Obnoxio The Clown

Dennis Skinner, the 77-year-old Labour MP, told how he got a fateful call from the Sunday Telegraph yesterday asking questions about his parliamentary expenses.

"I explained to them I had the lowest expenses in the House and the best voting record, but they wanted to know about £3,500 for alterations to my bathroom and kitchen and £800 for a sofa bed," he said.

"What their figures did not show was the alterations cost £12,800 and the pull-out bed £1,756, but I only charged the lower sums because I thought it was wrong to do otherwise. They have got a bloody cheek if they think I am on the fiddle.

"I only had the work done because, after my triple by-pass heart operation, I was told by the consultant to change the bath for a shower and make sure that the cupboards in the kitchen were at the right height and not to do any heavy lifting. He said it was important for my recuperation that I did things right or I would be back where I was.

"The new sofa bed was needed because the other one was too hard for me to pull out. If I had put in the full amount, I am sure the fees office would have paid up, but it would have been wrong. I told the chap from the Telegraph all this, but I got the impression they were still going to do a story on me."

Skinner, the MP for Bolsover, Derbyshire, said that he was upset that anyone could accuse him of fiddling his expenses.

Sorry, you lunatic old communist, but the fact that you weren't troughing at full tilt does not mean you were not fucking troughing at all. You jumped-up, overweening, self-important cuntweasel of a fuckstick. My employer would certainly would not give me a blue fucking bean for any of that shit.

Update: Interestingly, the boss points out that HMRC gives you a £8000 tax-free allowance for "disturbances" of this nature, which means that the workers' friend, the scourge of capitalism Beast of Bollocks simply charged the difference to the taxpayer's largesse.

What an arrogant, entitled old fucker. I hope you die slowly and painfully, you hypocritical fucking thief.

Update 2: from WOAR in the comments:
A person with a triple heart bypass shouldn't be sodding around with any pull-out beds as none of them are designed to be managed by the mobility-limited disabled.

There's no such thing as 'the other one was too heavy' and there's no such thing as 'this one is much lighter'. They all weigh a ton and that one is a standard sprung action.

Is he sleeping in a one-room apartment (he could be), but even then, people with triple heart bypasses should chuck out the sofa and put in a bed, and damn the interior design.

What there is, is the £1750 Tom leather sofabed from John Lewis.

A luxurious sofa bed fully upholstered in leather, comprising a 2-seater sofa and chaise to form a corner unit which you can have either left or right facing to suit your space. This makes it not only a great option for a larger room – but also for a smaller room, especially if you’re finding it difficult to fit in both a sofa and chair.

It offers storage space in the chaise section – ideal for bedding; and you just pull out at the bottom to bring out the bed section, giving you a sleeping space the equivalent size of a double bed - 135 x 205cm.

With resilient high density foam seat cushions and a sprung mattress. The back cushions with are fibre-filled, and Tom comes with 2 scatter cushions. It arrives in 2 parts."

The question really is: is this man really sleeping on this piece of furniture, or did he just use his heart bypass as a handy excuse to get an £800 sub to by a nice new leather sofa for the lounge, which happens to be handy if someone stays over.

HMRC allowed tax worth £956 and the taxpayer coughed up a further £800. The John Lewis catalog clearly shows the Tom Nina Chenille Sofa Bed - meaning it is exactly the same frame and action - but in chenille, not leather, at £995.

So if Skinner had chosen chenille instead of leather, it would have cost the tax payer £39 instead of £800.

The next trougher who wheels out this fucking line when confronted with one of their more egregious bits of fuckwittery will definitely be wearing my fist.

Cunts.

Heh:

If Iain honestly think that Kirkbride’s treatment will put women off going into politics he doesn’t give us much credit does he?. In fact I reckon there is a good couple of million women, with kids, out there, that right this minute are thinking ‘cheeky fucking bitch, that’ll teach you’.

An excellent post, I do commend the whole thing to you.

Tip of the clown wig to Timmy.

Eagerly campaigning to give Labour more troughing time.

Cunt.

I finally got around to having a look at SQSL. I quite like it, especially for those quick-and-dirty, one-off jobs. It probably deserves a place in your toolkit.

Configuring WAS CE with IDS.

Compression article.

Well, it is Friday:

Well worth a read ...

Update: More.

... and then there's this:

Tip of the clown wig to Bob.

Mrs Dale raises an important issue here:

Why was Julie Kirkbride considered a more serious transgression by the media, than, say Hazel Blears, who cheerfully remains in her cabinet post? Wasn't what Tony McNulty did far more serious than any of these?

That's a jolly good question.

How come the cheeky chipmunk isn't getting a "flipping" good rogering in the press? Why has McNumpty been forgotten?

The more I think about it, the more I wonder if CF isn't wrong and if the buttered new potato hasn't screwed the pooch by doing his bloodletting so quickly. At the moment, it looks like the memorable long tail is going to be the Tory story.

Come on folks, let's not forget the Labour troughers and the LimpDem thieves!

Yep, the BNP is definitely not a right-wing party.

I see a Tory has been caught doing the Lib-Dem fiddle.*

Why won't anyone believe me when I say it's just a few bad apples?

Honest!

* I would happily slip Ms Cash a large portion of clown in exchange for my contribution to her London flat.

I don't know if it's just the corner of the blogosphere I hang out in, but whereas I thought Call Me Dave had been radical in tackling corruption in the Tory party (compared to Gorgon Brownshirt, anyway!)

But lately it seems to me that all the attention and abuse is being directed at Tory troughers. Every seems to be forgetting that the most egregious offenders have been spread proportionally among all the parties.

Has Dave's "decisive action" (such as it is) actually backfired? Mindboggling if I'm right, but just goes to show how unbelievably stupid people are.

I wonder if they offer arse to mouth services? It seems like an appropriate repayment for their troughing.

Tip of the clown wig to Old Holborn.

... well, I certainly didn't:

in 1939, Prince Philip joined the Royal Navy, graduating the next year from the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth, as the top cadet in his course.^[12] He was commissioned as a midshipman in January 1940. Philip spent four months on the battleship HMSRamillies, protecting convoys of the Australian Expeditionary Force in the Indian Ocean. After shorter postings totalling two months on HMSKent, HMS Shropshire and in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), he was transferred from the Indian Ocean to the battleship HMS Valiant in theMediterranean Fleet. Amongst other engagements, he was involved in the Battle of Crete, was mentioned in despatches for his service during the Battle of Cape Matapan, and was awarded the Greek War Cross of Valour.^[12] Duties of lesser glory included stoking the boilers of the troop transport ship RMS Empress of Russia.^[13]

Prince Philip was promoted to sub-lieutenant after a series of courses at Portsmouth in which he gained the top grade in four out of five sections.^[14] In June 1942, he was appointed to the V&W class destroyer and flotilla leader, HMS Wallace, which was involved in convoy escort tasks on the east coast of Britain, as well as the allied invasion of Sicily.^[15] Promotion to lieutenant followed on 16 July 1942. In October of the same year, at just 21 years of age, he became first lieutenant of HMS Wallace and one of the youngest first lieutenants in the Royal Navy. In 1944, he moved on to the new destroyer, HMS Whelp, where he saw service with the British Pacific Fleet in the 27th Destroyer Flotilla.^[16]^[17]He was present in Tokyo Bay when the instrument of Japanese surrender was signed. In January 1946, Philip returned to Britain on the Whelp, and was posted as an instructor at HMS Royal Arthur, the Petty Officers’ School in Corsham, Wiltshire.^[18]

Sarkozy and Obama, "the main event"? How very dare they!

I so fucking hope that they don’t do this. But if they do, I hope everyone involved winds up on the wrong end of a Xenomorphs’ prehensile mouth parts.

Cunts.

New pricing model announced.

Informix Tech Day in Italy. Bene!

Podcast with Jerry Keesee.

Election DataBlade success story.

Getting started with the Informix Warehouse.

Compression ROI Calculator.

Ex-Informixer namecheck.

Moo!

Norma-Jean on marketing.

Scary job in Virginia. No, not all the security checks, you have to work with Notes.

On pricing add-ons. (I agree entirely!)

The only trouble is, the Tories do not offer an intellectually distinct paradigm. All major parties now think essentially in terms of neoclassical economics, moralistic social policy, spurious justifications for ever-greater encroachment on civil liberty, and ridiculously overblown pretensions about Britain’s role in international affairs.

Yep.

For the fucking sake of fucking fuck, here we fucking go again:

Listening to football while driving increases the risk of crashing, experts warn.

Fans who tuned into matches while in a driving simulator accelerated, overtook, tailgated and changed lanes at key points in the game.

Professor Michael J Pont, of the University of Leicester, said: 'It is widely accepted the distraction of talking on a mobile phone may lead to accidents, but other activities may have a similar impact.

'Football fans should ask someone else to drive during important games.'

So, expect car radios to become illegal in years to come. Because you can't trust a driver to do anything without legal guidance.

Cunts.

Tip of the clown wig to Donal.

The ultimate scandal: gategate is here.

And everyone is ignoring it!

Something I've noticed about politics since Labour came to power: no one does anything, or plans to do anything, they either talk about it or they have a commission do a report on it.

I was struck by this curious turn of phrase by Alan "Spanish Practices" Johnson:

Mr Johnson, who has been widely tipped as a potential successor to Mr Brown, urged the prime minister to involve the public in "a root and branch examination" of the political system in order to regain trust following the expenses scandal.

Examination? Ex-fucking-amination? I think you will find, Mr Johnson, that the only examination we want is to see what you fuckers look like after a week in a Judas chair.

Cunt.

Legend:

And Sister Margaret Gerving, a retired Mother Superior from Peterborough, added: "I could not give a flying monkey's fuck about any of this. Can you please - in the name of Christ - just stop stealing my fucking money?"

Since the comments on her blog appear to be dysfunctional,* I thought I'd post them here:

Oh, poor you. I've been watching your public meltdown with some horror, and wondering to myself: is this woman actually fit to be making the laws of this country?

Let's face it, Nadine, no matter how you dress it up, MP's brought this upon themselves. And you can't even use the "few bad apples" rubbish, because it sounds like half or possibly more of currently sitting MP's will lose their jobs because of this. It's not a minority. I am quite certain that 600+ MP's would have been sacked by my employer for making repeated claims that did not even abide by the very generous Green Book guidance, if my employer used the Green Book. But rest assured, Nadine, my employer's expense policy is much, MUCH stricter than yours and our expenses checkers are not compliant and do not encourage us to use our expenses as a salary top-up, they are tough and will question the smallest amount of money. I have had to justify spending £2 on a cup of coffee for a customer.

Not that you would know what a cup of coffee costs in the unsubsidised, taxed, real world.

Don't give the electorate a sob story about how difficult and financially unrewarding it is, because if that were really the case, you'd be struggling to find people to sit in Parliament, and there is no shortage of people wanting to be a candidate, is there?

£60K-plus is a good wage, and I (and everybody but the most swivel-eyed) would have no problem with MP's claiming reasonable, auditable and audited expenses for their jobs. Your pettifogging hooey about "only the rich will be able to afford to be MP's" is a crock of ordure, nobody wants that. You are setting up a straw man argument here.

What we want is for MP's to be as honest as they expect us to be. You make the rules by which we all have to live, and then in a display of bare-faced effrontery, exempt yourselves from the most annoying of these. You are allowed to use accountants tax-free to fill in your tax returns; we are not. You are allowed to exempt yourselves from appearing in various state databases; we are not. You are allowed to smoke in your place of work; we are not. You use taxpayer money to subsidise the food and drink in your place of work; we get nothing.

And please stop the pathetic mewling about "little old me" and realise that you live an exalted life compared to all but the richest in Britain. Other people may have more money, but they have to use their own money to exempt themselves from the more unpleasant rigours of British life, while you and your fellow MP's can achieve this at the stroke of a pen at someone else's expense.

Shame on you.

Update: Found this lovely comment from Brizzle:

My heart bleeds, you disgraceful grasping little shit of a woman.

Excellent!

*Much like she is, the mad old bat.

Wow! The younger Millipede, untarnished by the expenses scandal has come up with some zinging ideas to reform Parliament:

More power for parliamentary select committees to scrutinise legislation.
And who, pray tell, has ridden roughshod over the power these committees had before?
More power to be devolved to local government.
What, like the valuable Welsh Arsembly or the Scotch Parliament? Fuck off!

But wait! There's even more genius at work here:
The language of the chamber – such as calling MPs "my right honourable friend".
The ceremonial garb of Commons officials.
The amount of time the Commons sits during the year. Miliband said he would be open to the idea of September sittings.
The format of PMQs.

Yes, folks: that powerhouse genius of the Labour Party, that intellectual giant, Ed Millipede, has decided that if the "members" of Parliament stop all that flowery language, dress differently, sit for more time and have a different way of doing PMQ's, everything will be better.

No, you fucking moron: until your shower of modernising shitehawks arrived on the scene, Parliament was a much better representation of the people and much more effective at countering the most egregious stupidities of the executive.

Your party has fucked with Parliament over and over again and made it fucking worse each and every fucking time. And now your big plan to fix this is to fucking fuck with it some fucking more? You fucking useless fuck-faced fuck, do us all an immense favour:

GO FUCK YOURSELF FOR A CHANGE!

Whoever Harriet Harman paid £10,000 of our money to for media training should have the decency to give it back.

You fucking know you didn't give the money's worth.

Aw, bless:

The “systematic humiliation” of MPs is threatening Britain’s democracy, the Archbishop of Canterbury warns today.
Dr Rowan Williams, writing in The Times, says that the issues raised by the expenses scandal are grave and that urgent action is required.

“But many will now be wondering whether the point has not been adequately made," he says. "The continuing systematic humiliation of politicians itself threatens to carry a heavy price in terms of our ability to salvage some confidence in our democracy.

Listen you bearded baboon, the fucking MP's are the ones who have caused this. No-one is making this shit up, unlike the MP's who made up reasons why they should be entitled to our fucking money over and above their generous salary.

There is fuck-all wrong with our respect for democracy, and plenty wrong with the cunts who fill the seats thereof.

It's a bit like, say, having respect for the role of the head of a church, but thinking that a complete fucking asshole is in the chair at the moment, who doing his level best to destroy its credibility.

Tip of the clown wig to Scorpius for the title.

Update: Pengy has a worthy hoon du jour.

There's some weird stuff going on here.

"The 'cannon' really made my eyes water" -- Rektil Prolapsz, founder of goatse.cx

Tip of the clown wig to Ms Laudanum.

I'm sorry, I don't quite follow this:

Chancellor Alistair Darling is among nine Cabinet Ministers who paid accountants public money to complete their tax returns, it has been reported.

That really didn't make any sense at all.

Chancellor Alistair Darling is among nine Cabinet Ministers who paid accountants public money to complete their tax returns, it has been reported.

Nope, it's still not working.

I could have sworn that this article was implying that the man we've entrusted to repair our economy has such a weak grasp of things that he's paying someone to do his tax forms.

Now stop for a moment and consider just how damning that would be. The fucking Chancellor of the Exchequer, the man who ultimately decides how much tax we all pay, isn't capable of working out how much tax he should pay.

Hello? Is that kind of the whole point of your fucking job?

But then to go that extra mile and take the liberty of using our fucking tax money to fill in your tax return is ... is ...

I don't know what it fucking is. But I now know who's head I want to see on the first pike outside parliament.

Update: Leg-iron feels much the same as I do.

Update 2: Samizdata has a good take, and Terry Pratchett weighs in:

I have been enormously buoyed up, though, by hearing from journalists and other pundits that “the rich won’t end up paying the 50 per cent income tax because their smart accountants will find a way around it”. When I put this to my own accountant, a senior member of a reputable London firm, he laughed and said: “Unless you want to go and live abroad for a very long time, or associate with some extremely unsavoury people, or invest in risky tax schemes, then for someone like you there is really nothing that can be done.”
I assume he knows his stuff and the tax authorities know theirs, so why is this bland assertion repeated so regularly?

325 MP's to get a boot up the arse?

30 direct resignations? 200 more to "step down" at the next election? 90 more arrogant troughers to get a kick in the balls from those little oiks they "represent"?

Surely that can't be right? 325 egregious fiddlers out of 646? Or more than half of them not just taking a liberty, but taking a newsworthy liberty. Even I didn't think it would be that bad. I merely thought that at least 323 of them would have a dodgy claim. I didn't think that so many of them would have claims that would get them the sack from the supine regulators and mouth-breathing voters.

Certainly the list of troughers just seems to go on and fucking on.

It's a start, but I still want see heads on pike, pour encourager les autres. Cunts.

Think I might get the penis extension out again, and you get some peace again.

Tip of the clown wig to Gweeds.

I wonder if Brown is shitting himself?

Working respectively for the ratings agencies Standard & Poor’s, Moody’s and Fitch, this trio have the job of deciding whether the UK can pay back the hundreds of millions of pounds Brown’s government is borrowing every day through the gilts market in order to keep afloat. One day soon, it may be their job to declare that it can’t. ‘Britain should lose its triple-A rating,’ said Stuart Thomson, a bond fund manager at Ignis Asset Management, which has £70 billion under its control. ‘If the ratings agencies were being honest, they would downgrade the UK.’

So what?

Ratings matter, for two reasons. They impact on how much you pay to borrow. Every notch you drop down the scale, the price of borrowing rises to reflect the perceived increase in risk that investors are taking on. Perhaps more importantly, ratings also determine who can own your debt. Gilts are often owned by pension funds or foreign central banks, which classify them as part of their reserves. Both are often only allowed to buy Triple-A paper. Lose that status, and your best customers can suddenly no longer touch your bonds.

Sounds bad.

Japan was downgraded by Fitch in September 1998: at the time, the Japanese government was struggling with a huge volume of problem loans in its banking system, and a third consecutive quarter of negative growth (sounds familiar, eh?). Moody’s and S&P followed suit.

I wonder if the manic mincing madman has the IMF's number on speed dial on his latest Nokia? But why should we care, anyway?

It’s true that all three agencies are woven into the City’s fabric, and depend on it for their income. Nor do the problems stop there. ‘The political problem is really in the US,’ said Marc Ostwald, a strategist at Monument Securities. ‘Any move to cut the UK rating, or even to put it under review, immediately begs the question of why they aren’t doing the same thing for the US. It is following very similar policies to the UK.’ Indeed so. But cut the rating on US Treasury bills, and the world financial system would be right back hanging over the brink of the abyss.

This is all due to letting that fucking madman and his badger-browed sock puppet get on with the jobbie. Our political class of uselessly supine opposition and economically illiterate government are equally to blame for this.

We really are so fucking fucked.

Oh Christ, here we fucking go again ...

Raymond Hewlett, a convicted British paedophile responsible for a number of sex attacks in the last 40 years, is being investigated in connection with the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, it has emerged.

Why?

Hewlett, a former soldier, is believed to have been living an hour's drive from the resort of Praia da Luz, in Portugal, when she disappeared in April 2007, reports said.

And, of course, like all paedos he could smell an unattended child from an hour's drive away.

I see Nadine "Barking" Dorries is outraged at how hard-working British MP's are being slandered over expenses.

Meanwhile:

Ian Gibson, a senior Labour MP, is preparing to stand down after he admitted using his parliamentary expenses to pay for his daughter’s London home — before selling it to her for half its market value.

This week, Mr Gibson published his expense details online, so constituents could examine his claims.

But, in the same way as Commons authorities are planning to do with all MPs’ expenses, he blacked out the key information.

By comparing his published receipts with the uncensored documents, The Daily Telegraph found how the MP was trying to cover up the arrangement.

So, they only want to cover up details to hide their addresses?

And another Tory is at it as well:

Anne Main bought the flat in St Albans about 25 miles from her family’s detached main home in Beaconsfield.

Public records show that Mrs Main’s daughter, Claire, has lived at the property rent-free for up to three years.

It's just a few bad apples, honest.

... and I really find the constant wittering of left-wing troglodytes that the BNP have anything at all in common with me rather offensive. I don't like their economic policies, I don't like their racist policies, I don't like anything about them, other than that they want us out of the EU. And even then, I'd rather be ruled by the EU than by the BNP.

So can you please all fucking stop with this crap about how the BNP is an extreme right wing party. They are pretty much diametrically opposite to an extreme right wing party.

Thank you.

From RobW at the LPUK blog:

The left are obsessed with the idea of pointing out the bloody obvious about the BNP. Don't vote BNP they're racists and homophobes, etc, etc.

Everyday there seem to be more and more rants about the BNP being racist.

They've even set up ANOTHER fancy campaign called Hope Not Hate.

However there is one massive flaw with all this. The people who will vote BNP don't give a flying fuck* about racism. They're not voting BNP because the BNP are racist or even that they themselves are racists.

A lot of people will vote BNP because they've had enough of the main parties and because they like BNP policies.

So shouting racist at people isn't going to help. How we should attack the BNP is by attacking their policies.

An example might be -- the BNP WILL MAKE YOU POORER.

Just look at this policy...

Globalisation, with its export of jobs to the Third World, is bringing ruin and unemployment to British industries and the communities that depend on them.

Accordingly, the BNP calls for the selective exclusion of foreign-made goods from British markets and the reduction of foreign imports. We will ensure that our manufactured goods are, wherever possible, produced in British factories, employing British workers.

What will be the first consequence of this policy? Well, if you reduce competition by blocking foreign imports prices will rise. So if people vote BNP they are voting to make themselves poorer.

It's simple.

So I ask people to go and read BNP policy and start attacking it. But not because it's racist or homophobic -- but because it's moronic and will make the people of this country worse off.

Because that is the only way we can win against the BNP.

Hear, hear! It's quite true that some of the BNP's policies are breathtakingly and blatantly racist and fascist, but "racism" and "fascism" are devalued ideas now. It's best to show people that even without these tendencies, the BNP is offering tired and discredited ideas that will hurt the people they are supposed to help. Hmm, where have I heard that before?

*I have interpreted Rob's somewhat more polite ellipsis here.

Gosh:

Lord Truscott and Lord Taylor of Blackburn were unanimously found to have breached the Upper House's code of conduct which requires members to "always act on their personal honour". It is the first time in 350 years that peers have been banned in this way.

Banned?

Peers voted to suspend them until the end of the parliamentary session, about six months, the maximum penalty the House can impose.

Wow. That'll learn 'em. Six months' suspension for accepting bribes to change the law of the UK to the benefit of a corrupt company.

Fuck's sake. Keep on, folks. Keep on. But when heads wind up on pikes and people don't really care whether you were guilty or not, don't fucking come crying to me.

I see a Tory whip has been caught pulling the phantom mortgage stunt. Honest, it's just a few bad apples.

But that wasn't what really fucked me off. What fucked me off was discovering that Ruth fucking Kelly had tapped the taxpayer to stop her insurance premiums going up. "Boy", I've got to tell you, it's going to take a lot fucking more than a cilice and a hair shirt to atone for this, you fucking cheeky cunt.

I just got twattered by someone offering to jazz up my blog for me. Personally, I don't see the point of fucking with the Blogger defaults, really. Unlike the Devil or OH, I don't really have a brand.

I reckon people come to read stuff, not admire the rounded corners of the boxes round things. And even if they don't: fuck 'em. I'm not spending a penny on this shit because I'm not making a penny from this shit.

What the fuck is it with Tesco?

A man drove a Rolls-Royce through the window of a Tesco supermarket yesterday after staff at the store refused to sell him alcohol.

Witnesses said that the man had come into the store in Andover, Hampshire, at around 4.30pm to buy alcohol but had been turned away because he was already drunk.

Why, whenever there is a story about a shop acting as the hectoring, nannying moral guardian of the feeble, it's always Tesco? What is wrong with these cunts?

There is a black helicopter hovering over my house.

Should I be worried?

Fucking Jesus, what is it about short blokes and booze?

Even nice short blokes turn into utter cunts when they've had a skinful, but today's fuckmonkey topped the scales. I was standing on a London station, minding my own business, just trying to work out what platform the next train home would be on, when this short little cunt bounded up to me, shook my hand and then started telling me his life story.

Which apparently included him being an East End gangster "wiv Rolex watches, a Ferrari and a Rolls" who had "killed dozens of kaffirs" in South Africa while stealing Krugerrands, "innit?" "Just told him to drive the fahcking van or I'd blow his fahcking head off."

Oh, and he couldn't stop telling me about his fahcking barn conversion, either. Or shaking my fahcking hand, either. And he was ex-fahcking-SAS as well.

Fahcking nutter.

Anyway, I know what he was really looking for. He had started alluding to it before he mercifully staggered off in the wrong direction ... he was looking for a fight. Why is it that blokes think that the best thing they can do when they are drunk is pick a fight with someone who is can see over their head?

It had to happen.

From the LPUK blog:

British Sovereignty will leave the Commons with Michael Martin. It seems that the Europhiles have another victory by removing the last vestige of sovereignty from the Commons. Subtle, smoke and mirrors, but most important.

Two days ago I questioned the motives behind the extraordinary revelations by the Telegraph, exposing the excesses of the MP's and Speaker. Yes, they needed exposing, but I questioned the timing, I questioned the real motivation. I suggested then that this was part of the bigger EU plan to destroy the Authority of Parliament (updated this morning), it seems that Brown has qualified my theory and done the work of the Europhiles with his announcements on 'reform'. Subtle, smoke and mirrors, but most important.

Michael Martin, his abysmal work done, is now expendable, as are all those who have allowed their greed to prevail over their oath, and allowed others to to steal like thieves the goodwill and vested interest of Britain and its Parliament. I have no qualms in referring to them as Traitors.

As Michael Martin leaves for the last time on June 21st, the power of his office will set firm within the executive, and his authority will be given away to a quango to oversee the MP's who file into the house to rubber stamp fresh deliveries of directives from Brussels.

One senior Conservative David Davis proclaimed that the new speaker will be 'the most powerful in history' adding: 'This is a time for the House of Commons to find a new voice and that voice may not be the voice of the existing establishment.' Mr Davis is most telling with that statement.

The role of speaker will be reduced to that of a process manager, merely there to tick the boxes, stop the children squabbling and calling the order of business for the day, pre-set by the executive's Leader of the House.

Richard North on the EU Referendum blog sums this up more succinctly than I..

Before he goes, it seems, Speaker Martin is determined to complete the task of emasculating Parliament, destroying the last vestiges of the doctrine that it is "sovereign in its own House".

Thus, according to reports, Martin is set to push through radical change before he steps down, with the Cabinet this morning set to place the House of Commons "in the hands of independent regulators rather than the House itself."

As to future Speakers, the nature of their role will change. There will no longer be a Speaker who is in charge as chief executive. He will be procedural and ceremonial.

Even in the manner of the Speaker's resignation, we see Parliament showing its weakness rather than its strength. As my co-editor observes, this has not come about at the behest of the House of Commons as it ought to. Clearly, the prime minister has told him to go.

"Thus, the House has not managed to impose its authority even over him. This was a small test and they failed. The Speaker is still the Executive's bully boy; it's just that he is no longer useful to them."

And, with his departure, we see not the House instigating its own reforms, but the Cabinet – i.e., the Executive – using its satrap to impose changes. Thus we are to see – if this travesty goes ahead - the "mother of parliaments" deemed no longer capable of running its own affairs, its management to be vested in "independent regulators" – unelected, of course, and financed by the government. Speaker Lenthall would be turning in his grave.

However, since Parliament has largely been relegated to "procedural and ceremonial" matters, it is only appropriate that the Speaker should be allocated a similar role. But a Parliament which is no longer in charge of regulating its own affairs – and thus dis-empowered - can no longer lay claim to regulating the conduct of government.

In the fullness of time, I suppose, the new body – which we could call the Parliamentary Regulatory Agency Temporary (or "Offtrough" for short) – will have to be brought under the control of the about-to-be formed European Parliamentary Regulatory Agency. Clearly, under the Single Market, different rules cannot be allowed for different national parliaments.

Then the take-over will be complete, with Speaker Martin being remembered for his scorched earth policy which finally destroyed the very idea of an independent parliament in Westminster.

I do not and will not accept the rule of Brussels.
I am not a European citizen as the EU is not a state.
I am British, a citizen of the United Kingdom.

I take the vow now that I shall seek all legal and peaceful means to retain the absolute Sovereignty of the United Kingdom as a nation state, and the sovereignty loaned from the people vested in the House of Commons, unless and until the people of the United Kingdom agree to political union with others through the ballot box.

The lines are being drawn one by one by this Government. They shall draw no more for me to cross.

If elected, I will immediately ban speed-limited vehicles from overtaking between the hours of 06:00 and 10:00 and from 16:00 to 20:00. In the longer term, if companies wish to delimit their vehicles, that will be allowed, but the overtaking ban on speed limited vehicles will remain.

Tip of the clown wig to PH.

What sort of cocking cock is that then?

First the chippy Scots oinker offers up the idea that the House works best when it's united. This is utter crap. The fucking house was entirely united in troughing, or at best, turning a blind eye to the troughing. In the main, the House works best when bitterly and evenly divided.

The closest that the House had come to unity over something useful was in the idea that the cunt who encouraged everyone to trough by example should fuck off. But really, the idea that Martin is some sort of noble hero, sacrificing himself on the altar of unity is utterly risible.

The man is scum, looting from the taxpayer to live a fantasy lifestyle. Fuck him and his "unity". I still want to see his fat, ugly head on a fucking pike.

Sky and Paul Waugh are reporting that Michael "Greedy, even compared to MP's" Martin is going to resign. I doubt he will be leaving in any way that would satisfy me or millions of angry voters.

Which is: with his fat, ugly head on a fucking pike. The cunt.

Somehow I don't think these women will be adopting double-barrelled surnames.

Hah!

Meanwhile Alfie Patten is understood to be relieved the daughter he was alleged to have fathered is not his as it now means he will be able to have sex with it in about 15 years time.

Once again, TDM gives the real skinny about the news.

Thanks to the good folks at PH, I've just found the Chive, home of (among many delightful things) a "most improved camel toe" competition.

Mark Reckons has an interesting pair of posts showing a correlation between how safe a seat is and how much troughing happens:

As you can see there is still a clear gradation in each quartile indicating that the safer the seat, the more likely the MP is to be implicated.

Whether you're a Trot or Lord Snooty, you can't beat human nature.

I've got a pound here that says the chippy Scot waffles a load of crap, blames everyone and everything else and plans to stay.

Update: That's me with my pound intact.

Bwahahahaha! Trouser Quandary in fine form!

Honourable Members

A brief peruse of the latest Private Eye, following the recent discovery of the Fees Office's complicity in thieving from taxpayers, reveals that not only do the MP's have a supine internal expenses regulator, but they also have their own branch of HMRC that deals with their tax claims, Public Department 1.

And apparently, PD1 has been "encouraged" to believe that if it's good enough for the Fees Office, it's good enough for them.

AND that possessor of the ultimate moral compass, one JG Brown, Esq., also slipped through a bunch of income tax exemptions for MPs in the law.

In a nutshell:

1. MP's create the rules for themselves.
2. The Parliamentary regulation is incredibly lax and is also alleged to have encouraged members to fill their boots.
3. The tax man has been gently encouraged to turn a blind eye.
4. That is if there is anything to turn a blind eye to, thanks to the generous exemptions that Gordon Brown allowed to MP's.

But it's only a few bad apples, honest!

If a man is tired of London, he must be tired of life, some Londonophile once wittered. He was definitely talking out of his fucking arsehole.

... spectacularly:

Just because someone isn't egregiously troughing, does not make them fucking honest. Vide Ann Widdicombe and her fucking lawn-mowing cat.

The Tories are banging on about the BNP now. One of the nastier parts of their webshite is a list of what utter scumbags some members of the BNP are.

I hereby call upon Tim Montgomerie to expose the membership of the Tory Party to the same scrutiny and tell us all what sort of "scum" votes Tory. I'd also be pleased if that crusading hero of the left, who nods approvingly about how effective this BNP-bashing is, to expose the members of the Labour Party to the same scrutiny and tell us how many thugs, kiddy-fiddlers, fraudsters and crooks there are supporting Labour.

It's only fair.

(For the sake of avoidance of doubt: I share the general distaste for the BNP on every ground [bar their wish to leave the EU], but I despise the hypocrisy of those attacking them.)

Just go and read it.

Tip of the clown wig to bocan.

Last night when I fell asleep, I didn't even know who David Chaytor was, today I want him strung up from a lamp post. Today I know that he is another hallowed and honourable representative of the people who didn't notice that his mortgage was paid off.

Three things:

How fucking useless are you not to notice your mortgage was paid off?
Would you trust anyone whose services you paid for if they were that incompetent? Or lied that big a whopper, if that is what he did?
They. Are. All. At. It. We are only seeing the big-ticket, most egregious examples. I am still willing to put down money that says that more than half of them have a claim that would get you or me fired (unless you are an MP, of course!)

Utter bastarding cunts.

... from the "it was all within the rules" meme to the "submitted in error" meme.

Every single troughing cunt who has offered to repay money is doing so because s/he "submitted a claim in error".

Every single one.

Listen, you fucking incompetent fucks: if you can't manage your fucking expenses properly, why the cunting fuck do you expect us to manage the country properly?

You arrogant, thieving, bastarding, weasel-worded cunts: "a plague upon all your houses" doesn't even fucking begin to describe it.

And as for that arrogant fuck, Shahid Malik: come here you little fuckweasel and let me show you some real fucking justice.

Teh funneh:

Some nights I am Caffeine Man, able to look at tall buildings with a single glance, and vibrate so hard that once, Ann Summers tried to sell me.

From PoliticsHome:

... just a pity about the timing, really:

Please use this reply in full. I’m sorry I can’t comment further as I’m off to a seminar on “Cleaning and Maintaining your Moat.”

Contrite? Him?

(It is quite a funny letter though and I do encourage you to read the whole thing.)

Dungeekin' is back! Hurrah!

The spokesman said, "we have seen an unprecedented increase in sales across a wide range of products. The primary increases were in garden pitchforks, firelighters, pre-cut timber and high-strength wire. We're not sure about the precise reason for the increase in these products alone, but our marketers are working on promotions to increase sales further".

So, we have "car crash" interviews from those caught troughing, Labour sleazed up to its collective edballs, Tories dredging moats. Cometh the hour, cometh the Clegg?

Er, no:

This really could have been the Liberal Democrats’ moment. With the two main parties hobbled by the scale of the abuse of the MPs’ allowance system, Nick Clegg should have been perfectly positioned to hold his head high as the leader of a party of moral purity. But it’s not been quite so simple. Although the Lib Dem misdemeanors revealed by the Telegraph are characteristically less colourful than those of their political rivals, the party has no claim to be whiter-than-white. Senior Liberal Democrats who urged the leadership to take a tough line on those caught abusing the system have been asked to remain silent for the sake of party unity. ‘I was told not to rock the boat,’ one said this week.

They. Are. All. At. It.

Shahid Malik, who was "one million percent within the rules", has resigned for some reason.

It's all so fucking confusing. Do you think he might have been lying, perhaps?

I had really hoped it was a joke, but no:

And I say "necessary" because there is an enormous difference between having a widescreen television, and repairing the central heating. I never had a television in my second home throughout my 17 years as an MP. I never had a washing machine – I borrowed somebody else's. I got the crockery from my brother's old vicarage, but each room was painted once, and the exterior twice.
When you are spending most of your time in London, you have to pay for someone to cut the grass. Who else was going to cut my grass? The cat?

This is that paragon of Conservative virtue, Ann Widdicombe. Can you smell the foetid sense of entitlement?

Ann, let me explain this to you slowly: my employer expects me to spend lots of time away from home, perhaps not as much as you, but still, a significant amount. I have a small garden. Now, here comes the crucial bit: my employer does not reimburse me for gardening costs while I am away from home. Funnily enough, if my central heating packs up, my employer says "necessary or not, I'm not fucking paying for that!"

What the cunting fuck do you think the taxpayer is, a fucking money tree? I would kick you in your fat cunt if I wasn't so scared I'd lose my shoe, you arrogant, overweening fucking money-grubbing whore.

Update: Ambush Predator is slightly more polite.

Tip of the clown wig to the Middle-aged Submarine. At least, I think that's what he is.

Hah!

On the stump, Obama liked to joke that a building in the Cayman Islands that was the registered home of 12,000 plus US companies was "either the biggest building in the world or the biggest tax scam on record." But the Cayman Islands is dinging back, a press release has just dropped in my inbox from them pointing out that 1209 North Orange Street in Wilmington Delaware, Joe Biden’s home state, houses 217,000 companies.

Democrats turn out to be hypocrites. In other news, bears are Catholic and pope found shitting in the woods. Or something.

Ed Bollocks: "How dare you people question my expenses? Don't you know who I am?"
Yvette "Boy" Cooper: "Leave 'im Ed, 'e's not worff it!"

They kill Jesus and then invent both communism and Lesley Joseph and everyone loves them. We ignore the odd holocaust, molest the odd child and all of a sudden we're the bad guys. I'm fucking sick of it.

Why can't I write stuff like this?*

*Don't answer that, you cunt.

It seems that MP's are still giving one "car crash" interview after another. They still don't get it, do they?

Does this not show the utter contempt with which they regard their money tree, i.e., the taxpayer?

They are angry and confused that people dare to question their claims: do we not understand that they are entitled to what they decide they want?

Hi guys,

Next time you do one of your hilarious caravan smashing and exploding gags, is there any chance you could have Margaret Beckett strapped into one of the cameras? I'd love to see the supercilious old bag burnt to a screaming death.

There could be a fiver in it for each of you.

Ta ever so much!

Obo

Tip of the clown wig to TDM for the image.

Tip of the clown wig for the cover generator to the jolly nice, but ultimately deluded Daily Referendum.

Gorgon has finally taken action against Morley. Now Dave's aide's faux "resignation" looks like a complete sham.

Way to go, fucknut.

Tuesday Kid tagged me, so here goes:

1. I like Europe but I love America.
2. I hate having breakfast.
3. People park opposite my drive all the time and then bugger off somewhere else.
4. Right now, I need a shower.
5. I have a dragon in my office.
6. When I'm not in my clown suit, I like nothing better than beige clothes.
7. I have never taken a single "recreational chemical" in my life.
8. I'm looking at Bergwerk as I type this.

I'll tag Leg-iron, Ross, Ambush Predator and, for balance, Dave Spart. Unless such things are beneath the dignity of a Marxist, of course!

From the LPUK website:

I have to say I thoroughly support this idea. Seems a sensible place to begin improving the sex trade in this country...

Brothels containing up to four prostitutes should be legalised to reduce rates of sexually transmitted diseases and protect women from violence, according to members of the Royal College of Nursing (RCN).

Decriminalising groups of prostitutes who band together would make their working lives safer, delegates at the RCN's annual congress in Harrogate heard.

The "stigma" which surrounds working girls means many are afraid to visit their doctors or local hospital and leaves them vulnerable to attacks, as seen with the murder of five prostitutes in Ipswich in 2006.

The vote calling for legalised brothels, by the mainly female union, was described by one delegate as the "good girls helping the bad girls".

Carol Watts, a nurse from Cambridgeshire, who proposed the motion, said: "The simple truth is that there will always be people willing to pay for sex with others without commitment.

"We should acknowledge that that is part of life in the UK and should make sure that there is not an underclass of marginalised women in the country.

However, as with all good ideas there has to be an equal and opposing idea. So it should come as no surprise what ~~Harriet Harman's~~ the Government's response was...

A spokesman for the Home Office said: “We are determined to shift the focus onto the sex buyer, the person responsible for creating the demand for prostitution markets which in turn creates demand for the vile trade of women being trafficked for sexual exploitation.”

As we all know the Government's position won't change anything. It won't stop these things it will just add to the risk. And if you add risk you tend to make things more dangerous -- not safer.

So I applaud the RCN for attempting to move this debate forward.

If you haven't already heard it, it's 44 minutes in.

You know, every time I think I've seen it all, someone manages to come along and top all the egregious stupidity I've seen before:

Although it welcomes millions of tourists each year from across the globe, the cathedral city - famed for its association with 14th century Canterbury Tales author Geoffrey Chaucer - has also attracted ire for not having a homosexuals' community centre.

What?

He sacks an aide, no great loss to him, but the MP the aide is married to is untouched, so his power base in the Commons is undiminished and the MP appears to be clean.

There you go, Cameron has just shown himself to be just as immoral and unmoved by all this as any of the other troughers.

Vote Tory and nothing will change.

Update: My mistake, obviously MacKay is an MP, but the point is still that surely both of them should go.

Update 2: Post in haste, repent at leisure! Right, what is happening is that MacKay is resigning as Cameron's aide, not as an MP. In other words, all he is doing is getting the idea in front of the public that someone from the Tories has been sacked or made to resign. MacKay is not doing anything here but allowing Cameron to look like he's doing something when he's really doing fuck all.

... EVER!

From the Anglo-Saxon.

Hahahahaha:

'Shortly there will be an election, in which Labour will increase its majority'

Let’s be clear: this is a mad one. You won’t have heard it anywhere else, but you can take it from me. At the age of 38, this is my 17th consecutive Labour Party conference, and I’ve never been to one quite like this.

It’s in the nature of collective hysteria that no single act can be adduced to prove its existence. But there is a fin de siecle, self-destructive, decadent craziness about Conference 2007. Somewhere in the wads of twenty somethings and thirtywouldbes jamming the chintzy Bournemouth bars long after they’re normally silent lurks the jitterbugging desperation of the Twenties before the Crash, Berlin between the wars, London as Imperial Glory died with its queen. The collective psyche of this group of individuals who’ve never had it so good has rarely been so uncertain.

This is not a columnar conceit. I do not really have a thesis; no point to prove. I can only tentatively explain this atmosphere. But nor am I wrong. This mood is as real as the grief in the church. I am simply reporting what is here.

Perhaps the magnitude of the moment we face is too great for us collectively to bear. Shortly there will be an election, in which Labour will increase its majority, and in so doing utterly shatter the glass paradigm of cyclical politics which has contained us for the century since 1906. This ought to herald another decade of strong, confident, consensual Labour government. Which will finally and irrevocably transform the nature of politics and civic life in Britain.

That is a frightening responsibility. The young princes who now stride the parade ground with the confidence born of aristocratic schooling can never be afraid. They never have been. Like latter day Pushkins drilled in the elite academy of Brownian blitzkrieg, they are bursting with their sense of destiny. It’s not the Milibands, the Ballses or the Burnhams who are unconsciously nervous. This is the moment for which they were created. They are ready.

But for the rest, the officer class as much as the rank and file, it’s a daunting inheritance. The decade to date has been a long march to sustain. Those who led it have changed and re-changed, been shuffled and sidelined, died and retired from the field. But we – the poor bloody soldiers - are still here. Our boots are fresh and our uniforms re-supplied. We are rested and invigorated. Morale, if it anywhere was, can only be high. Yet still it’s a decade since we have been home. As we prepare to strike out again from our camp, we don’t wonder which army will triumph, but begin to ask what we will do if this march never ends.

For, that, indeed, is what this madness is: it’s the hour that we see that the march never ends.

We’ve learned that we cannot be killed. And we’ve come to accept that we’ll never go home. But now is the light headed dance, the fretful mazurka, of an army that knows it can never arrive.

Hmmm ... I wonder what Sion Simon's expenses look like ...

Not a fuck, matey-boy:

An MP who was involved in last month's G20 protests in London is to call for an investigation into whether the police used agents provocateurs to incite the crowds.

Liberal Democrat Tom Brake says he saw what he believed to be two plain-clothes police officers go through a police cordon after presenting their ID cards.

Brake, who along with hundreds of others was corralled behind police lines near Bank tube station in the City of London on the day of the protests, says he was informed by people in the crowd that the men had been seen to throw bottles at the police and had encouraged others to do the same shortly before they passed through the cordon.

Brake, a member of the influential home affairs select committee, will raise the allegations when he gives evidence before parliament's joint committee on human rights on Tuesday.
"When I was in the middle of the crowd, two people came over to me and said, 'There are people over there who we believe are policemen and who have been encouraging the crowd to throw things at the police,'" Brake said. But when the crowd became suspicious of the men and accused them of being police officers, the pair approached the police line and passed through after showing some form of identification.

Brake has produced a draft report of his experiences for the human rights committee, having received written statements from people in the crowd. These include Tony Amos, a photographer who was standing with protesters in the Royal Exchange between 5pm and 6pm. "He [one of the alleged officers] was egging protesters on. It was very noticeable," Amos said. "Then suddenly a protester seemed to identify him as a policeman and turned on him. He legged it towards the police line, flashed some ID and they just let him through, no questions asked."

Amos added: "He was pretty much inciting the crowd. He could not be called an observer. I don't believe in conspiracy theories but this really struck me. Hopefully, a review of video evidence will clear this up."

Were the police stirring up trouble just so that they could beat the crap out of people, or was there something even more sinister behind this?

I can't help but feel that the police in this country are getting way out of line. This kind of behaviour is going to be to the police what expenses were to politicians. Mind you would shutting down the ACPO and sacking all the senior porkers be such a bad thing?

... as you've never seen her before!

... here.

A "Prandtl-Glauert singularity". Awesome.

This was an atrocious day for Brown. He had no idea how out of touch he sounded. Only the Speaker fared worse. Bloated and knackered, looking like a crimson bull-frog, he was tetchy and uncertain in the chair. He interrupted speeches constantly and scolded members for no reason. He has spent the week digging his own grave. It’s deep enough now.

Just fuck off, the pair of you. Oh, and die.

The estimable Mark W has a brilliant post here, which I am going to quote in full:

OK, we've finally wised up to the fact that a lot of MPs have second and third homes.

More widely publicised is the fact that the average house price has fallen by about £30,000 since late 2007. As heartbreaking as that may be for the one million borrowers in negative equity, does it not gladden your heart that for every £1 you have lost, the average MP has lost £3 or £4?

So, next time the government announces some grand plan to 'boost mortgage lending' or 'kickstart the housing market', just ask yourself: for whose benefit are they doing this, and with whose money?

Of course! That explains why the bastards are so keen to do it!

Laugh? I fucking pissed myself!

... went into the political evolution of Rachel Reeves, PPC for Leeds West (over at LabourLost):

I remember back in 1987, my dad putting on the Six o'clock News and pointing out Neil Kinnock to my sister, Ellie, and me. He told us that was who we voted for, and we've both known we were Labour since then (I was eight and Ellie was six).

Jesus wept. And I'm sure the history of vast majority of tribal voters is not in the least bit different.

I guess we should just be grateful her dad didn't support Hitler.

Sunday, 31 May 2009

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