You Couldn't Make This Stuff Up

Hello dear reader, today has been a pretty difficult day for so many reasons, maybe partly due to our beloved British weather, which has turned to poopy virtually overnight.  That awful misty, drizzly rain has begun to rear its ugly head again.  One bonus, however, when driving through the Forest of Dean, is that the forestry itself becomes very green and lush.  It looks lovely and my wife and I went for a drive through it today, remarking that it reminded us of the time we drove through the forestry of the South Island of New Zealand.  That was beautiful and so is this - easily the most lovely part of England.

When the bad weather strikes, so does what Churchill describes as "The Black Dog."  My body aches still more, headache, foggy head, extreme fatigue.  The pain of moving is like the pain of pulling a very large truck behind me with my teeth.  It's not only down to the weather, I can feel like this on sunny days too, but certainly it appears to have been set off today by the arrival of this horrid weather.  

Both my wife and I have been stressed today.  Sadly I am unable to venture into the reasons for it here, but stress never helps matters.  I am very proud, however, to call this woman my wife.  Next month, we celebrate 21 years since our first date, and at the end of July will be our 18th wedding anniversary.  Still every day the feeling of marriage to her gets better and I love her very much indeed.  Corny though it may sound, she is the rock on which I lean and she is, in many ways, the reason I am as sane and well as I am, even though it is still not good.

Any road, back to the shenanigans at Westminster.  Today, former minister Elliot Morley was "outed" as having claimed £16,000 on a mortgage that had already been paid off.  This worked out at £800 a month for 20 months!  Then, of course, when this was discovered and threatened with publication by the Daily Telegraph, he claimed that this had been an error, he had paid the money back, and he felt terrible about it!  Yeah, sure, mate, you didn't realise that the mortage had already been paid off a year and a half earlier!  Anybody, and everybody I have ever met, literally counts down the days until the end of their mortgage and for him to say that he had discovered the mistake 2 weeks ago (when this whole stink was surely already in the air), paid it back and already begun the process of feeling terrible about it is taking the insult to our intelligence to a whole new level.  WHO DO THEY THINK WE ARE?  DO THEY IMAGINE WE CAME DOWN IN THE LAST SHOWER?  This is utterly dreadful - these are the people who tell us how to live our lives in this NANNY STATE - they tell us what benefits we can and cannot claim and put measures in place to stop benefit fraud including making disabled people fill out 60 page forms for the sake of a few quied a week.  Is it any wonder that not only is our trust in these people destroyed, but in actual fact these people should be sacked and hauled through the courts.

One gentleman whom I believe has been stitched up by the Telegraph outings has been Conervative MP John Maples who used a private members' club as his residence while he waited to move into another property.  The difference here is that he cleared this with Westminster officials at the time, and they agreed it at the time.  Maples even produced all of this correspondence for the benefit of the Daily Telegraph.  They ignored it.

These are my demands:

1. That there be a general election immediately, with every single MP of every single party in Westminster getting the boot, and facing re-election to their jobs.

2. That Gordon Brown be ousted as Prime Minister.  A more weak and ineffectual leader there has not been since the one before last, a certain John Major.  Come on, Margaret Thatcher was in a better position than Brown is now when she got kicked out of Downing Street.

3. That when MPs are returned to Westminster, they receive the salary that they receive, already pretty high in my opinion, and nothing more.  Everything they do, buy, live in, eat, drive or cook their barbecues on must be paid for out of that salary.  That salary should be subject to the same rate of tax that everybody else pays.

4. Every Cabinet Minister should be forced to go on a training course before taking up their post.  And they must pass a certification before being allowed to sit round the table with whoever becomes PM in Brown's place.  This prevents young upstarts with a particular chip on their shoulder taking up 6-figure salaried jobs for which they have no experience or aptitude, simply because they all want the top job (even though they cannot say that).

5. And while we're on the subject, those who pay their new tax rate should have a say in where that money is spent.  Nobody, it is well known, would object to paying tax if it went towards improving their schools, hospitals, roads and housing, instead of fighting wars in oil-rich foreign lands or bailing out banks that got into difficulties while their CEO's took 7-figure retirement packages.

All MPs are barking on about changing the system, but they would hate it if that change involved them losing their jobs.  But that is what is needed.  Get rid of this corrupt Parliament, & change the rules from the outset.  These people should be their to serve their constituents, and not the other way around.  The Queen ought to seize the reigns [just my little pun] for once and dissolve Parliament, sending every single one of them home and calling a General Election.  

Oh well, until then, I'll just watch another episode of South Park...