Democracy - whats the point?

I spoke to a mate of mine the other day and asked him who he voted for in the European elections a few weeks ago. "I don't vote" was his defiant response, as if it was his way of protesting that he believed it didn't make any difference who he voted for.

It's quite sad that in Great Britain only 50% of the population - plus or minus 10% - can be bothered to vote; be it European elections, local elections or even general elections. In the recent European elections it was approximately 40% and in the last general election it was approximately 60%.

Taking the general election as an example: over 20 million people didn't vote.

Why?

Disillusionment?
Protest?
Main parties all have the same policies?
Assumption that Labour would get a majority anyway?

Personally I believe, like my friend said, it's because people feel their vote doesn't really count. What difference will it make to them? Will their lives improve, degrade or stay the same? When the Government says it's pumping money into something, who notices? Who benefits?

I've been thinking about this over these past few weeks as the misdemeanours of various MPs have become apparent thanks to the Telegraph and it's struck me that in the UK we really don't have a proper democracy in the true sense that the people have the power.

Does every vote count in a general election? The answer is it doesn't, due to the First Past the Post system. Let me give a quick example.

In a constituency of 24,001 people, 12001 people vote Labour and 12000 vote Conservative. Labour wins, the Conservative votes are discarded. Now, assume that the first 12001 people that went to the ballot box all ticked Labour candidates. At this point, it really doesn't matter who the other 12000 people vote for because Labour has already won. Therefore it can be said that their votes did not count.

Yes, this can work to the advantage of any party and you could say where one party gains in one place another gains in another place, so it's swings and roundabouts. It's still not a truly democratic and fair system though, because it can be manipulated. If there are two constituencies next to each other whereby one is traditionally weak and one is strong in terms of a party's domination of the vote, parties can orchestrate some voters from the strong constituency to vote in the weak one.

For the past 12 years we've been in a position where Labour, who got only 3% more of the total vote share than the Conservatives in the 2005 general election, have had a huge majority in the House of Commons and therefore you can say that all the other parties and all the other votes were irrelevant.

The result of first past the post is that representation in the House of Commons does not reflect the actual vote. You could have come second or third in the overall vote share yet still end up dominating the House of Commons because you won more constituencies.

I don't believe it's a great system, I don't believe it promotes democracy and lately with Labour's domination in the House of Commons it has given the Prime Minister an almost presidential role, though Mr Brown is falling from this pedestal quite rapidly (if he ever really climbed on to it in the first place).

So what do we need to sort it out?

Michael Jackson coming back from the dead to sing us all into the sunlight?

Kim Jong Il to nuke us into oblivion?

The other popular alternative to first past the post is proportional representation which shares the seats in the House of Commons proportionally to the number of votes for each party.

This means that every vote counts so radical parties, racist parties, one-policy parties and lots of independents will get seats there, and the domination of the big two parties will be lessened.

It sounds good on paper, but in practise it means that anything passing through the House of Commons would be voted on by these minority parties and their votes could make or break the outcome.

Some say that's a good thing, and some don't. The Government is against it: they say it would be a pointless coalition of a large number of small parties that never got anything done. Whilst that might be correct, it would in my view still be more representative than the current system.

It's not something I believe will happen unless the voting figures drop even more than they have already. I do believe that when the Prime Minister calls the next election, we will see a rise in voting simply to get him out but it could easily go the other way.

There can't be many people that still won't vote Conservative "because Thatcher closed the mines", can there?

Total Recall

Lately I am liking more and more the idea of being able to recall Members of Parliament, or in laymans terms, kick them out if we get sick of them.

It's how Arnie got in in California: a percentage didn't like the existing Governor and forced a new election, and he won.

This would be particularly useful right now with all these expenses related resignations, or rather steppings down. As you will know, all of those MPs that have been caught with their snouts in the trough are "stepping down at the next election", although they all say they were intending to step down and that the expenses scandal is nothing to do with it. Right.

They are hanging on because they will receive a £70,000 "readjustment" payment if they simply quit being an MP.

Had they gone now, they wouldn't get it. Had they been recallable, they would most certainly not get it, and I think there should be an option to recall their pension to spend it on something more useful.

Vive la Legislation

Lord Steve Carter and Ben Bradshaw have revealed their plans for "Digital Britain".

• Application of a £6 per year phone line tax to fund the 2MBit broadband expansion into rich suburbs.

• ISPs are forced to hand over customer details on request to Ofcom which can be dished out to media conglomerates so they can monitor and sue you more easily.

• All peer to peer is illegal, full stop and Ofcom is tasked with blocking it.

• "Online piracy is wrong" and "unacceptable", and anyone caught "downloading illegally" will be shot at dawn.
  

Superb. Another double helping of spin complete with the bitter aftertaste of legislation. I thought this report was supposed to take us forward. Taxing everyone to pay for old copper wire technology to be rolled out whilst everyone else on the planet is rolling out fibre is a sure fire winner!

If you check out what Ben Bradshaw said in the Commons today, it's clear he was just reading his script and had no idea what on earth he was talking about. Bullshitting it about fibre rollout when it's not even on the radar and there is no incentive for any company to take a lead on it.

I was under the assumption this report might be a really important step in making Britain a digital leader. In fact, having read the report, all it proposes is a new tax and a few analyses. No doubt incorporating more and more reports from Lord Snooty, more taxes and even more legislation.

So, they intend to eradicate their perception of online piracy by providing Ofcom with powers to obtain your personal data from ISPs to give to third parties so they can sue you. Currently this cannot happen due to the Data Protection Act. I really am against this action, as I believe most ISPs are. It's just another step to policing the internet and is a burden they do not want.

We've had Feargal Sharkey on again, totally missing the point and pushing his own agenda to make himself more money from his single hit song. Yes, he is chief executive of British Music Rights: another self serving music lobby group that labels all music downloaders as thieves.

He obviously has no idea of reality when he talks about a small number of people not being happy about this. Nobody is happy about it, because its the music industry pressuring the Government to push legislation through to support their failed business model. We don't need these aging, overgrown, monolithic music companies any more given the other means of distribution for music.

Apparently piracy in the UK costs music companies £175 million. The Government has already handed banks hundreds of billions, so why doesn't he just subsidise the music industry like he does for manufacturing, farming, and so on.

“If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And If it stops moving, subsidise it." - Ronald Reagan

If you download music or movies, the BPI try and convince you that you are wrong, that you are the problem and that you are a criminal. You've no doubt seen the "Knock off Nigel" adverts and associated parodies: likening people that download a few tunes to someone that would rob their grandmother is just bizarre and laughable. It also implies that there's something wrong with doing things on the cheap: something I would vehemently disagree with.

The Government reckon that their measures will reduce "illegal downloading" by 80%, but there is no such thing as illegal downloading. It's like labelling people that buy fake brand name clothes as criminals. They're not. The crime is in the distribution: in the case of file sharing it's the making available of contents and not the downloading of it. For those that use peer to peer, the technology relies on sharing and most peer to peer clients enable sharing by default.

I am sick of people like Feargal Sharkey and BPI boss Geoff Taylor labelling internet users as criminals for downloading something that was available online. I am sick of the Government pandering to these industries. Unfortunately the Government and media lobbies are so far behind on all this, that by the time they legislate for Bittorrent, it'll be yesterday's technology anyway.

I also feel some sympathy for the many businesses that distribute their software and updates using Bittorrent, because they will have to go back to old style leased line technology to provide this to their customers if the Government decide to force ISPs to block it.

I personally believe that these draconian measures will simply benefit other more liberal countries with a more modern attitude to business. Should they ban and block Bittorrent, peer to peer users from the UK will purchase remote servers hosted there in order to operate peer to peer software under different legislation. They will then use a virtual private networking connection in order to download their content from it. In fact, this already happens and is something I certainly would consider if the UK Government bans peer to peer as it suggested in the Commons today.

They should take a look at the case of Comcast in the USA. They blocked Bittorrent and ended up being sued because of it. They lost and the FCC forced them to stop it.

Maybe some day once someone in power actually thinks for themselves and has a background in the subject (rather than getting all their opinions from a board of self serving quango sitters) they will make progressive legislation to improve everything for everyone. This smokescreen only benefits music companies. Everyone else gets taxed or sued.

I hate Ruth Kelly

Yeah, this snooty pompous Brown "babe" is on the expenses gravy train too.

She claimed thousands of pounds for damage to her second home caused by flooding.

If my house were flooded and damage ran into large sums of money, the first thing I would think is to contact my insurer about it.

But, like all MPs, Ms Kelly first thought "I'll claim it on expenses".

I also find it quite interesting how MPs from all parties are coming out in support of the change in the rules to permit Gurkhas to live in Britain. If they have all supported this for a long as they claim, why does it only happen when support for the Government is at an all time low? Answers on a postcard..

They are all ripping us off

So, finally the grand old tale of how much of our money the Members of Parliament are creaming off to feather their nests is exposed. After all, in a system that allows you to fund a second life on expenses it is not surprising to see all members taking part in it.

The News of the World came up with a cracking promotion this week; just collect tokens to enter a competition to "live like an MP" - food bills paid, mortgage paid, gas and electric paid, home improvements paid. The only downside was that they were only offering £75,000 - about half what an MP claims on expenses every year.

I find it quite funny that over the weekend a special hotline was set up for MPs to come clean about expenses that they feared would be exposed and pay them back before they were. It's a whole web of deceit, and certainly a very very long gravy train. Why is our entire so-called democratic system so institutionally dishonest?

The MPs that have been caught are all coming out now claiming that they never supported the system and how they believe it should be changed. That is mightily convenient. They didn't seem to think about that when they were milking it dry for things such as sit on lawnmowers, under soil heating for their tennis courts and trimming of foliage around their helipad.

One in particular that I despise is Barbara Follett, who apparently is the Tourism Minister (although I would hedge not for long). She happens to be married to a best selling author who himself earns around £15million per year from his books. She claimed £25,000 for security patrols at her second home because she "didn't feel safe".

Some of them are paying the money back but it is important to note that this is only happening because they got caught.

Blame, according to MPs, is planted firmly at the door of the Fees Office for approving claims made, however the Fees Office in turn blames the MPs for submitting claims for frivolous items and says it is not their job to decide whether something can be claimed for or not. Hardly the shock of the century, I know.

Both are at fault.

There is also group of MPs that switch their second home repeatedly around the multiple homes in their property empire in order to claim expenses on each one for renovations. It is a disgrace.

I for one cannot believe Hazel Blears is still an MP after her cynical switching of homes both for expenses purposes and tax avoidance purposes. If it were anyone else they would have been arrested for tax evasion, but since she is Member of Parliament she will no doubt get away with it scot free, disappearing to the back benches in a reshuffle.

The salary for being a MP is hardly paltry, yet I would not be surprised if in the case of most of them their salary goes directly into the bank, unspent. The ease with which some of these MPs are able to pay back tens of thousands of "misclaimed" expenses tells you that most of them have feathered their nest. Mind you, the fact that even unknowns have multimillion pound country retreats and live like aristocracy tells you that.

There was a classic interview on Sky News with former MP Lord Foulkes yesterday where his agenda was clearly to ignore the fact that MPs are lining their pockets and ignore the fact that the Speaker Michael Martin is also doing it and trying to block publication of further expenses claims, but instead assault the interviewer and tell them they don't offer as much value as an MP.

Foulkes is also Scottish and clearly he is friends with the Speaker as he spewed out some rehearsed nobody-to-somebody rhetoric about the Speaker being from Glasgow, where according to him not many people get to the "top". More like he is trying to appease the hard working people from Scotland because he knows they will be livid to see a so called hard Labour man from a Labour heartland living the life of riley at their expense and trying his utmost to prevent anyone finding out about it.

When Foulkes was interviewed on the BBC, he was told the presenter earned £92,000 which according to him is almost twice as much as an MP. He does sort of have a point there in that the BBC is also funded by taxpayers albeit by an optional tax. However, she is not stealing money to supplement her earnings whereas all MPs are. To say an MP earns £67,000 is not the whole story - that all gets banked, and their living costs and any luxuries are all claimed on expenses.

If I got a job in London, I'd have to move there and buy a place to live. If you're a MP, you get it all for free. In fact even if an MP already lives in London, they can and do still claim for another house. That in itself tells you that it's "worth it" for them to do so, if only for the giant profit that they will pocket when they sell it. And it should not be.

They should be provided with a flat in London and the second home allowance should be scrapped. All current second homes should be sold and the profit split in proportion between the public purse and the MP. Paying for food should be scrapped, and paying for any furniture or renovations should be scrapped. This would remove any second home switching in order to abuse the system for more gains.

Even Gordon Brown has made an apology about all this; but why now? He knew about it all along and indeed he was part of it. Same for David Cameron: apparently he went ballistic at some of his party for their expenses claims.

He will have known about it, so please "Dave", give up with the publicity stunts.

Going for Gord

So Gordon Brown is going to give all of the British Olympians a gong as a reward for winning medals at the Beijing Olympics.

I wonder if they'll take pride of place in their trophy cabinets; Olympic gold with Gordons Gong next to it. Awesome sauce.

It's a somewhat desperate publicity stunt and whilst there might be a feel good factor about people from this country winning on the world stage, at home we're still plunging into a financial crisis and I don't really think the constant bombardment of awards for these people is going to take people's minds off this. With Christmas around the corner, it'll only become more evident anyway.

Bottler Brown then made me laugh when he talked about pumping more billions of pounds into sport in schools. It seems a bit of a bizarre comment since for the last 11 years Labour have been systematically destroying sport in schools!

With non-competitive sports days where everyone wins and nobody loses in addition to the widespread approval of sell-offs of enormous amounts of school playing fields to housing developers, Labour has successfully killed any chance kids of lower middle and lower class backgrounds had of getting interested in Olympic sports. The closest most kids of today will get to an Olympic medal is an ASBO.

It's no surprise over 60% of the medallists went to public schools.

The heat is on!

Speaker of the House of Commons Michael Martin is today under intense fire because his wife has been claiming taxi expenses for get-togethers that may not have been related to official business.

Indeed, from what I have heard she had claimed over £4000 in taxi fares to basically pay for her mates to come round to their house for a piss up.

If this is true, Martin must go. His position would become untenable: particularly since he is supposed to be leading an enquiry into MPs bogus expenses claims.

However given that Martin is fighting tooth and nail to stop expenses breakdowns being revealed I think it's reasonable to suggest that there is no smoke without fire on this issue. After all, why else would he be so bothered about it..

Expenses... again

They are at it again. This time the MP's are scrambling to block publication of second home expenditure - and they are spending our money to do it.

A group of MPs led by the Speaker of the House have decided to continue fighting against this publication by taking the issue to the high court. Apparently they were advised by lawyers that they didn't have a leg to stand on and almost everyone thought they would drop it but they haven't.

It seems to me inevitable that they will have to disclose this information. Firstly it's in the public interest and secondly its our bloody money. However the MPs have been bleating that they don't want their addresses published for fears of harassment.

Fine by me, just publish how much they are creaming off to pay for their marble kitchens and plasma televisions. I don't think anyone is bothered where they live.

Of course, we know the real reason they don't want this information in the public domain. The BBC's political editor Nick Robinson (the guy that looks like Judge Jules) summed it up pretty well when he talked about the possibility of several resignations if/when the figures are published.

Whilst MPs operate under a shroud of secrecy with regards to the amount of freebie money they are siphoning off for their own pockets, nobody will trust them.

Secrecy is only needed when there is something to hide.

Robin Banks

Looks like the predictions about the budget were pretty accurate. The Chancellor, Alistair Darling, has rammed up tax on almost everything you could think of.

Petrol is up 2p per litre.
Beer is up 4p per pint.
Wine is up 15p per bottle.
Spirits are up 50p per bottle.

The moronic thing is how this is sold as being the "miracle cure" for binge drinking. Firstly it wont be, and secondly we know that it's not really the reason he's taxed it so hard. To provide some sort of comparison all you have to do is look at what has happened with banning of advertising of cigarettes as well as the enormous tax increases on them. Did it stop people smoking? Not really.

It's a straightforward tax on as many people as they could extract more cash from. The Government know it wont make any difference and that people will continue to drink so they liberally smatter some taxes across the board. If it meant people giving up drinking then the Government starts to lose taxes and everyone is aware how financially broke the UK is at the moment.

Let's face it - Labour already introduced 24 hour licensing, allowing bars, pubs and even supermarkets to sell alcohol at any time they like. So now we are all used to the late opening hours we get slapped with more tax? Am I too cynical?

If you couple into this budget the fact that all farm produce - particularly butter, milk and cheese - as well as loaves of bread have skyrocketed in price recently and so has gas, water and electricity you have to wonder where we are heading.

Yet more taxes were slapped on so-called gas guzzlers in the name of Climate Change (tm), despite the fact that the money goes nowhere except into the greedy MP's expenses pot. We're getting battered on every turn by so-called environment taxes so the climate should - if these Government funded boffins are to be believed - be changing to a perfect one because we are paying loads of money because of it. Isn't the case though.

These taxes might seem small but they soon add up. It annoys me also how the Chancellor defers some taxes so that they occur after a few months or next year, by which time we have forgotten about them. For example, he deferred the petrol increase until October, by which time we will probably be paying around £1.20 per litre anyway. It already costs me about 80 quid to fill up my gas guzzler...

Darling has also looked at forcing supermarkets to charge for plastic bags. I'm sure they would rather the Government forced them to do it rather than make an active decision. Small things like 10p for a plastic bag put customers off if they can go elsewhere and get bags for free, but is it going to save the planet? Absolutely not.

Remember the Chancellor is the same idiot that doled out £40billion to a bank to save it from going bust. I don't really see why I should be hammered for more tax because the Chancellor is clueless. It's a sad state when the Government can hand out such large amounts of public money to private firms affected by their management of the economy to save its own bacon.

I'm getting a bit fucking tired of England right now. I heard the other day that in Wales it's now free to park at a hospital. Arguably it should be free everywhere but it's not in England - its more expensive than parking in a town centre. Profiting from the sick.

Also in Wales if you need a prescription from a doctor, it's free. It's around £8 per item in England.

In Scotland, students pay no tuition fees to go to university. English students have to pay over £3000 per year.

What pisses me off is that the tax I pay goes to give freebies in Wales and Scotland, but what are they doing to give me any freebies? Nothing, I don't get anything.

Get me on an plane to Australia.

Go away Galloway

I'm getting a bit tired of George Galloway and his apparently goggled vision of Western life. For example, I'm listening to his radio show at the moment and someone e-mailed in commenting that Muslims should be brought more into British society rather than given reasons to exclude themselves from it. This was obviously in relation to the Sharia thing I have already commented on. I agree pretty much with this. If people want to live seperately I don't see why Britain should have its culture carved up to suit them.

Galloway replied putting down the e-mailer, asking whether Muslims should be forced to go to the pub on Friday nights, get drunk, then go outside and piss on the wall on their way home to beat up their wife.

I know he's spent loads of time in Glasgow but bloody hell is that what George believes is commonplace in British society? Is he really trying to suggest that normal Brits are ALL alcoholic antisocial wife beaters? He always cracks down when someone makes a sweeping comment about Muslims but he's quite happy to dish out the same crap against normal non-Muslim British people.

Another stupid one is the way he bleats that abortion is "the law" in this country and that if he were a Jewish doctor he could say he wouldn't do one because of religious beliefs. This seemed to be about all he could come up with to justify his view that Sharia should be implemented here. Problem is, abortion isn't the law here. Sure it's legal, but its a choice on a case by case basis. I don't see the link between the UK law permitting abortion and implementing Sharia for divorces, marriages and any other family cases. Apples and oranges.

I also don't understand why certain bits of Sharia can be picked and chosen either. Why's Glasgow George not supporting the criminal aspect too?

He is a self confessed anti-capitalist which I find hilarious given that he's profited from the very thing he hates. The show he presents on commercial radio station Talksport nets him £100,000 per year for one night per week. In addition he pockets the standard MP's wage of about £70,000 per year plus a further £100,000+ of expenses.

Hypocrite!

Con your way, Derek

Derek Conway has today been suspended by the Conservatives after getting caught funding his son with his expenses: your money.

Good. But there are still plenty of others that need to go. Like these greedy bastards (sourced from Sky News/Bloomberg):

£185,421: Shahid Malik, Labour MP for Dewsbury
£178,116: Liam Byrne, Labour MP for Hodge Hill
£173,691: Joan Ryan, Labour MP for Enfield North
£172,733: Dan Norris, Labour MP for Wansdyke
£172,327: Tim Farron, Lib Dem MP for Westmorland & Lonsdale

I'm not surprised they are trying to become exempt from the Freedom of Information Act so they can conceal their expenses. It's mad that they can even consider this: expenses should be transparent and honest but as we all know it's anything but. They seem to want to keep it as muddy as possible so nobody can track how much public money they are siphoning off to fund their families' champagne lifestyle.

Check this one out: last year Barry Gardiner, the environment minister, claimed mileage equivalent to driving his own car to Delhi and back. He has an official government car and is a London MP. Unreal.

David McLetchie, the Scottish Tory leader, could not account for why he had claimed £5000 in "personal" taxi fares. He resigned, but only because he was caught.

This is what these bastards get (from timesonline.co.uk):

Staffing allowance

£84,081 To pay for employees’ pay, pensions and perks

Additional costs allowance

£21,634 To cover mortgage interest for a second property, utility bills, grocery bills, council tax and insurance

Incidental expenses allowance

£20,000 To pay for office and surgery costs. MPs can also pick up £250 every month in petty cash from this allowance

Travel expenses

No maximum(!)


The Capitalist Nightmare

I don't blame them for taking everything they can within the rules. Why not? You'd be a fool not to. We are not in a society where morals matter any more, it's the capitalist pinnacle, or rather the capitalist nightmare. Things admired just because they are expensive. People respected based on earnings and status. Greed and wealth above all else.

Why do young girls all want to be Posh Spice? Is it because she's talented and intelligent? No, it's because she wears expensive clothes, has an expensive lifestyle and is married to someone talked about more because of the money they earn than the sporting talent they have.

Why is Tony Blair being talked about lately? Is it because of his role as a United Nations ambassador? Is it because of the things he has done in his career as a MP and Prime Minister? No, it's because he's now being paid half a million per year by JP Morgan and probably a similar amount by Zurich for basically doing nothing and bullshitting about the global hysteria that is "climate change".

His wife's no different. All we know about her is that she's unattractive and gets paid £300,000 per year defending asylum seekers.

Anyway the rules for MPs expenses must be changed.

Currently they state that employees must be: “employed to meet a genuine need in supporting you, the member, in performing your parliamentary duties; [be] able and (if necessary) qualified to do the job; [and] actually doing the job.”

I've decided that MPs should simply be banned from employing their own family. It's quite clearly wrong that MPs can turn their expenses allowance into their own household income, in many cases doubling their money. It stinks.

Take the housewife that would otherwise be doing nothing; perhaps she answers the phone once in a while? Here's £40,000 a year plus pension and perks for your trouble, love.

Unqualified son studying geography full time at uni? £40,000 over 3 years, son. Shame on you Conway.

MPs are set apart from everyone else. They are in it to win it and take as much cash as possible and do as little as possible for it. There are too many examples of greed and arrogance to deny it so there needs to be a crackdown and anyone caught siphoning money unnecessarily should be out.

The UK is bordering on the Italian style Government where as soon as someone gets on the gravy train so do their whole family. Corruption city. The British Government used to have an integrity that it has now lost with scandal after scandal of outright arrogance and in some cases criminality - whether found guilty or not it does not matter.

Once the smoke starts to billow, it no longer matters whether there is a fire. If you think about Blair and the cash for honours for example, does anyone actually think it didn't happen?

All aboard the gravy train

I was really glad to see Peter Hain (right) fall on his sword the other day. I'd been clamouring for him to be booted out by Gordon since the story that he'd not declared over £100,000 in donations hit the news. At the time Bottler Brown didn't have the guts to get rid of him but once the Police stepped in and started the investigation there was only one possible outcome: especially when it was discovered that over half of it had come channeled through the dodgy "Progressive Policy Forum" think tank.

Not that long ago Harriet Harman was also rumbled for accepting donations via a third party, as was Hilary Benn. Both should have gone. Now we hear that Wendy Alexander and Alan Johnson are being investigated for yet more undeclared donations. Johnson's on the ropes a bit at the moment but I think he might just be able to hang on. His line is that he knew nothing about it, thought it was a genuine donation and is blaming the Electoral Commission for making admin errors. One wonders who will be next. Personally I find this hilarious because this is only happening due to reforms brought in by His Holiness the Right Reverend Tony Blair.

Even if Johnson goes, theres nothing to suggest he wont be back. Same with Hain. Handy Mandy went for undeclared loans from Geoffrey Robinson and he'd already been sacked and brought back once!

Supermarket Sweep

The Harman and Benn cases are unusual. Well they're the same case really. David Abrahams - a very rich property developer - had been pumping money to them for 4 years using false identities. This of course is entirely against the rules and Peter Watts, the general secretary of Labour, admitted that he knew what was going on but told everyone it was OK. So he bit the bullet.

Abrahams wanted to build a business park on a stretch of Green Belt land near Durham and had applied for permission. He made donations to Labour using the identities of the "directors" of the development. The Government had initially objected to Abrahams' plans but then, all of a sudden, the objections were retracted. It has quite an unpleasant smell about it and a cynic may suggest that Abrahams was attempting to influence decision making without anyone knowing who he was. If this is the case the Government are just as guilty in being influenced by cash. Who's surprised about that though?

We've had cash for honours which put a black cloud above the Labour party after several rich businesspeople that gave secret loans to Labour were nominated for honours. Nobody was surprised to see the Police draw a blank, even though they went through the high profile drama of questioning Tony Blair three times. I suppose this was some attempt to convince people that they were actually investigating an alleged crime!

I've heard politicians bleating on about how the system needs to be changed because so many are being caught by it. No. Whats the point in having rules if you're going to change them when people start getting caught breaking them? If politicians cant be bothered to abide by them then they should lose their jobs and be locked up like anyone else would be for money laundering and fraud. Dave Cameron has already castigated them for arrogance which is quite right. One or two forgetful ministers might be overlooked but when they are queueing up to be investigated by the Police I think what Dave said is absolutely true.

Labour have irreparably harmed the public trust in Government. I know, sleaze was a factor in the Conservatives losing office in 1997 (so were all the Conservative policies that Labour stole) but Labour has really taken sleaze and outright corruption to a new level where only those with no more lives left get booted out. You work in a bank, you launder money, you're out of a job and landed in court. You work in the Government and you can easily spin and squirm your way out of it.

This aside many Members of Parliament are simply cash siphoning non-entities that exist only to profit from you. The myth that MPs are local people that are fighting for your rights is exactly that - a myth. I remember in the mid 1990's when my brother used to be involved with the local Conservatives and I somehow ended up meeting our MP at the time which was Harold Elletson. Elletson was incredibly posh, wasn't from our area at all and quite honestly I would have had no idea who he was. I'd never even heard his name before. He was typical ivory tower material. The stereotypical Tory Boy from Harry Enfield & Chums.

Since the Tories were voted out and kept appointing hopeless leaders (apart from Hague) he jumped ship to become a bleeding heart Liberal Democrat and sits on one of those pointless committees these days. He is clearly mad because he went from a party with not many policies to a party with loads of unworkable "taxation nation" ones. On second thoughts, someone that can get paid £70,000 for doing nothing must have some grey matter between their ears.

I've not made a point here yet, I know. Well the point is that Mr Elletson may well have been their MP but nobody knew, nobody cared and he didn't really seem to do much. He took his massive amount of cash per year, probably siphoned a large chunk of expenses and sailed away into the sunset. Lovely.

I've just Googled Mr Elletson and it shows that his successor in 1997 was Joan Humble of Labour. I didn't know this. I don't know how to contact her. I don't know what she stands for. Of course, Mrs Humble is not even from this area and being a Yorkshirewoman will probably be supplying information to Government on how best to extract further tax from us Lancastrians to give to former mining villages in Yorkshire. Such is my cynicism but I make no apologies for it.

Democracy: Power to the Pillocks

It baffles me that people are suckered in to the belief that politicians do things for them or that MPs listen to local peoples' hopes and concerns and try to push them through with a passion. This isn't the case. How can it be the case? As I have already mentioned, MPs are rarely from the local area: they are professionals. If there's a place with no MP or candidate, they go and try their luck. They cry some crocodile tears about local issues, get their face in the newspaper and then disappear. Nothing ever happens that can be attributed to the MP, they are forgotten about and sit there on a pile of money until the next election. Best job ever.

Rt. Rev "Teflon" Tony won such a landslide because he managed to convince people that they were voting for him and not some former coal miner on an anti-Thatcher crusade. An undeniably good move. Check out their 1997 manifesto cover on the left: You're not voting for Prezza you're voting for me!

I've watched Prime Ministers Questions and the House of Commons is packed with mostly disinterested morons. The questions and answers are all pre-set and everyone is reading from a script including Bottler Brown. One Labour MP asked a question and had to keep pausing as she struggled to read her little sheet of notepaper - it must have been an issue that she was really passionate about then! Or maybe she was one of the true Old Labourites that can empathise with the Jeremy Kyle generation: flunked school, can't read and wants the state to provide everything by taking money from those that have a job.

On normal days the House of Commons is empty apart from one person speaking and a couple of half asleep overweight people listening and occasionally grunting a question. What are the MPs doing to justify the enormous salaries and pensions they get? Why are they allowed to pay their own family with their massive expenses budget?

Money for Nothing and your Pension for Free

The Conservative MP Derek Conway was today hammered for using his expenses money to pay his son just under £12,000 a year as well as dishing out bonuses of a few thousand despite his son being on a full-time university course. He's also paying his wife £40,000 per year from his expenses. She must be some office assistant. Conway should have been booted out immediately for this.

Some might suggest this is typical behaviour and I would tend to agree: there there is a history of MPs with their hands in the till reported in the press. We have already seen Scottish MEPs being probed for claiming full rent on property they have sub-let as well as MPs being rapped for paying relations to "work" for them when the work is in doubt. Even the infamous IDS (former Conservative leader Iain Duncan Smith) resigned due to allegations that he was paying his wife a salary for no apparent reason. He was eventually found to have done nothing wrong.

This is a bit of a running theme with politicians, but no smoke without fire I say!

I believe it's 100% wrong that MPs can pay members of their family excessive salaries for menial jobs such as secretarial work, especially since we know that they will do far less work than someone employed by a company to do the same work. There should be limits on what is allowed for certain jobs, or alternatively there should be someone that can make judgements on claims for expenses. There probably is, but unsurprisingly I have no idea who it is or what claims they have ever quashed. Probably none.

Labour have been a source of far more sleaze than John Major's Conservatives were in the 1990's and I think the unrequieted devotion by some to Labour is dissipating - especially now that the Rt. Rev Blair has left and in the true spirit of Labour has taken a £500,000 per year position at JP Morgan in the USA as well as another position as some eco warrior with Zurich group.

The taxes, more taxes and even more taxes ethos brought in by New Labour has caused many staunch Labour voters to lose their affinity with Labour and look for alternatives. This is another article for another day, but I think many people would agree that given the conduct of the representatives of the Government there must be some concern as to their real motives when handling the taxes we work so hard to pay.

The Government is making us stupid

I remember when Tony Blair came in to power in the UK and one of his main policies used to be improving the "three R's": Reading, wRiting and aRithmetic in schools.

Several years and countless billions later we continue to hear reports that the education system is failing the kids. Furthermore you can see this yourself. In this area at least, kids are not exactly known for intellectual prowess and you can tell. They talk like someone has just smashed them in the face with a cricket bat. Which they probably have.

We have a growing "gang" culture powered by these disillusioned teenagers - and some of them are only just teenagers. Of course, these are not gangs compared to the likes of the Yardie gangs in London or those similar gun wielding gangs in Liverpool. Simply gangs that commit minor offences which makes them feel better about themselves. Underage drinking, intimidation, vandalism, verbal and sometimes physical assault. Happy slapping. Even murder: consider the case of Gary Newlove that was battered to death outside his home by three teenagers in Warrington after he went to stop them kicking his wife's car. (The Police should take a proactive stance with these kids and lock them up before they do something like this. Force them to be educated.)

Anyway. Don't get me wrong here, most of this stuff happened when I was a teenager too. The difference is that only the "hard" kids - usually the ones that were thick - used to do it, and there weren't that many of them. When I used to buy alcohol underage, I didn't buy it to fuel me up for a fight or to brick someones car. I just went back to someones house and got trollied. Now a far larger number seem to do it: they are aggressive and do things that are against what is acceptable seemingly for the sake of doing so. It's got to a stage where an Antisocial Behaviour Order (ASBO) is like a diploma and gives respect on the street.

All this brings me to my point, which is Gordon Brown yet again trying to eradicate private schools by removing their charitable status (and resulting tax breaks). There is always this myth that private schools are available only for the very rich.

I went to a private school, as did several of my junior school friends and none of our parents are anything like what you would call rich (Labour ministers have a far higher income than my parents ever did). Private schools offer bursaries to help those that cannot afford the fees. The main thing is that they can choose who they accept: they don't accept rough kids that have no interest in learning. If they find a kid thats desperate to get the best education but cant afford it, they help them.

At that time you could do just as well at other normal comprehensive schools although there is no doubt that the quality and experience of the teaching staff was very high at the school I went to; and the discipline was too.

Fast forward 10 years or so and it's a whole different zeitgeist. You can see how things have changed. Pupils at comprehensive schools just don't want to know. Many of them are what I would class as thick, or no-hopers. I accept that the education system has a part to play in that. Basically I believe the education system in this country has become a joke: key exams are easier than ever to pass, many of the teaching staff are inexperienced; core subjects are dumbed down in favour of easy subjects like media. All this despite Gordon Brown and previously Tony Blair pumping billions of pounds into the system, buying the latest IT suites, latest science labs, books etc.

Consider the private sector and you can see that many of them are scrapping the GCSE and A level and opting for the internationally recognised International Baccalaureate. Compare this to the normal education system where exams are trivialised more and more each year and you can see why there is a problem.

In a comprehensive, teachers do not have the powers to control a class that those in private schools do. Any parent will tell you that once a child gets away with doing something they shouldn't they will keep doing it so it's no wonder classes in these schools are often disrupted by pupils. It's no wonder kids are antisocial when they are outside school because they can get away with it.

Society has removed all means of discipline. You can't smack your kids any more, you can't punish them. The Police never crack down on gang culture like they claim to and certainly don't enforce curfews and no-loitering zones. Many of those that go to comprehensive schools only have single mother to look after them. No father figure. I certainly used to be afraid of upsetting my dad but that wasn't necessarily a bad thing. I guess when you're a child in a single parent situation you go either completely off the rails and become a reprobate or you set off climbing the ladder to greatness. Not many climb the ladder.

As I said earlier, one of the common complaints from those perpetual benefits claimants that want to send their kids to the best private schools but cant afford it is that only super rich families can afford to send their kids there. Labour often spout about it too but the irony is that almost all Members of Parliament are products of private schools and send their kids to private schools.

What does Gordon Brown think will happen if the charitable status is removed from private schools? Prices will obviously go up. Meaning that Gordon will be the instigator of something he hates: exclusivity. You see, if this happens it really will only be the super rich that can afford these schools, and certainly some will have to close or reduce in size. For what benefit? Is this miraculously going to improve Gordon's awful education system?

No it's not. Private schools are an example that privatization works. Removing them removes choice for a select number and removes the top schools because people on benefits with kids that have been expelled from school already can't send their kids there. It removes the example of high quality education that Britain is known for around the world. What's next after Eton and Rugby have gone, demolish Oxford and Cambridge?

It is an example of Labour removing yet another choice. Soon there wont be any left.

Fake guns, pointless laws

Today the home secretary Jacqui Smith announced a new law banning deactivated firearms. She said,

"Tackling gun crime is key to making people feel safer and more secure in their communities. We already have the tightest controls in Europe but there is more we can do to remove the threat of gun crime."

In this nanny state we have the tightest controls on just about everything, Jacqui. So why is it that according to the Centre for Defence Studies at King's College since 1997 (when legally owned guns were banned in the UK) gun crime figures have gone up year on year? Don't tell me it's because of fake guns.

It's no coincidence that more guns from Eastern Europe are entering the UK just as more people from Eastern Europe are. It's no coincidence that about half of the gun crime in the UK happens in London. Bizarrely, over 50% of gun crime is actually air guns. I thought these were banned?

It doesn't take a genius to see that making legally owned firearms illegal makes no difference to crime, unless you actually think that criminals used to obtain a firearms license before committing armed robbery. Looking at the figures they don't and at least now they don't have to either.

And what of these deactivated firearms that people like to collect, for example old guns from World Wars. Now they are banned, what difference is it going to make? Are all the criminals that use them going to hand them in? Me no think so.

"The police tell me these pre-1995 weapons are turning up more and more in gun related crime and I want to address these concerns to effectively eliminate the threat from our streets."

Oh really? You mean like the last gun law effectively eliminated real gun crime? Wait a minute...

Call me Brave

So Dave Cameron has been in the news today with his latest suggestion for tackling perpetual benefits claimants and that is to make them all do community work in order to get their wages (benefits). He is right that the benefits system needs a reform, however I am not sure this almost communist idea is the one that will do it.

Apparently benefits cost the UK £100 billion per year which seems like a lot, although I'm not really surprised when for those that are on benefits there is no incentive to try to get a job.

Benefits are the gold paving on the streets that many people crave. Get on benefits and you get all your dental and optometric care for free, you get a free house, a free car (in many cases as its cheaper than paying bus & taxi fares), free money and you can sit on your arse all day watching Judge Judy on Sky. If you aren't on about £20,000 you are probably better off on benefits when you consider all the free stuff you get.

Why would you get a job on minimum wage and be worse off than having no job? It doesn't make sense to me, and evidently not to those on benefits as they don't apply for jobs either. Indeed, a large percentage of those that apply for jobs in this area are Polish immigrants - it's the indigenous lazy Brits that are the ones claiming. People on benefits create jobs though - I daren't think how many civil servants are employed to administer the benefits system. In addition people on benefits create jobs for patronising wrong-righting, crime-fighting (maybe) talkshow hosts like Jeremy Kyle.

You have to bear in mind that people are on benefits either because they can't be arsed to get a job; they can't work due to disability; they have 5 million children by 3 million different partners or because they have criminal records, no qualifications and are on drugs.

They took an example of a mid twenties chav on the BBC News this evening and asked him what he thought of Dave's great new idea. He said he thought people on benefits already did community work and that many are on benefits because they can't get a job. He was obviously on drugs.

I have trouble being sympathetic to people like him because he ruined his own life by getting a criminal record and by skipping school. The result being a youth with no aspirations and no qualifications that is a drain on society. The kind of person that probably aspires to go to prison in order to get a better life. Making him do community work for his benefits wont solve the root cause of this guy's problems, wont make him any more appealing to an employer and wont make him any less of a drain on society. He will still be an unqualified convict.

I guess Dave is thinking that if those on benefits that are doing the community work they might think "hey! I could be doing the same amount of work in a proper job and get paid more!" Unfortunately when you get a job you lose all the stuff you were getting for free as well.

Dave also said he plans to punish people that refuse to work. How? He's not going to let them starve or kick them out of their council houses, so whats the plan? Send them to jail? It costs the state 40 grand a year to jail a single person but in this age of crazed judges that dish out completely bizarre sentences such as giving people that are a danger to society a community sentence and jailing an old lady for not paying her Council Tax I would not be surprised if jail was the threat.

I'm sure many on benefits would be glad to go there.

Brown and Out

There's a brand new Labour reform on the agenda this week, publicised by pensions thief Gordon Brown today. Apparently doctors are going to monitor people that have certain hereditary illnesses in their family to catch any warning signs that they may also be affected by these conditions.

Shame they've been doing it for ages isn't it? It seems the story of Labour is to keep reinventing old policies simply by claiming they are new.

Globally boring

Just seen an interview on Sky with the Director of Friends of the Earth. Can't remember his name but he had grey hair and black eyebrows and reminded me of Alistair Darling.

He actually said something that I agree with, and that is that IF Government wants people to care about global warming they need to make people feel like the small things they do affect the bigger picture rather than issuing negative warnings that the world is going to explode in 2025 unless everyone recycles their empty cans of baked beans and pays more council tax.

It's a strange one. What is global warming? It could either be a genuine climatic condition that the world is affected by. Or it could be propaganda on a grand scale that lures us into believing we're all going to die unless we pay the Government loads more tax on stuff we can't live without, like fuel.

This Friends of the Earth bloke on Sky was ranting on about the world being less congested, fuel being cheaper, more jobs, bigger houses, less poverty, cure for cancer and so on IF and only if we use energy saving bulbs, switch our lights off when we leave the room religiously and continue to get down on our knees and pay the ridiculous so-called green taxes that the hypocritical Government ministers keep slapping us in the face with.

You see, I don't really think the UK Government is interested in global warming in the environmental sense. Of course, there's no doubt they love the guilt tax they can keep applying to life's pleasures in the name of it but other countries have provided incentives to be greener. In Germany for example their Government introduced incentives for people to get solar panels in 2000. They have the world's largest solar farm in Germany. I don't see our Government subsidising solar or any renewable energy for that matter. I don't see our Government doing anything about the crisis they claim to be imminent other than making money from it.

What difference does me paying 200 quid or 300 quid for my car tax make? None whatsoever other than to fund Gordon Brown's wasteful public spending plans that reform all the things Labour manifested to reform when they were voted in in 1997. Does it even pay to build new roads? No. Does it pay to improve bus travel or rail travel or subsidise their use? No.

Even so-called eco friendly fuels such as LPG are not cheap enough for people to want to spend thousands to convert their cars, devaluing them in the process. Where's the incentive?

They have the right idea in London. Making people pay £8 per day to drive into the city probably pushes car travel up to similar prices as rail travel. It's a shame it's gone that way rather than rail prices coming down.

I laughed at what an environmentalist on Sky News said when questioned as to his views about the opinion that global warming was a load of rubbish. He claimed that it must be true because all the world leaders support it.

How many of them have a clue about science?