11:09am Friday 15th May 2009
SO, the little piggies of Westminster have been immersing their greedy snouts in the trough we have to fill through our taxes.
What astounds me is that there isn’t a bigger furore and more strident demands for wholesale resignations. We live in a world where benefit cheats are imprisoned and we accept that as a sanction on the poorest amongst us.
We live in a world where if you break the speeding laws you may lose your licence for a period of six months or more (a personal gripe – I freely acknowledge).
Our legislators have decreed that those are the penalties and we have to accept them, as did the chief executive of the firm that makes and supplies speed cameras this week when he fell foul of his own products. I admit it, a tad of schadenfreude there.
We are all bound by the laws that politicians enact for the greater good, we fervently hope.
We have therefore an absolute right to expect that they should, like Caesar’s wife, be above suspicion themselves.
It can only be arrogance that leads them to believe that they can behave quite so immorally with impunity, albeit apparently without breaking any rules.
When I work away from home in my profession I get a ‘touring’ allowance that covers only a fraction of the real cost of living away from home and I have to lump it.
That’s the real world. If I handed a producer a receipt for the theatrical equivalent of cleaning out my moat, or mowing my helipad or even buying a new toothbrush, he would either have me committed or burst into laughter.
Perhaps I was naïve to think our elected representatives wouldn’t play the system in such a cynical way. But now Pandora’s Box is open and they haven’t closed it in time for any Hope to remain.
A plague on all their houses, say I. Yes, some of them are now, shamefacedly, shovelling back their ill-gotten gains.
But none of the cheats, the ‘flippers’, the greedy opportunists – for that is what they are – should ever be allowed to stand for public office again.
The rest of us can’t write our own rules.
We have to obey the quite restrictive rules they write for us. It is beneath contempt to provide themselves with such generous loopholes and then quite so shamelessly exploit them.
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