Orders of magnitude

Over on Capitalists@Work and EU Referendum are covering the ongoing saga of the Eurofighter, where the government are committed to buying another 88 (or 92) redundant Cold War era fighter jets, which are of little use in the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq at a cost of around £27 billion.

That's £27,000 million

Previously we figured that the MPs Expense row that's sweeping the nation at the moment costs about £16 million.

Lets process this just a little

Eurofighter £27,000,000,000
MPs Expenses £16,000,000

or

Eurofighter £27,000 million
MPs Expenses £16 million

That's near as dammit two thousand times more of a cost to the taxpayer, two thousand times more of a waste of money.

Lasy year I did some calculations to quantify government spending in terms of 'taxpayer hours' how long people would have to work to pay off various government expenditure. Back then I figured a taxpayer hour was worth about £4.80 per hour.

On that basis, the MPs expenses is 3,333,333 taxpayer hours and the Eurofighter shambles is 5,625,000,000 taxpayer hours (416,667 taxpayer days and 703,250,000 taxpayer days or 1,603 taxpayer years and 2,704,807 taxpayer years).

Erm, that's based on 2008 taxpayer hours. Things have changed.

Smarter people than me have it that Tax Freedom day was yesterday, 14th May, I must have missed it myself, I haven't been in paid employment this year, anyhoo so The Powers That Be take 37% of your average Briton's earnings. The mean weekly earnings are still last year's figure of £11.78 per hour. So a Taxpayer hour is now worth £4.36.

On that basis, the MPs expenses is 3,669,725 taxpayer hours and the Eurofighter shambles is 6,192,660,550 taxpayer hours (458,715 taxpayer days and 774,082,568 taxpayer days or 1,764 taxpayer years and 2,977,240 taxpayer years).

Its mind-boggling no matter how you chop it up.

Impulse

I have to put down my knitting, my fingers are hurting. itunes has been on random all day and it just came up with The Plimptons - Impulse Records (1979 - 2000) (extended version).



Its been years since I last heard that song, it's from a fuzzy period of my life. 2005, Glasgow. Maybe earlier.



The Plimptons had a monthly residency at the Tchai Ovna Teahouse, its a small pokey wee place, you could fit twenty people in, maybe forty with folk standing, they'd usually get in the former crowd.



Every month they'd invite friendly bands to play with them, mates bands, side projects, folk who'd begged for a chance.



There was no stage at the Tchai, just two broken amps and a couple of microphone stands, but for that size of crowd it was barely worth it. This one time MJ Hibbett played, he'd come up from Leicester with his guitar, he was the second act of the evening, after seeing the first act struggle to get the mics to work, he came up with a better solution. I was sat just at the side, next to the fire place, I remember his words "Instead of using a microphone I'm going to step a little closer to you, and sing a little bit louder, and it'll be great."



Back in those days, The Plimptons were a three piece, Adam, Martin and Soares. Soares played keyboards, the others took turns on guitar and vocals.



One particular night they were running late, the Tchai's manager stood at the back tapping his watch theatrically. The regular last song of the set at this time was Impulse Records, it was a great sprawling epic of a song when they were still figuring out how it should soung before they'd recorded it, still pretty fresh from Adam's pen.



Hmm, my memory's going fuzzy, am I thinking of a gig at the Tchai or was it a gig at Stereo? I'm not so sure any more.



The song sounds a little like mid-nineties Pulp, a pastiche even, there's a verse about hanging out with a girl called Deborah, anyhoo, its got this Pulp-like four-four keyboard all the way through. I remember Martin shouting out "We haven't got enough time, what are we going to do?"



From the side of the stage, my usual position as manager / roadie, I called out "Play it double time, doing two verses at the same time."



They barely missed a beat, the keyboard player, who I think at this time was either Soares, Paul from The Martial Arts or Craig Pulsar, starts playing double time. Adam and Martin both clutching the same microphone and start doing it, two different verses at the same time, double time.



The crowd, about 50% friends, 50% fans of the other bands, stand open-mouthed.



It was a shambles but it was stunning.



Those were the days.Sent using BlackBerry® from Orange

Knitting project #10 - The larger blackberry beret

Knitting project #10 - The larger blackberry beret
Originally uploaded by manc_ill_kid

In the photie I am pulling my Cats On Fire face.

Chicks will love me.

So this is my second attempt at knitting a blackberry beret, its a bit wider this time, and looks more beret-shaped than my first attempt last month.

It does however, have a hole in the top cos I'm not sure how to finish it off properly. Hopefully it will never rain when you wear this hat, otherwise you will have a very small damp patch where the rain comes in.

I hope that one day I'll find out how to finish it off properly or like I'll get some graph paper and figure it out. Maybe I'm just doing it wrong, rather than starting at the rim and working to the hub, I should be starting at the hub and working outwards to the rim.

Gah.

As long as I work in a process of continuous improvement, everything will be okay.

More of my knitting photies on flickr here

Thanks

Well past it

Well past it
Originally uploaded by manc_ill_kid

On the top shelf of my cupboard I'd always assumed it another flatmate's food, but when they moved out I thought I'd investigate, to see if there was anything worth salvaging.

Porridge oats with a best before date of 28/02/05

Yum!

Opting out of the minimum wage

I am currently unemployed. After eight years or so of continuous employment and paying National Insurance I now draw my Job Seekers Allowance, this is £60.50 a week.

Another way of looking at it would be equivalent to having a full time job paying £1.51 per hour. That's how much I am currently worth, and crikey, its depressing.

I've got a degree and speak a handful of languages and know the lore of computers and the internet, I know how to knit and type and write SQL, but my time is worth only £1.51 per hour.

Minimum wage is currently £5.73 per hour, almost four times my current value.

I would willing work for less than minimum wage if I had the opportunity. I would willingly opt out of the minimum wage given the choice.

Dave and co paying it back

Looks like Constantly Furious and Mark Thompson were a few moments ahead of the zeitgeist in calling for MPs to pay pack their expenses, with David Cameron having a press conference to announce that the shadow cabinet were going to do just that.

Over on LabourList someone had calculated that the total sum of the expenses troughed is £16 million, £16,000,000.

So, if we were truly getting it back, that would be about 25p or £0.25 per resident of the UK, which wouldn't even cover the postage.

Yes, the MPs are all bad bad people and should cease to be parliamentarians, they've demonstrated that they cannot be trusted with taxpayers money, in any way. They should just fuck off and we get a general election to draft in a new load of people who may or may not be able to run things better.

We are in the midst of a global financial crisis, with government borrowing in the hundreds of billions of pounds.

Lets look briefly at this xkcd comic strip

and also briefly at these paragraphs from EUReferendum

But the crisis has acquired the characteristics of BSE (Blame Someone Else), with Parliament having walked away from acknowledging its part in the crisis – while the claqueurs prattle about "Mr Brown's regulations". However, responsibility ultimately lies with Parliament. Had MPs devoted a fraction of the effort they spent on creative accounting for their own expenses to the nation's financial affairs, they could have saved us hundreds of billions.

Such is the level of debate in this infantile country of ours, however, that prattling about penny ante sums of money, while billions pour down the drain unchecked, is seen as admirable. But, in the final analysis, we will have seen more energy, media coverage and Parliamentary time allocated to MPs' expenses than to the entire process of regulating of the financial sector.

and

Roughly, in terms of salary equivalent, MPs cost us £100 million a year. On one project alone, the defence committee could have saved us that. Collectively, each year – through effective and robust control of the executive – MPs could save us billions. And, should they do so – and had they done so - they would be worth the money they are paid, no matter how it is packaged.

The millions wastes / troughed / stolen in this expenses scandal is a lot of money, but still several orders of magnitude fewer than the thousands of millions (billions) that government borrowing and debt is swallowing up, and its the same parliament which is responsible.

We need to get rid of these people and get a new crowd in as quickly as possible. There need to be a new batch of politicians in the House of Commons, people who haven't been politicians before, people untainted, with new biases, new ideas and new ideals.

Maybe the future has a House of Commons with the two biggest parties being the Libertarians and the BNP slogging it out from far ends of the political spectrum, liberty and authoritarianism, or maybe there'll be coalitions from a palette of five or six parties. Either way, it'll get new ideas and change on the agenda and parliament can start working again.

MJ Hibbett covers

This is entertaining, some American gentleman called Robin covering an MJ Hibbett song

A few lyric changes so it'll make sense in the US of A, but its still kind of unnerving to hear such a familiar song sung with an American accent.

If you're really into MJ Hibbett covers, here's my cover of The Lesson of The Smiths

Haven't a clue

This, from Towards Mutual Benefit, amuses me

From the website of the Icelandic Ministry for Foreign Affairs, my emphasis:

Icelandic Foreign Minister makes a formal complaint on British PM's comments

8.5.2009

The Icelandic Minister for Foreign Affairs, Ossur Skarphedinsson, today made a formal complaint on comments made by the British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, during a session of Parliamentary question time. Minister Skarphedinsson called in the British Chargé d’Affaires to Iceland to deliver a protest. The Ambassador of Iceland to the United Kingdom has also delivered a letter to 10 Downing Street.

Minister Skarphedinsson said that the Prime Minister’s comments of 7 May related to financial losses of the Christie hospital were unhelpful. In his comments, Prime Minister Brown inaccurately stated that the UK authories were not the regulatory authority in the case of Kaupthing, Singer Friedlander Bank, where the Christie hospital funds were deposited. Furthermore, the Prime Minister claimed that the UK authorities were in negotiations with the International Monetary Fund on the rate at which Iceland can repay losses to British deposit holders.

Minister Skarphedinsson earlier today stresssed that Kaupthing, Singer and Friedlander Bank is a British Bank, under the regulatory authority of the UK Financial Supervisory Authority. "We of course regret that the Christie hospital has suffered financially due to the seizure by the FSA of Kaupthing, Singer and Friedlander, but there is no basis for linking this matter to the Icelandic depositors’ compensation scheme", said the Minister.

What's going on here? Does the Kaupthing, Singer and Friedlander Bank fall under Icelandic jurisdiction as Brown told Parliament, or that of the UK, as the Icelandic government claims?

I'm quite willing to believe that the UK Financial Supervisory Authority hasn't a clue what banks it's supposed to be regulating and which one's it isn't, and so can't report accurately to Gordon Brown. The whole system's a shambles, and its all really really complicated.

Just keep it

Elsewhere on the internet Constantly Furious is championing a scheme to encourage MPs to payback any expenses they feel like paying back.

So here's what you're going to do, troughers. Go through all your paperwork; go through the shoeboxes full of receipts; go through what the Daily Telegraph has already published (or could yet publish) about you; gather it all together, and prepare for a long evening with a calculator. Or a spreadsheet. Bet we bought you a laptop recently.

Decide which claims you're completely comfortable with, and which now make you feel (or should make you feel) gut-churningly ashamed. Now add up the claims you now realise were not morally right (fuck whether they were "within the rules" or not - it seems everything is).

Now you've got a total - quite a large one, for some of you - of expenses you know in your heart you shouldn't have claimed. Even if "everyone else was"; even if it was "within the rules".

Make out a cheque for that amount, and pay it back.

Some of these cheques might be quite large. You'll have to do what the rest of us do when we suddenly need a large amount of money: you might have to get a loan; you might perhaps re-mortgage one of your houses, or even - oh dear - sell one. You might have to trade down to a smaller car. Your partner might have to get a job. Tough shit.

I can't say I support this idea. That money won't be coming back to me, it'll go back into the state's black hole of debt and will essentially cease to exist, so sod it, the money's spent, the cash has been exchanged for stuff of approximately the same value, suppliers and tradesmen have been paid.

My alternative is (firstly the old golden goodbye payment for MP's gets canned) the MPs all get their expense totals tattooed on their foreheads and a general election called. If their constituents think the MP's value is the same as the price tag on their fod then so be it, and they think otherwise then get voted out of office.

If as Burning Our Money has it they think they can make more money in the private sector, then so be it, the private sector will be able to assess their value and their price tag. And if they end up destitute and unemployable (like myself) then so be it.

Paying the money back doesn't undo the offence of taking it in the first place.

The chap who started the Pay It Back campaign is here

There's this argument for the death penalty that I read somewhere once, "We're not hanging you cos you stole horses, we're hanging you to stop horses being stolen". Getting these MPs to pay back expenses that they've troughed isn't going to stop MPs troughing the system, only getting rid of these MPs will do.

So they can keep what they've stolen and get the hell out of my way.

Brief Musical Interlude

The new MJ Hibbett album, Regardez, Ecoutez et Repetez, is out now so they've done a wee advert for it on YouTube, with radio DJ Steve Lemaqc doing the voice-over. Its just like the adverts you see on TV, but with grown ups.



The album's available here

Other cool MJ Hibbett videos on YouTube
Its only works because you're here
Do the indie kid
Hey Hey 16K