The politicall fallout of the 'greedy' MPs continues.
It has clearly done damage to politics generally within the UK. In my view the Telegraph has done democracy no favours by revealing the expenses scandal at this time, and by  the way that they have presented the information.

If we have too many people simply not voting next month then we may end up with long term damage to the UK by allowing extremists and other single issue people into power.

With the exception of any actual frauds that may be discovered, it should be remembered that the vast majority of MPs are only claiming what is allowed by the system in place. The vast majority of MPs are having all of their expense claims checked, approved and signed off by the officials running the expenses system.

Why is their such an emphasis on the monkeys (sorry about this analogy ) when the problem is with the organ grinder!

Those running the system are at fault. They have defined what is acceptable to be claimed for, and what is not allowed. It was the responsibility of the MPS to ensure that they were operating within the system. 

How many of us in the real world would actually turn down valid expenses incurred whilst doing our work? I suspect that there would be a lot of fuss if the employer said that they thought that the rules were too generous and that they would only refund a percentage of valid expense claims.

All the promises of this government that their ID cards scheme is important and safe are slowly falling apart, even before the ID scheme gets going!

When an ID card is used to verify a purchase or an identity, this fact is recorded on the Big Brother computers.

We have already had the tax office saying that they are going to use these computer records and match them to the person's tax record to pick up anomolies. This means that they are looking for where the person's income appears to be at odds with their pattern of expenditure.

If they are willing to do this then is is a small step for other actions!

Perhaps they could refuse the transaction on the grounds that people have outstanding tax bills, penalty tickets, etc. and they want to stop them spending their money on other things.

Perhaps the tax office, the social services, the company that issued a penalty ticket, etc. could simply refuse the transaction but divert the payment to where they want it to be!

This is a story in the Mail, read it yourself to see the details.

But I am getting more and more concerned about the level of petty bureaucracy that is beginning to control all aspects of our daily lives. We now seem to have groups of people who preying on everyone else, looking continuously to catch people who have broken the rules! But there are now so many rules it is almost impossible to avoid breaking some some of them!!!.

For example the act of dropping a piece of paper can get a person a fine even though they immediately pick up the paper. Effectively we are being fined for the act of dropping something even if it was not deliberate and we pick it up immediately.

During the second world war there was only one Hitler. Now in a so-called free society we seem to have hundreds of them!