Some Random Ramblings.

I read with some incredulity the Real Madrid have just paid Manchester United £80 million for Ronaldo, add to that the £56 million they paid for Kaka a couple of days ago all adds up to a staggering £136 million quid and they are still on the lookout for more players.

(For Ken Gregory’s benefit Ronaldo and Kaka are football players and Real Madrid and Manchester United are football clubs, football is probably the biggest spectator sport in the UK, although fishing is the biggest participation sport!)

In addition to the transfer fees these players and others in the squad will command something like £100,000 quid a WEEK in wages you can see that when you compare these mind numbing sums of money to the mere pittance plus expenses that our MP’s are expected to survive on it puts it into perspective.
For those of us on a rather more modest income we read about these things with a sense of disbelief, the sums being bandied about frequently exceed our total income for eight or nine years and I am sure that a lot of the people who I represent would be glad of my yearly income never mind the weekly income of some people. Although I fully accept that MP’s who have constituencies in Cornwall or Leeds, Manchester etc cant go home after a day at the office it seems to me that there are thousands of folks who live in the South East of England who commute daily to and from London and most of these manage to get into their office’s by 9 am so I don’t accept that MP’s who live within the same distance of London as their commuting constituents should have a second home. Parliament no longer sits through the night so even with a late night most of them should be able to catch the late train home if not bed and breakfast would be a perfectly acceptable and legitimate expense. The added bonus of this would be that they would have to suffer the same trials and tribulations as the normal passenger and maybe then something would be done about the state of our railways and possibly even get the trains to run on time more frequently than now.
Just as an aside to this post what most of you wont know is that for some strange reason any MP who is also a Minister HAS TO HAVE a London address, again I can understand that for senior Ministers but quite why the Minister for Broom Cupboards and Loft Ladders is required to live in London I don’t know.
Now the expenses furore has died down and the Government have said they will change the system although only time will tell Journalists (spit) are moving their attention onto the outbreak of Swine Flu. As usual they are all becoming excited at the prospect of a pandemic and the reporting of it is becoming more and more hysterical bulletin by bulletin. If you believe what they are saying more and more people are becoming infected and we will all be dead in our beds by the Autumn. The figures quoted are of course the total number of people who have caught the disease since the outbreak began not the number currently suffering from it, and in any case 750 cases out of a population of 55million is hardly cause for hysteria. If you stuck a nought or two on the end of that figure I could understand the concern. All this assumes of course that in the meantime Mars doesn’t collide with Earth sending us all into oblivion !!



I am off this evening to a briefing on something called The Working Neighbourhood Fund, this is a fund that among other things is supposed to help people find work or give them the skills to help them find work.
I shall find whether this is true or if it is just another excuse to line the pockets of the Consultants and Middle Class Groupies and Luvvies who seem to be employed by these schemes in great numbers and who spend their time telling the proletariat what they should or shouldn’t be doing but not actually achieving any positive results.