More Incapacity Benefit Checks And Another £23000 For MPs

In the same week where we have had a budget that announced that there are to be more stringent medical checks of incapacity benefit claimants we also hear that MPs are allowed to claim up to £23,000 of taxpayers money each year towards improving their 2nd homes.

MPs are allowed certain allowances each year to enable them to stay in London to carry out their parliamentary duties. The John Lewis List, as the allowances list is known, lists various items for which they can claim.

You may be struggling to afford food, heating and a roof over your head and you may begrudge the taxes you have to pay but MPs are enjoying that tax you paid – getting up to £10,000 to spend on a new kitchen, £35 per square metre for carpeting with up to £6.50 per metre for fitting and £750 for a nice new stereo system.

Nobody would dispute that being an MP is a challenging profession. There are doubts about the motivation of some members of that profession but there are many, and hopefully most, who work hard for the people they represent and for the nation. However, they do volunteer to become an MP. Nobody forces them to do it and some might wonder why anybody would want to do it. For their own reasons they choose to fight for the privilege of becoming an MP. We should give them the support necessary to carry out their work but we should not be paying for luxuries.

Trust in our politicians is vital for democracy to work. Far too many times over recent years we have been misled, spun stories or apparently been lied to on subjects as important as the Iraq war and that we would have a referendum on the EU constitution. Government and MPs are always careful in their choice of words but it is the impression they give to people that people vote on. If they choose to be clever and complicated with their wording they should not be surprised when people believe they have been lied to.

I get sick and tired of MPs complaining that they are viewed with so much distrust and yet when it comes down to it, the party in government invariably squirm and slide away from what people want from and expect of their MPs.

There should be arrangements for MPs to get accommodation in London. Some of them have to travel great distances to be there. The government could supply a hostel where the MPs can get a room and breakfast. It need not be expensive or fancy. If MPs want fancy they can pay for their own accommodation. There should be no allowances for second homes, no new furniture and no mortgage interest payments.

How many people in this country have to work away from home just to survive? MPs are employees of the people and just as we expect Incapacity Benefit to be paid only to those people who need and deserve it, we also expect benefits to MPs to be paid to those who need and deserve it. Governments always say they want to cut taxes. They could start by doing away with the John Lewis List and instead send MPs to a homeless persons hostel – an instant saving of about 600*23000=£13,800,000 Yes, that is nearly 14 MILLION pounds.

It would no doubt lead to a great improvement in homeless Hostels and a far better understanding by MPs of how the real world is beyond the glitz and glamour of the parliamentary tearoom. All we ask of our MPs is that they treat us fairly and do not take advantage of their position. It really doesn’t seem a lot to ask of them.

As we have seen in New York this week people do not like hypocrisy and never forgive those who have such double standards. The MPs allowances are a slap in the face to the millions struggling on less income per year than MPs can currently claim as allowances for their 2nd homes. It is quite simply disgusting that MPs can require that sick people have to fight over a couple of extra pounds which they desperately need in order to simply survive while MPs give themselves these huge allowances.

Can MPs really be so stupid? Why are they surprised to find that people believe they are all greedily taking as much as they can get with their faces deep in the trough? The fairness of British society? It probably never really existed but it certainly doesn’t exist in the houses of Parliament today.

Plastic Bags – The Scapegoats Of Our Throwaway Society

Our illustrious leader Gordon Brown clearly  sees banning supermarket plastic bags as a popular ‘green’ movement to hang his coat on. It would seem to be a nice and simple move to ban disposable plastic shopping bags unlike the various disasterous events that have haunted his period as PM so far. A ban is probably seen as a move with little downside. If there was consumer resistance you can use the green argument and say that plastic bags are throwaway items and throwaway items are wasteful of natural resources which of course they are.

If removing the plastic bag from society were the answer life would be nice and simple but of course this is simply the tip of a very large iceberg. The truth of the matter is that the plastic bag you carry your shopping home in is almost irrelevent in terms of using environmental resources. Many people reuse them for all sorts of uses. I personally use all the bags I get as bin liners for my kitchen waste bin.

It is what goes in the bag that is the problem. All the waste materiels you get when you have unpacked your shopping, the tomatoes that might have been shipped in by air from Spain, or Egypt or Chile. Strawberries out of season flown in from the southern hemisphere. There is just so much STUFF.

If Gordon Brown wants to show he really has green credentials he needs to lead a change of mindset that stops and thinks about what we buy and where we buy it from. We have been encouraged to think that buying new stuff all the time is good for us and good for the economy. It certainly generates money but good for us? Hardly. There are as many if not more unhappy people around now as there were years ago before all this consumerism came along. New TVs don’t make people happy. They give us a brief moment of elation as we get our new toy but that feeling soon fades. We are much like our children and we would get as excited and almost as much satisfaction from playing with the box as we get from the new toy that came in that box.

We don’t need to worry much about the plastic bag. The amount of material used in the making of them is negligable and their environmental impact can be reduced through the use of bidegradable versions. It isn’t the bag we need to worry about. What we should be worrying about is the fact that the contents of the bag have had a lot of carbon pumped into the atmosphere to get it in the shop for us to buy and put in our plastic bag and most of the time we don’t need them.

This is the tragedy of the environmental crisis we face. It isn’t that we have damaged our planet to get food for our children. We have damaged the planets ability to support life so we can have new and bigger cars, new abd bigger tvs, newer fashionable kitchens replacing one that was only put in a couple of years ago, trips to foreign countries for stag nights and strawberries at christmas.

It hasn’t made people happy and it has caused immense damage to the environment we depend on for life itself. We may already have done too much damage for human being to survive in the future, only time will tell, but as an epitaph we will be able to read. Here lies the human race. A wonderful opportunity wasted by greed for money and material things.