Snouts in the Trough

Before the 2010 election, Cameron accused Labour of wasting millions funding ‘a cushy lifestyle for politicians’ and pledged he would ‘cut the cost of politics’.

But in his first year in Downing Street he created 117 new peers – 117 people who were not elected by the taxpaying public; most of whom were probably not even known to the taxpaying public; most of whom had never done anything of benefit for the taxpaying public; most of whom were probably already either wealthy or extremely wealthy and who had no need of taxpayers’ money to support their luxury lifestyles; most of whom were ‘Cameron’s cronies’; but all of whom could from then on claim generous and easily ‘fiddleable’ expenses, paid for by us, till the day they died.

The increase in the number of peers could cost us well over £10 million a year. What is perhaps most surprising about Cameron’s ‘cutting the cost of politics’ speech is that he managed to keep a straight face while fooling us about his real intentions of hugely increasing the cost of politics, mostly for the benefit of himself and his buddies.

Before the election, Clegg seemed to share big-spending, austerity-preaching Cameron’s admirable belief that the cost of politics should be cut. In a September 2009 policy document Mr Clegg promised A Better Politics for Less.

But Clegg too seems to have forgotten his ‘cut the cost of politics’ promise. In 2010, he had two special advisers, by 2012 this had risen to fourteen, costing us almost £1 million a year.

Then Clegg spent about £80 million of our money on his failed AV referendum. This £80 million could have paid for five hundred police officers or nurses for five years, perhaps a better use of our money than increasing the number of Libdems in Westminster.  Had Clegg succeeded, AV would have hugely complicated our voting system and meant at least £100 million of our taxes being spent on a new electronic vote-counting system.

Clegg’s proposal for up to 450 elected peers, all receiving a full salary from our taxes, would have increased the cost of the Lords from £130m to about £300m a year. This may or may not be an example of Clegg’s ‘better politics’, but it certainly wasn’t ‘for less’. Moreover, Clegg’s arrogant disdain for proper control of spending our money was further demonstrated when there was a Tory backbench rebellion against Clegg’s plan. In retaliation for the Tories abandoning reform of the Lords, Clegg threatened to block Cameron’s proposal to reduce the number of MPs in the Commons to 600 – something which would have slightly reduced the cost of politics – unless he got his way on Lords reform.

Once again, Mr ‘Better Politics for Less’ Clegg seemed totally and selfishly unconcerned about how much of our money he would spend on his political cronies. Clegg’s various attempts to squander huge quantities of our tax money on his efforts to change voting systems for the Commons and Lords for the benefit of himself and his party seem to sit uncomfortably with Clegg’s vision of A Better Politics for Less.

There is nothing wrong with being a Mandelsonian, although it’s not something that appeals to me. But there is something very wrong with being a liar and a thief and avoiding prosecution because your chums at Westminster protect you.  As one Telegraph reader pointed out:

“Carol Irving, single mother of 4, unemployed. Failed to declare she was living with a partner. Over-claimed £40,000 in Housing Benefit = 6 months in jail”

“David Laws MP single, multimillionaire. Failed to declare he was living with a partner, over-claimed £40,000 in Parliamentary Allowances =invited to rejoin government after 18 months on back benches”

Yet liar and thief David Laws looks likely to rejoin the Cameron/Clegg bunch of liars and thieves in government today in David Cameron’s much anticipated and totally pointless reshuffle replacing one bunch of greedy, incompetent, self-serving liars and thieves with another bunch of greedy, incompetent, self-serving liars and thieves.

I think the reinstatement of liar and thief David Laws will tell us all we need to know about the worthless, lying, thieving, expenses-fiddling scum who infest Westminster and who are destroying our country while filling their own pockets with our money.

And, by the way Mr Cameron – we all despise you and the pointless joke chancellor, George ‘I haven’t a clue’ Osborne, and no amount of shuffling and reshuffling is going to save your useless government come the next election.

I don’t often read the Guardian – I find it too turgid, badly written, verbose and self-righteous. But an article on Saturday caught my attention – “Don’t give climate change heretics an easy ride”.

Firstly, the supposed journalist brands anybody who doesn’t agree with her as a “heretic”. Even the Mail and the Torygraph aren’t that biased and intolerant.

Secondly, the ‘journalist’ ignores many of the factors that could contribute to climate change – overpopulation, deforestation, solar activity and so on.

Thirdly, the ‘journalist’ demands a system of accreditation of experts so that only ‘approved’ climate scientists should be allowed to comment on climate change. Who would administer this accreditation? Guardian journalists with no relevant scientific qualifications? Moreover, this idiot seems to forget that the head of the completely discredited IPCC is a bureaucrat and railway engineer from one of the world’s most corrupt countries and who has made a lot of money from his IPCC sinecure. She also forgets that forty years ago most climate ‘scientists’ were united in predicting a new mini ice age with freezing temperatures that would devastate agriculture in Norther Europe and the US. Funny, none of the ‘experts’ mention that any more.

I usually find Guardian articles laughable in the way they dogmatically ignore even the most blindingly obvious facts when these don’t support their cherished beliefs. But I found this article gave an interesting insight into the mentality of Guardian journalists and readers and I found it worrying in the way it proposed to muzzle any person brave enough to disagree with the usual blinkered Guardian propaganda.

I had always assumed that the Guardian was the paper of choice for the liberal elites – overpaid BBC executives and underperforming, politically correct teachers. But if you compare Guardian readers’ comments with those on the Mail and Torygraph websites, you’ll be struck by the complete intolerance shown and the amount of invective spewed out by Guardian readers. In comparison to them, Mail and Torygraph readers seem eminently balanced and reasonable. So perhaps this ludicrous article about muzzling ‘global warming heretics’ fits in well with the inability of Guardian journalists and readers to allow free speech to anyone opposed to their narrow-minded, self-serving views.

As arguments rage over whether exams have been dumbed down and now should be made more rigorous, perhaps all the supposed educational experts are missing a trick. Obviously, not all children are equal academically and not all those who are will perform well in exams which tend to depend on having a good short-term memory. But maybe our educational system is not geared up to identify what each child is good at.

The diagram below is based on work by a psychologist who proposed that there are eight types of intelligence. All are equally valid. Instead of judging our children on a few quite narrow criteria, if they were all evaluated against these eight types of intelligence, perhaps we would be better at identifying their real talents and how these should be developed? Then  every child could be helped to reach their full potential. Just a thought.

A survey has just revealed that most Brits do not understand the difference between our deficit (what the Government spends each month and what it takes in taxes) and our national debt (what the Government owes). So they don’t realise that as long as we have a deficit, our debt increases. Thus they don’t understand that, even if the Coalition was to cut public spending (which it’s not doing), we are still going bankrupt. Our national debt was about £700bn in 2010. By the time of the next election it will be over £1.5trn.

We are at risk of financial markets panicking within a couple of years (especially if the economically-ignorant idiot Balls becomes Chancellor), the interest the Government pays on its debt rising and up to a third of all our taxes being used just to pay the interest on our debt. We are facing a Greece-style economic collapse because neither the Coalition nor Labour have the courage to explain to stupid voters the catastrophe facing the country.

If the majority are incapable of comprehending the difference between deficit and debt, then they’re going to vote for Labour as they’ll believe Labour’s argument that you can borrow your way out of debt. But that will lead to a total economic collapse. When people are real turkeys, they really do vote for Christmas.

Perhaps all voters should be given a democratic choice. They could choose to be registered to either vote in one of Simon ‘Slimey’ Cowell’s fixed supposed ‘talent’ competitions or they could vote in general and council elections? Then all the thickos would choose to vote in Slimey’s competitions and Britain might get the kind of government we need and not the government thick Britain deserves.