Just in passing
I think I speak for every bonus-earning banker in the country when I say a heartfelt "thank you" to Members of Parliament for pushing us far down into the relegation zone of the national shit-list. Through a combination of
a) fiddling the system for amounts that the average man in the street can understand (how big is a £3.4m pension pot? Can anyone really visualise that sort of money? But a £2k duck house, everyone can get a grip on that and see that it's wildly extravagant), and
b) offering such massive hostages for fortune by moralising in such a hilarious way when it was our necks on the block ("Court of Public Opinion", anyone?),
the membership of the Mother of Parliaments have well and truly established themselves as the benchmark for venality, thus conveniently pushing us off the radar screen. Thanks guys.
Update: I actually think that Anthony "You're just jealous" Steen has been rather hard done by. All the rest of them, when exposed to light, start blithering about "mistakes" and offering to pay back the money, thus demonstrating that they knew they were doing something shifty all along. Steen just fronts it out, telling us all to fuck off if we want our money back, thus demonstrating that he believed he deserved it all. Which makes him in a curious way, the most honest one of the lot of them; unlike, say, Hazel Blears, he never took any money he wasn't prepared to defend the taking of. Delusional, obviously, but honest.
how big is a £3.4m pension potAbout £200k a year at current annuity rates...
ReplyDeletei am fond of ducks and feel viggers was hard done by
ReplyDelete(even though the ducks themselves felt awkward about the whole thing and never moved into their little house)
As George Monbiot would probably say, the ducks are not unemployed.
ReplyDeleteOxford poetry scandal? Is ferret-legging an urban legend?
ReplyDeleteI no longer have a home to go to and need posts.
No, ferret-legging does actually take place, in pubs in particularly desolate and uninteresting rural areas of the North.
ReplyDeleteI have no opinions on the Oxford poetry scandal. Ruth Padel once wrote a quite interesting book on poetry appreciation - or at least, the first two chapters of it were interesting, I got bored and gave up after that. Which I suppose brings into question how interesting those first chapters actually were.
Getting naive undergrads to do your dirty work is one of the staple tricks of Oxford student political hacks. I'm disappointed, but not surprised, to see that the tradition is carried on by the faculty...
ReplyDeleteCaptcha: lubsludg.
Seat of the kings of East Mercia in the 6th century, I believe.
If I hated both bankers and MPs how would I decide?
ReplyDeleteWhich group told me to invest in stocks that then lost >50% of their value might be start :-)
BTW Daniel,
Just saw a nice bit of Levitt bashing here
link
Also see "the amount of money embezzled by the former proprietor of the Telegraph, and the relative amount of media coverage devoted to that event".
ReplyDeleteThe politicking for the Chancellorship was much more amusing. I was in Oxford, incidentally, that weekend, and the sight of the noble Lords Bingham and Neill campaigning outside the Bodleian in best student-union fashion was about as whimsical as it gets.
ReplyDeleteHello, I'm just writing to notify you if it's okay that I sent your 2006 food subisdies article from the new statesman to show an aquaintence of mine who wrote a post about Bill Gates and his policies for Africa. I'll send you the blog post if you like.
ReplyDeletesure, although I think you mean the Guardian as I've never written anything for the NS.
ReplyDeleteBy the way, here's the blog entry:http://ladypoverty.blogspot.com/2008/09/wall-street-journal-has-philanthropy.html
ReplyDelete