Why can’t they use their salaries?

A simple question really. If you or I want to subscribe to Sky TV, or buy some furniture, or some food, or feminine hygiene products – we go to the relevant shop, take money from our bank accounts in the guise of a debit card, credit card, or cash from our purse or wallet and buy these items. Where doe this money come from? In all cases but the credit card, our salaries, wages or earnings from running our businesses.

I don’t know about you, but when I go to the supermarket, I don’t fill my trolley, get to the checkout and then demand that someone else cough up. If I did I’d quickly be dealt with.

Why then, do some MPs feel that their everyday items must be paid for by other people? They get paid to do their job, they know what the pay is like before they go for the job and so once they have it they should be satisfied and use their salary to live.

By all means, if their constituency office is too far from Westminster to be able to get home, then they should be given someplace near work to stay – but that sure as hell shouldn’t mean they can stay in a £200 a night hotel. Far from Westminster while waiting for one London residence to be sold and another to be bought.

This is obscene. It’s bad enough that people are suffering while this goes on but to focus on that would be to miss the point. What some of these MPS are doing (and yes, I know it is only some, doesn’t make it any better though) is stealing taxpayers’ money. Just because what they have been doing is within ‘the rules’ as some of them keep shamefully bleating on about – doesn’t mean it’s right. Anyone can see that defence is disgraceful – who the hell made these rules? The same people who are using them to their great advantage.

In any other job, this type of behaviour would be unspeakable and the perpetrators would be fired and probably prosecuted for theft or misuse of funds or something of that ilk. Well like it or not, MPs are doing a job and they are accountable to us the electorate who put them there. We really need to demand much better – all of us, not just that brave lady who took the government to task through the Freedom of Information act to get this information out.

Given this climate, if the disgusting defence of this continues there will be social unrest. I hope the powers that be see sense and I hope the electorate takes this as a cue to become more concerned with politics and less with Z list celebrities.