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.

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...