I am furious.
I started the morning looking at MPs expenses, and these annoyed me. I then looked at housing allowances, and these enraged me. I then looked at food allowances, and these created a bubbling fire pit of rage that is brewing deep within me.
I will start by saying this. I am not against expenses in principle. I understand the need for them, and I agree with it. What I vehemently disagree with is claiming tens of thousands when you are voting against feeding hungry children. Sometimes hundreds of thousands and you then go and vote to lower benefits like ESA.
So I did what I usually do when something rubs me up the wrong way, I took to social media. Then like a saucepan that was simmering, I started to boil, finally overflowing. What the fuck is it with these people. I do hesitate to use the term people; I cannot wrap my head around their logic.
Esther McVey claimed nigh on nine grand for a personal photographer. Iain Duncan Smith thirty-nine quid on a breakfast! Therese Coffey claims eighteen hundred quid a month for rent!
And, so let’s talk rent. In London, the LHA (Local housing allowance) for someone on Universal Credit is just over one hundred and fifty quid a week, six hundred a month for a single room. It is nearly three hundred quid for a one-bedroom and three sixty for a two-bedroom.
I’ll work with the two-bedroom, I’ll be generous in other words. If you are a single person in Central London, you will get one thousand four hundred and forty pounds per month for a two-bedroom place. You would not be able to claim that as you would only be eligible for the allowance for a one-bedroom. So it is twelve hundred a month, sorry Therese but rules are rules. Easy! You top it up with your Universal Credit. Oops sorry once again, you only get just over four hundred quid a month. You are not renting the same place as the head of the DWP. Even if you did not spend a penny more on anything, you still could not manage it.
Why shouldn’t our elected officials have the same limits we place on the poor? We expect the poorest, the lowest earners, to find a place to live within the LHA so why do we let our MPs choose where they like? Wouldn’t the whole system work better if they placed themselves within the same confines? If Coffey had to find a place within the LHA, then she might start to think about increasing it, at the very least she’d understand what others were going through.
Nine grand for a personal photographer, that is more than the poorest get in total for a year! Thirty-nine quid for a fucking breakfast! Yet here we are. MPs get an allowance of twenty-five quid a day, when they are away from their constituency, for a food allowance. Yet they are playing silly beggars over thirty pounds a week to feed our youngest and most impoverished.
Refusing to help the poorest because they all have their mouths in the trough and then claim there is not enough for the average person. Fuck em.
