Snouts in the Trough

A reader informed me that Mail on Sunday columnist Peter Hitchens proposed that there should be compulsory voting, on condition there was a box for “none of the above”. If the “none of the above” hit 30% then no MP would be selected for that constituency.”

This is an interesting idea. So let’s look at a couple of possible variations:

1. Perhaps there should be a place on the list of candidates called “No MP”.  Then if the majority of voters chose the “No MP” option, then that constituency would just not have any MP for the next parliament.

We could even develop this. Each MP costs us over £300,000 in salary, expenses, subsidised meals and drinks, freebie foreign trips and general troughing. What if voters had the option that if they voted “No MP” then £100,000 would be given to local charities each year, thus saving over £200,000 for that constituency each year – £1,000,000 over the 5-year life of a parlament. So, if 200 constituencies voted “No MP”, there would be an extra £100,000,000 for local charities and a £200,000,000 saving for taxpayers over a parliament.

2. Or there could be another possibility. What if there was a rule that if the voter turnout in a constituency was below 50%, then that constituency would lose the right to have an MP at Westminster.

Then you could still apply the rule that in each constituency with no MP, £500,000 is donated to local charities and £1,000,000 is saved for taxpayers for the life of the next parliament.

Of course, this is all idle dreaming. This would give us true democracy and it would make our useless, greedy, self-serving, thieving MPs work for a living.

In the meantime, it seems most MPs use their position to fill their pockets with as much money as they can.

Here’s how Tory Tim Yeo spends much of his time (click to see more clearly)

And here’s how Simon Reevell fills much of his time – working as a barrister:

Last week I was in London. Walking across Westminster Bridge was difficult due to the many Eastern European conmen, scammers and pickpockets swarming all over the bridge. The main con being used was the “three shells and a pea” scam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shell_game

(click on pictures to see more clearly)

But there were also beggars and, I believe pickpockets, bag snatchers and other such desirables – all part of Eastern European gangs that seem to have taken over the bridge and frightened away more honest people like the bagpipe players and food vendors who used to work there.

Now, here are some really unusual scenes – our pen-pushing, politically-correct police actually doing something about the infestation:

But a few minutes after the police have gone, the Eastern European garbage are back again hustling, begging and stealing.

Now it seems that London is their main target. But when hundreds of thousands more start flooding in after 1 January 2014, all our main town centres are going to become almost no-go areas for us:

Then the only the only safe place to shop will be in out-of-town centres, away from our new Eastern European friends. Our useless government claims it wants to revive our high streets. But when our Eastern European visitors spread out across the country, no honest person will dare going anywhere near our town centres.

Of course, the Eastern Europeans are not the only gangs of con artists and crooks around Westminster Bridge:

(Click on title to leave a comment or to see comments)

Former rock star Neil Young (of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young and of “After the Goldrush”) seems to have been reborn as an environmentalist. He has just attacked a Canadian tar sands oil extraction project saying: “The fact is, Fort McMurray looks like Hiroshima. Fort McMurray is a wasteland. The Indians up there and the native peoples are dying”. That’s an interesting comparison from Mr Young. Hiroshima was devastated by the world’s first atomic bomb and over 100,000 people are estimated to have died (click on picture to see more clearly)

I haven’t been to Fort McMurray. But someone who worked there wrote, “Fort McMurray is also known as Fort McMoney a town of 50,000, 30 miles from the nearest plant with maybe 2,000 natives earning up to $150,000 a year if they care to take a job. Most do and live normal lives. Many waste their life drinking, taking drugs etc – the result of having too much money and nothing to do. More die in traffic accidents, odeed or frozen to death than health issues caused by oil extraction. I worked there for 10 years and know people that spent 40 years there and they have no related health issues.”

Neil Young is not the first aged rock star to open their big mouth before engaging what’s left, if anything, of their brain. Recently we had our very own Brian “Badger” May comparing the culling of badgers to genocide. I’m not sure which genocide he had in mind. It could have been the 1915 slaughter of over one million Armenians and other ethnic Christian minorities by the Turks. Or perhaps the 1994 Rwandan massacre of between 500,000 and 1,000,000 Tutsis. Or maybe it was the Holocaust where over 11 million people – mainly Jews and Slavs – were killed by our German friends. Interestingly, homosexuals were also included in the Holocaust. I wonder how Mr May’s former bandmate, the homosexual Freddy Mercury, would have reacted to Mr May’s apparent suggestion that gassing homosexuals to prevent the spread of homosexuality was the same as culling a few thousand badgers to prevent the spread of bovine TB.

But, of course, the crass stupidity of Young and May are mere bagatelles compared to the continued rantings of arch idiots like Saint Bob Geldorf and Saint Bono.

As a registered non-dom, Geldorf is legally entitled to avoid income and capital gains tax on international earnings. His fortune is estimated to be about £32m. If he’s earning say 3% on his investments, that’s £960,000 a year – £18,461 a week. Although he does his best to pay as little tax as possible, he is forever mouthing off about how more of the money that we ordinary people pay in taxes should be shovelled into the waiting pockets of African kleptocrats (click on picture to see more clearly)

Bono is much richer. He too has “useful” tax arrangements. In 2006, U2 moved their publishing arm to the Netherlands after the tax exemption for artists introduced by former Taoiseach Charles Haughey was capped at €250,000. Bono’s fortune has been estimated at about £400m. At 3% interest a year, that gives Bono £12m a year – £230,769 a week or £32,967 a day. If Mr Bono paid the same levels of tax as us plebs, the Irish or British government would have lots more money to give to enriching African leaders while their people starved to death.

Hey, ho. That’s the way it goes. I wish I was an ageing rock star with a big mouth and a drink and drug-addled brain and could afford to be a blundering, greedy, hypocritical buffoon worshipped by a sycophantic press and by politicians eager to be seen to be trendy and  “doing the right thing” – with other people’s money, never their own.

This is the 2nd in a series of blogs where I’ll present the case as to who should win our “Trougher of the Year” trophy. Today, Baroness “The Pig” Ashton. As usual, I’ll look at what The Pig has cost us and what she has done for us.

What has she cost us?

As the first head of the EU’s diplomatic service. The Pig gets an annual salary of around  £260,000 – about the same as the US president, almost twice the £142,500 a British PM gets and over twice the £124,000 her counterpart, the US Secretary of State. Moreover, she has chosen to pay the extremely low EU taxes rather than UK taxes, thus saving herself around £40,000 a year.

When she leaves her EU job next year, Ashton will get a “transitional payment” of up to £464,000 payable over 3 years to ease her difficult transition off the gilded EU gravy train. In addition, she will be entitled to a pension of over £60,000 a year to add to all the other generous public-sector pensions she has accumulated in Britain. If you add up Ashton’s salary, expenses and pension, then she has probably cost us over £4m for just her 5 years in Brussels.

Before her big Brussels job, Ashton spent about 26 years troughing in various public-sector and political jobs probably costing us about £5m in salary, pensions and expenses. So, all in all, the direct cost of Ashton to taxpayers will be somewhere in the region of £9m.

 What has she done for us?

When Ashton was appointed to her eye-wateringly lucrative position, one journalist wrote: ”Never elected by anyone, anywhere, totally unqualified for almost every job she has done, she has risen to her current position presumably through a combination of down-the-line Stalinist political correctness and the fact that she has the charisma of a caravan site on the Isle of Sheppey.” According to The Guardian, an anonymous Whitehall source said: “Cathy just got lucky…The appointment of her and Herman Van Rompuy was a complete disgrace. They are no more than garden gnomes”.

In February 2011, Baroness Ashton received the lowest grade in a survey rating the performance of European Commissioners. The survey, carried out by lobbying and PR company Burson-Marsteller, asked 324 Brussels policy-makers to rate the European Commissioners with a grade A to E (A being the highest). Ashton, a commission vice-president as well as the EU’s high representative for foreign affairs, scored an E for her performance. She was the only Commissioner to receive a grade below D.

When she took over as head of the EU’s utterly useless diplomatic service, Ashton promised  that her department would stick to its initial budget. But spending actually shot up from £383m in 2011 to £407m in 2012 and will be about £431m in 2013. The excuse given by Ashton’s spokesman was that her department had more work to do than expected. I suppose he must have meant the EU’s impotent, almost non-existent response to the “Arab Spring” which has now turned into the horrific Islamofascist “Arab Winter”.

In fact, the only significant achievement I can find in Ashton’s long years of “public service” is that she helped steer the disastrous Lisbon Treaty (which was just the previously rejected EU Constitution under another name) through the House of Lords. Signing away our national sovereignty by accepting the Lisbon Treaty was probably one of the greatest acts of treachery ever committed by any British government. But people like The Pig don’t care what’s good for Britain – they only care about advancing their own lousy careers.

So, there you have it – just a few reasons why the fragrant Pig should win our “Trougher of the Year” trophy. Next – Chris Patten.

Here’s a picture with six clowns and one great international statesman. Can you spot who are the clowns and who is the great international statesman?

Yup. That wasn’t very difficult. While Cameron, Hague, Hollande, Obama and Kerry have behaved like idiots, buffoons, fools, clowns over their desperate attempts to get involved in yet another pointless, internecine Middle East war that has nothing to do with us, there has been one person who has behaved calmly and thoughtfully – Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

It has become fashionable in the press to criticise Putin over the lack of real democracy in Russia. But Russia is not Kensington or Notting Hill Gate where most of Britain’s chattering classes live. Russia is a huge, almost ungovernable country. Russia’s surface area is 17,098,246 km2 compared to the US at 9,629,091 km2 and Britain at a pathetic 242,900 km2. So, Russia is almost twice as large as the US and seventy times larger than the UK.

Moreover, Russia was facing complete chaos until Putin took over. Putin has been the best thing that every happened to Russia since Boney M sang “Ra-Ra-Rasputin, lover of the Russian queen”. Under Putin’s rule, the earnings from Russia’s oil, gas and minerals have not been squandered as they are in most other resource-rich countries. Instead they have been (more or less) invested in imposing order in this vast country, in modernising it and in building a new middle class of highly educated people. Visit any holiday resort around the world, and the people you’ll see buying holiday homes and yachts are mostly Russians. This is an incredible, almost unbelievable change from just a couple of decades ago and light years away from what happened when Russia was the Soviet Union.

Of course, there have been problems. You can’t move from totalitarianism to chaos to peaceful development and national economic success in just a few decades without a certain degree of central control. And you can’t have a country earning so much wealth without some of it being siphoned off by corrupt politicians, bureaucrats and businessmen.

We are making a terrible mistake in constantly attacking Putin over supposed human rights abuses and corruption in Russia. The West and Putin have one common enemy – radical Islam.

But instead of understanding this and working together with Russia to fight the spread of radical Islam, idiots Cameron, Hague, Obama, Kerry and Hollande want to turn our military into Al Quaeda’s air force. It’s time to stop demonising Putin and to realise that Russia and the West are on the same side.

How long will it take for the clowns that rule us to tell the difference between our friends and our enemies?