Francis Maude MP

The MP for Horsham certainly sounds very hard done by. Let's look at it without emotion.

He owns a house in his constituancy worth around £500,00, fair enough, he's earned or inherited it.

He's bought a house in London worth around £500,00 again, can't complain about that, he's every right to have a house in London if he wishes.

Then it starts to get more interesting. He rents out his house in London (what's a £1/2M house going to rent for? £1500/month? give or take) and decides what he really wants is a flat, a couple of hundred yards away, and thinks it's ok for the British taxpayer to fund this new flat.

I've got one thing to say to this guy, it isn't! You have two properties, you have a property in London which you can use as an MP, you don't need a flat funded by poor people while you rent out your house which you could have used. 

This from the Telegraph

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/mps-expenses/5304772/Francis-Maude-claimed-for-second-London-home-MPs-expenses.html

"He claimed £18,112.50 in mortgage interest payments for the year 2006-07, £1,790 for council tax, £2,237 for a service charge and £820 for cleaning.

A further £9,801.78 was claimed for mortgage interest payments from April 1 to Aug 31, 2007.

The senior Tory MP then submitted a claim for the mortgage interest payments for the remainder of the 2007-08 financial year, which came to £13,070.96.

In a note to the House of Commons fees office he said he knew there was not enough left in his ACA account to cover the payments.

The fees office paid out £6,748.52, up to the maximum of his allowance."

So, he has an income from his house (remember he owns it outright) of (what?) £15k - £20k he's got capital gains on the house in London, he then gets an additional £21k from us because he thought his house 1 min walk away wasn't good enough.

Nice work if you can get it! Talk about pigs snouting in the trough!

Then when the crap hits the fan he offers to pay the capital gains back to the governemnt. Well it's too late, you shouldn't have done it in the first place. If you were on the 'social' you'd be in front of the beek facing a prison term, an offer to just pay it back and all would be forgiven wouldn't happen.

Do the honourable thing and resign now!

Chiropractors

Well, today Simon Singh lost his preliminary hearing on a defamation case brought by the British Chiropractic Association (BCA) because of an article he published in The Guardian (since removed from their web site).

Fortunately, the original BCA advertising material has be archived in case they attempted to change it. Here is what the BCA claims its members can do.

"There is evidence to show that chiropractic care has helped children with the following symptoms:

Asthma, Colic, Prolonged crying Sleep and feeding problems, Breathing difficulties, Hyperactivity, Bedwetting, Frequent infections, especially in the ears"

Well very nice claims, no frigging evidence to show how cracking-bones is going to cure any of these things. This just stinks of the BCA shutting down a world renowned science writer to cover their arses. The judge was probably one of the worse that Simon could have asked foe. Mr. Justice Eady, who has ruled some strange rulings in the past - Max Mosley has the right to privacy when he is strutting round shouting in German brandishing a whip with a few prostitutes, a gagging order on the husband of a wife who ran off with a celebrity, well you can Google for yourselves.

Frankly we might as well give up on science now and let the lunatics run the asylum. Just wait until the homoeopaths and the mad Prince get a hold of this, all opposition to quackery will be shut down and we'll go back to rubbing in spit, mud and leaches.