Masopher's Mind

The recent attention to the few grand legally fiddled by the Westminster MPs aka the Eton and Edinburgh old boys club is another example of misplaced focus. In what is being referred to as the worst financial collapse in history where billions-no-trillions of tax payers money is being spirited away to pay for non-existent assets, viewers are being coaxed to get upset because a man wants to get his moat cleaned and another the bushes around his helipad trimmed. He has moat, he wants it cleaned! He’s not asking the tax payer to buy him a moat, but he needs to have his current one maintained. How can he ask his constituency to take pride in the environment with a dirty moat? There is absolutely no way a man of Douglas Hogg’s pedigree could survive on an MP’s salary. Without the few extra pounds to maintain his home he must either rely on bribery or cease being an MP. The losers are, in the end, the constituents who must settle for a third rate citizen because they are cheaper to maintain.

Masopher say: pay them more, because if we dont pay them to govern us who will? I’ll tell you who in case you havent guessed, the first rate citizens will. And thats why we are in the mess we are in, because politicians owe their allegience to the people who  

a) appreciate when they write some legislation in their favor. If we dont appreciate these guys when they do right by us, why do they care if we complain when they do wrong by us? we complain no matter what.

b) pay them. Everybody want to live better or at very least continue to live the same way they live before. No body gets into public service because they want to come out worse off than when they started. Even Jesus benefitted from his minitry, not to mention Moses and Mohammed. So if the most venerated people you know benefitted hugely why do you think these regular guys will sacrifice themselves for an ungrateful suspicious public? If you dont pay them then they are going to find someone that will and help them.

That is what it comes to in the end. The tax payers get what they pay for. If they want ASDA MPs they get ASDA MP’s; if they want cheap and cheerful men, happy to be payed little they must expect that the men will do little in return; Low education, narrow vision and no ambition for themselves or their country.

But it gets worse. Instead of paying for a government of highly educated men and women, taxpayers are being railroaded into paying for a government which is itself governed by another body. This can come in two forms: pencil pushing civil servants who will be paid to rubberstamp whatever the MPs decide anyway, or they will be paying the EU to govern the UK. The taxpayer makes no net financial profit but loses yet another level of independence. Instead of trusting in the honour of honourable men, we will trust in the murkiness of bureaucracy. After many hundreds of years of the Scottish lead government of the UK having the final say, the Telegraph has lead the country into a country lead by a bunch of cheap men who are in turn lead by non-elected (and possibly foreign) bureaucrats.

In a democracy if you do not like how your money was spent you could vote the representative out. No such luck in the UK. On so many levels this is prevented. The first level is that the unelected prime minister refuses to hold elections. The second level is the two party systems in play which denies access to electable independently willed citizens and third is the monarchy that under shadows the whole system.

Why the big furore over a man working for the citizenry getting his moat cleaned? We pay for the cleaning of many moats and we will never get a drop of work out of the owners of those moats. Trimming a few bushes and a plug for the bathroom sink? How about trips to the Galapagos and the gold accoutrements in various houses of the Monarchy? Why do we complain about the second homes of our elected servants when an unelected master still reigns over us in lavish luxury?

The speaker of the house was chucked into the house of lords for his scapegoatism. Being the rubberstamper of the MPs expenses he was made the guilty party except for two things. He is not the guilty party and it is the monarchy who rubberstamps parliament. If there was anything wrong, it was the monarchy that has the final say not the Speaker. The Royalty that has been languishing in permanent paid retirement still gets ceremonial but still legally binding say in how tax payer’s money is spent.

Masopher is not against the Monarchy in any way. Masopher would love if this imperfect and defective veil of democracy was dispensed with and people told. “It is that way because I say it is.” Masopher is an anarchist mindset but a strong and active monarchy is an acceptable alternative. This pretention of free will; media led psychological games and scaremongering, the baying of the masses and orchestrated opinion: It really sucks. It really, really, sucks.