Greed beggars belief

THEY must think we’re all stupid, these politicians.

If I see one more smirking MP quoting the mantra “I’ve done nothing wrong” when it turns out we’ve paid for his wife’s tampons and a man to clean his swimming pool, then I’m going to put a brick through the telly and that’ll be the end of Ges On The Box.

I’ve had my fill this week. More than my fill.

When mum-in-law gets a pension of £96 a week (that’s her rent, electricity, gas, food, clothing and savings for three nights’ B&B hols in Bournemouth) I am incandescent to discover MPs get £400 a month for food — on top of their £65,000 salary — for their second house (for which we’ve already bought a cooker, fridge and microwave . . . not to mention renovated, wallpapered and cleaned).

Tell me, someone, please, why we — who earn less than a third of what an MP gets paid — should be expected to foot his caviar bill?

Why should we, the humble taxpayer, cough up £750 for a telly for his second home when we can’t afford to pay a tenner for a secondhand one off eBay for ourselves?

Why should an MP, who lives 17 miles from Westminster, be allowed to clam for a second house to “enable” him to do his job?

And WHY are we coughing up £6,000 for someone to clean Gordon Brown’s house? The man is paid £165,000 a year, he can afford his own blessed cleaner.

I’ll tell you why they do it: Because they can. And because we let them.

They are absolutely right when they smirk that they’ve done “nothing illegal”. They haven’t.

But who, I ask you, sets the laws of this country? The same MPs who have a little green book telling them they can claim up to £24,000 a year in expenses, providing it isn’t excessive.

It might not be excessive to someone on £165,000 a year to expect us to pay £750 for a music centre or £1,000 for a bed, but it jolly well is to me.

They have not done anything legally wrong, true. But what they are doing is morally wrong.

When the “rules” for expenses were first drawn up, they were aimed at gentlemen and ladies with a moral code. Men and women who became politicians to help others. Not themselves.

Gordon Brown needs to call a general election now. And then every single one of us must go into the voting booth and spoil the paper.

These money-grabbing, self-serving, greedy people whom we elected to serve OUR interests must be left in no doubt whatsoever that the country has called time on their grubby little ways.