A Sense of Proportion

It's hard to get away from the subject of MP's expenses nowadays, especially if you, like me, read The Telegraph. Many people I've heard discussing the matter over the last couple of weeks have said "They're even worse than bankers" - is this the ultimate insult?

So I started wondering if this were true.

Over the course of the last few hours, I've worked through a part of The Telegraph web site covering their review of expenses.

Now where you draw the line depends on your own moral judgement and the information available. Where I judged a claim "dodgy" I put it in my spreadsheet. There were many I couldn't make a call on, either because there was insufficient information on the cost or on the nature of the claim from the information on the Telegraph website (there's just one of me; they have dozens working on this).

But I came up with a total of just under £1.5m. I expect this is on the low side: probably two to three times this would be a truer figure.

Then I looked up just one dodgy banker's payment: Fred the Shred's £16m pension pot. And I put these figures into the chart below.

It seems to me that in the furore over MP's expenses, we've lost our sense of proportion. Let's make it clear: I am not making excuses for any of the MP's dodgy claims, but even if we doubled the amounts of MP's' dodgy claims, they would still be dwarfed by just this one banker. The sensible MPs have admitted they got it wrong and apologised and may face further sanction in some cases. The dodgy ones are in many cases still dodging.

But all the MPs' dodgy claims put together look like being well under what Fred the Shred snaffled quite legally. And he's just one banker. Take all the dodgy bankers (a small proportion, I know) and they've made off with staggering amounts of cash while ruining the western economies. The dodgy MPs have cost you and me each a few pennies. They are pennies that by rights ought to be yours and mine, but they are pennies. The dodgy bankers have cost you and me each tens of thousands of pounds.

Brain the size of a ...

I am lucky to live in a large village surrounded by woods and fields and so yesterday I went for a walk with the current Mrs Haffey. It was hot and humid and clearly the insects were loving it. There were lots of greenfly about (I use the term "greenfly" loosely; we're talking about something tiny and green that flies) and it suddenly struck me how astonishing it is that greenfly exists at all.

Somewhere in its tiny brain (and I hope I am not being too rude by describing it in this way) is everything needed for a full existence, if not one which I would regard as complete. I suspect it doesn't have much appreciation of the Arts and its Scientific and Literary achievements are minimal. Yet it leads a full life. It eats out most days, probably every day come to think of it. It gets to fly places, something we humans don't do very well. It reproduces.

All of this is managed with a brain so tiny it weighs a fraction of what just one hair from my head weighs. Now I don't think I am being unduly modest when I tell you that if I cut off a tiny bit of one of my hairs equal in weight to the brain of a greenfly - or even the whole greenfly itself - it wouldn't do much. I may be wrong, but I think the fragment of hair would just lie there.

Isn't nature astonishing?

Welcome home

The Royal Air Force squadrons of Chinook helicopters are based at Odiham. At any one time, a few hundred of the men and women in these squadrons are based overseas, most notably in Afghanistan. Conditions there are tougher than most people can imagine; often they are extremely dangerous. This is implicitly recognised in news programs. So often when you see footage of the war, it's of helicopter pilots dropping off soldiers or collecting the wounded while being fired at. I've met a few of these men and women and they are uniquely courteous, professional and cheerful.

In June last year, Odiham invited the RAF to parade through the village. It was a mostly sunny day, and a happy one. I think many who attended were surprised at how uplifting an occasion it was. Plenty of the servicemen and women were smiling as they marched along. Certainly all of the public were.

They will be parading through again on the morning of Saturday 13th June. If you live nearby, come along and welcome them home!

I hope I die before I get old

Let's play "Let's Pretend" for a moment.

Let's pretend you've retired. You get a state pension of about £95 a week at present, I believe, and on a regular basis this is increased. That's not a lot, but you've probably paid off your house and live frugally. You feel the cold in winter, but the government gives you extra fuel payments from time to time. You're getting frail, but the National Health Service is there to help you out. And so you may not live well, but you are able to survive in not too much discomfort.

This all works well unless you are a British citizen who has retired outside the EU and USA. In that case, things suddenly look a lot worse.

• Your pension is never increased. If you retired a few years ago on £50 a week, that's it for the rest of your life. Tough luck about inflation.
  
• You don't get any winter fuel payments. At this point, dear reader, you're probably thinking "You don't need winter fuel payments if you live in Australia or South Africa." You'd be wrong. In many of these sunny climes, night time temperatures drop to freezing in winter and since double glazing is rare, when it's freezing outside, it's pretty close to freezing inside. And if you've retired to Canada, it gets pretty chilly there too.
  
• There's no National Health Service to fall back on. So just as your health gets frail, you face steeply increasing costs.
  

For years the Government has refused to do anything about this.

Let's look simply at the matter of pensions. There are about 500,000 British pensioners affected by having a fixed pension under this policy. The Government claims that it would be unaffordable to keep increasing their pensions in line with pensions for those living in the UK.

Really? Just how much would it cost? I've seen estimates of less than 1% increase in the budget for the Department of Work and Pensions. How is that unaffordable?

The way we treat the most vulnerable in our society is a measure of our civilisation.

We are treating half a million British pensioners callously.

We should be ashamed.