is it?

Firstly, this figure includes every man, woman and child in the UK. If we restrict the numbers to just us taxpayers, it then shoots up to £1.33 each. “But that’s still a tiny amount of money”, the monarchists cry. True, but it’s a whole lot of tiny amounts of money. If my underfunded education taught me anything about arithmetic, when you multiply a small number by a big number you end up with, approximately, a shit-load.

The total cost of the Queen and the civil list to the taxpayer was £41.5m in 2008, but it’s not enough - the Queen wants more! To show us that she’s ‘one of us’ and that, like her subjects, she’s not immune to the credit crunch, she apparently had to dip into her £330m reserve (excluding the £10 billion Royal Collection) and cough up another £6m just to balance her books last year. That’s either a major cocaine habit, ma’am, or one will need to consider shopping at Lidl.

And £41.5m is still not the whole picture. This number doesn’t include the cost of military or police security. It’s their duty, “for Queen and country”, so it apparently doesn’t count.

If you ask anyone currently being treated for MRSA they caught in an NHS hospital, the parent of any child who didn’t get a place in their closest school, any student going through the education system, or any pensioner trying to heat their home on their meagre winter fuel allowance this winter, I’m sure they could think of a couple of things that they might consider more worthy investments of £41.5m before they wonder who will fund the royal train, the royal garden parties and state banquets.

If we decide to look further afield than the UK, according to the adverts £2 a month could make a real difference imagine; help a eliminate avoidable blindness, or could help families in Africa feed themselves or could help to provide clean water to some of the poorest people in the world. Just think of the difference we could make to the world for the sacrifice of having to come up with a new picture for the £5 note.

Actually, there’s an idea. If we, as a nation, decide we will spend our £0.69 a year each on something more useful than an insanely privileged few, the Queen could feed her family through modelling. No, really! She could license her image to the Royal (or Federal) Mint, or Royal (Federal) Mail. If she got desperate enough, I’m sure Nuts or Loaded would pay a fortune for a couple ‘off the shoulder’ shots – and what would Playboy pay for a centrefold...

...actually, maybe that’s not the best idea, but it would certainly modernise the Royal family more than a stint on ‘It’s a Royal Knockout’.

This year for my £0.69 I’ll have a Greggs cheese and onion pasty. The blind kids can wait until next year.

Ding, Dong! The witch is injured...

I had a very brief flicker of doubt about my social conscience this afternoon.

I found myself strangely cheered by the thought of an 83 year-old woman falling over in her home and breaking her arm. The old woman in question has dimentia and a history of strokes, but yet the thought of her falling over and breaking her upper arm briefly brought a warm glow and a sense of peace to what was turning out to be a reasonably ordinary day of work, work and work.

“What the fuck is wrong with you!”, I hear you say.

Where could I possibly begin to answer that...

Luckily, in my mind, an imaginary someone helps me to find a possible answer; “Are you some kind of sociopath?”

Possibly... Given the evidence to date, I couldn’t in good faith rule it out...

“She’s just a defenceless and senile old woman in a state of distress. And you find that heartwarming?!?”

Yup! A little. I’m not jumping for joy, but I’m not crying for our damaged society, either.

I could say I don’t feel good about myself for it, but I’d be lying. I don’t feel anything about myself for it. But I still feel... not exactly happy... but certainly content.

“Sick cunt!”

True. But I suppose I should give a bit of context to this before the authorities are called, or you decide you have happened across some strange, niche market, fucked-up blog about geriatric cage-fighting. The old woman in question is not an elderly relative or some kindly old spinster helping out at the local Oxfam. She’s not even a neighbour with deliveries of milk spoiling outside her door while I amuse myself at the thought of her slowly wasting away alone and forgotten by the world she was once a vibrant part of thanks to the wonderful policy of ‘care in the community’.

The old woman in question is Margaret Thatcher.

The news report stated that “she had tripped and fallen at about 0800BST. An ambulance was called and she was transferred under police escort, with her special branch protection detail, to the hospital”. Most of us will never receive anywhere near that kind of special treatment in our dotage, partly thanks to the privitisation of the NHS in the 1980’s, but I presume that Baroness Maggie will be in the best of hands.

So, back to the brief concern for my social conscience. Should I feel bad for her or not? After all, “There is no such thing as 'society', there are individual men and women, and there are families."

I was in primary school when she became the first (and, to date, only) female Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland. My formative years were against a backdrop of New Wave and New Romantics in the charts, big hair and shoulderpads in the streets, and the A-Team and Knight Rider on the rented Rumbelows TV in the living room. My young self knew little of politics in the early 1980’s, but I knew that the bogeyman was real - and her name was ‘Maggie’, ‘The Iron Lady’ or simply ‘Thatcher’. She was the one who stole the milk and caused Santa not to visit my friend’s whose parents were forced out of work from the industry we used to have.

I grew into a teenager through her reign, to a background of social unrest, industrial strife and high unemployment. The attitude of the country was that ‘Greed is Good’ and through monetarist economic policy and economic liberalism, this was reinforced by our country’s leaders until it helped us into the economic crash of the of the late 1980's and recession of the very early 1990’s – all under the rule of that same wandered, frail and injured old lady.

Even years later, long after she had departed from power, when, as an adult, I had to pay my poll tax and student loans, I realised I was still suffering for being one of ‘Maggies children’.

It would be naive and churlish to say any of the current recession and economic crisis is due to Thatcher’s policies, we have had almost 20-years and a succession of governments to right the political wrongs, if not the memory of the fashion wrongs, of the 1980’s. But we don’t appear to be able to learn from history.

Our current Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, Lord Mandelson once claimed of New Labour that “we are all Thatcherites now”, and in terms of economic policy this seems scarily accurate – history has a habit of repeating itself.

In the long term, it will be interesting to see how history remembers Margaret Thatcher. I, like many of my generation, will not remember her fondly. But now there’s an outside chance that one day in the future, once they finally stake her into her casket, I will remember a day way back in 2009 when she did something to bring a smile to my face and a warm feeling to my soul.

“To wear your heart on your sleeve isn't a very good plan; you should wear it inside, where it functions best.”

My house doesn’t have a moat, so who I am I to judge...

The whole saga of MPs allowances and expenses has been going on for quite a while now and up until now I have (mostly) avoided blogging about it. I’ve avoided it mainly for health reasons. Every time I see one of their self-important, smug, shit-eating faces on the TV or read about their repeated rape of the déclassé proletariat in the news I start to feel nauseous, my heart rate raises to an uncomfortable just-eaten-a-deep-fried-Mars-bar level and I then need to sit in a darkened room for a while in case I suddenly ‘Hulk-up’!

Incidentally, when I say this sorry saga has been going on for quite a while I don’t mean since the Daily Torygraph published their first ‘scoop’ a the beginning of April this year, I remember having a laugh about it as far back as the middle of 2005, when Armando Iannucci’s fabulous ‘The Thick of It’ first made me laugh at the absurdity of corruption in the MPs allowances and expenses system.

I’m not laughing now...

I don’t actually care that they are all claiming expenses. If there is a need for something to be purchased that is reasonably required for them to be able to do their job, then that, in my mind, is OK. The fact that the growing list of embarassing items contains toilet seats (glittery or otherwise), jellied eels, a Corby trouser press and even tampons for a guy (I’m assuming the immigration minister Phil Woolas is a guy, although I haven’t personally checked inside his Ys), is all an amusing and titilating distraction from the real problem...

The real problem is the fact that the people we entrust (and pay) to govern the country think that this is acceptable behaviour. That the fact it doesn’t appear to be against the wording of the rules means that they believe they can justify procuring anything they want and we, the plebeians, foot the bill for it. The fact that it is morally bankrupt doesn’t appear to be an issue.

Whoever wrote the rule book probably didn’t think to include anthing to stop these right honourable members claiming for cleaning their moat, changing their lighbulbs or building a house for their fucking ducks. This might be because any reasonable person (never mind an honourable one) would possibly stop for a second while they are filling in their legitimate expenses claim and say to themselves; “Hold on a second... I’ve already paid this mortgage off... This could be considered taking the piss...”.

Many of these parasites have defended their overblown claims by saying they were made within the rules and were agreed with the fees office. To me, this smacks rather too much of the of the old Nuremberg defence. Frankly, we deserve better. If you’re going to try to justify your theft and deception, at least try to use your imagination.

There has also been a fair bit of commentary saying that the poor MPs are paid only a small basic salary and that any radical overhaul of the allowances system means that they would have to substantially increase MPs basic wage. This is simply a load of bollocks. MPs are paid an annual salary of £64,776– more than 2.5x the UK average salary (£24,809) or a massive 6.1x the UK minimum wage of £10,428.60 (assuming a typical 35hr working week for workers over 21). According to their own statistics, their, so called, small wage places them firmly in the top 10% of wage earners in the country, so please don’t try to make us feel sorry for you. If you want to earn the big money, go and work for RBS, it is public-sector after all.

Following the Nolan Committee's First Report on Standards in Public Life in 1994, our public servants, including MPs, are supposed to adhere to The Seven Principles of Public Life; Selflessness, Integrity, Objectivity, Accountability, Openness, Honesty, and Leadership. There are very few of our MPs who have shown any of these admirable traits recently. It would appear that these are not so much Principals, more like pointers or suggestions. Just like the serving suggestions you get on the back of a ready meal, a nice helpful alternative that no-one ever follows.

So, to any MPs who might happen across this humble blog, here’s a radical idea. You can keep your top-10%-of-wage-earners-salary; after all we want to attract at least the top 10% of intellect to the job. You can continue to claim for reasonable expenses "wholly, exclusively and necessarily incurred from the purpose of performing your Parliamentary duties", but, for fuck’s sake, get someone with a bit of nous to police it. If you then want a house for your daughter, a new marble table, mock tudor beams, a 42” plasma screen TV or even hundreds of bags of horse shit – buy it from your salary like the rest of us. After all, that’s what all of us ‘little people’ do when we get paid – it’s called a job.

Don’t make me angry. You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry...

Bring on the spangly green dancer...

Every year I go over to a close friend’s house to enjoy the spectacle that is the Eurovision song contest. Every year follows a similar template. My friend lives out in the countryside, so every year I pick up another friend who lives near me and we then drive over to our mutual friend’s house where we meet with a larger party of friends and we swap pleasantries for an hour or so before the main event.

Every year my friend’s wife puts on a fabulous buffet spread and we enjoy the wonderful food, have a few drinks (non-alcoholic for me of course) and generally enjoy each other’s company before subjecting ourselves to trial by Europop.

Every year my friend’s wife very thoughtfully prints out scoring sheets from the BBC Eurovision website and warns us not to start our scoring too low at the beginning, and we all laugh knowing this to be oh-so true.

We then vaguely watch the show and laugh at the funny Europeans. We discuss how the tactical voting will go and, as expected, groan when all the neighbouring countries give each other “douze points” as we predicted. We laugh at the outfits, we laugh at the songs, we laugh at the dance routines, we laugh at the token fat one (the only one who can actually sing), we laugh at the scary one, we laugh at the Germans, we laugh, we laugh, we laugh...

All very middle-class, all very jolly, all very nice and all very pleasant.

This year followed exactly the same template as every other year and I had a nice time in nice surrounds with nice company and nice food. Nice. Nice. Nice.

However, something new happened this year. This year there was a revelation, a revelation in the unlikeliest form.

Albania.

Don’t get me wrong, the song was still shit like all the rest, the singer was a forgettable Europop singer like the rest, but the act, my god, the act was a revelation!

Now, before you read on you have to see this shit...! Seriously, watch it now...! Don’t worry I’ll wait until you get back...

Did you see what I mean! The guy in the tight green sequined body suit was wonderfully bizarre. He had absolutely nothing to do with anything, he wasn't dancing, he wasn't singing, he wasn't even co-ordinated with the others, in fact, he was just truly fucking weird!. I’m not sure if he thought he was on a green screen and was meant to be moving the set around, or in fact what the fuck he was doing there, but wow! All I could think was that he should be taken on by the rest of the TV channels.

Imagine how much more palatable the evening news would be if he was fannying around behind the newsreaders and they didn’t acknowledge his presence. Who would really care that the politicians were fucking us up the ass by having us pay for them to over-legislate, over bureaucratise, have illegal wars, allow the elderly to live in poverty, under-educate the youth, demolish our economy, and cripple the NHS – all this while still making us pay to clean out their fucking moat like the good little serfs that we are.

That spangly green guy could keep us all happy.

“Look darling, our trusted politicians and public servants have unexpectedly let us down. They have stolen our hard earned cash while systematically destroying our economy, placing all of our jobs at risk and borrowing so much money that our children’s, children’s, children will still be picking up the bill”

“True dear, but that prancing little green fucker has completely distracted me from my despair and my fear for the future with his modern improvisational dance...”

Surely, it's got to be worth a try?