This is not one of my serious posts, but matters that I take seriously, because they are so unfair and so absurd. Take the latest transfer fee of £80 million for a football player in the Premier League. If you take into account the unemployed, the children, the retired, the lower paid and the high-paid fans who are attending the matches, it would not be an exaggeration to say that the average daily pay packet would be approximately £80 for an eight hour day, so the working year of 200 days would amount to £16,000, and the fee would represent five thousand year’s wages of the average fan. It is these fans who are going to have to foot the bill through their purchases, and season tickets for that incredible transfer fee, at a time when so many people are on short time of losing their jobs. Of course it’s absurd! It is also obscene!
Recently we have had a spate of people being brought to book with respect to the police force and the social services, for either criminality, malfeasance, or permitting unreasonable behaviour to pass without censure. Some of these people will go to jail, quite a few will be sacked. How is it then that the far more serious and far-reaching theft of our savings and investments, because that is what it was, when our money was used to gamble with, and when success was achieved, the achievers received bonuses and even higher salaries, from the source, that was the aggrandisement of our investments, as a result of their gambling on the stock exchange. When the wheels came off, they add insult to injury by taking our taxes to actually pay these people, some with incredible salaries and pension funds. It was all beyond being absurd.
I resent very much the way in which some members of Parliament have been playing ducks and drakes with our system of government, in some cases without reference to the electorate that put them in power. The glaring case of course is the inflated ego of Mrs. Blears, who had previously put herself up as a candidate for the vice Premiership and came last. I suspect that without reference to the chairman of her constituency party, she went headlong into an assassination of the Prime Minister. It is possible to imagine that her letter, her rhetoric, and total arrogant attitude reflected her conjecture that there was going to be a leadership battle, and with this she would receive promotion. Her subsequent abject apologies, only went to bolster this assumption. She is not alone in this behaviour, that demeans our parliamentary system, to a level at which we feel we cannot trust those who are supposed to lead us, their judgement and integrity. The whole business over the last few weeks has been more than a disaster, it has cut the feet from underneath our political platform, and except for the fact that the Brits are phlegmatic, slow to anger, saves us from some terrible political upheaval. This is criminal not absurd.