Pocket Full of Woes

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FORAY Sunday, November 1, 2009 Email Print

Pocket full of woes

Venkata Vemuri

British MPs are gearing up to discuss a major issue in the august House next week. No, it’s not about recession or the postal strike or even the EU presidential election. It’s about their allowances which are facing an executive axe.Following the MPs’ expenses scandal which exposed scores of members misusing their allowances, a Parliamentary watchdog is planning to reform the system of allowances. The move has been greeted with predictable howls of outrage from some at Westmin-ster.Some of these measures leaked to the Press include:
Parachute payments worth up to £65,000 for MPs standing down will be phased out after the next election.
The scrapping of the £25-a-day subsistence payment for food, introduced in the spring.
Those living within an hour's commute of Westminster will not be allowed to claim expenses for a second home. MPs will only be allowed to rent flats costing up to £1,250 a month.
MPs will be barred from employing family members in their offices; order MPs to sack currently employed relatives within five years.
Claims for food, furniture, mortgages and some other items will be prohibited.But more than the MPs, it is their wives who are crying foul over the expected harsh measures. More than 200 MPs currently employ spouses and other family members. Some wives have already consulted their union representatives and are threatening to take legal action if they are forced to quit. The MPs are insisting they should not be punished because of a few bad apples. The wife of Conservative MP from North Thanet, Roger Gale, who is employed by him, says: "I was very well qualified to do the job when I first started, coming up for 27 years ago, and I'm still very well qualified so am I not allowed to apply for my own job anymore?" Bra-vo!Tabloid press in Cambridge? True, and it is ruffling the feathers of the university's tradition-bound gentry. Some students are bringing out a tabloid, The Tab, complete with its Page 3 girls. It appears online and provides the latest celebrity gossip and sport news and has proved hugely popular with 80,000 hits in its first week.There’s a Totty section featuring scantily-clad women students and features like Bra-vo about the large bra sizes of Cambridge students. The university's traditional student Press is furious, and the student union’s women’s officer Natalie Szarek has called for the Tab Totty section to be axed from the site.She claims the pictures “reproduce and reinforce harmful attitudes towards women. Semi-naked women in provocative positions are being shoved in freshers’ faces. We can do better as a university,” she adds.Three male students who paid £500 each to set up the website say the students' union is a "sad dinosaur" which is upset that The Tab is stealing readers from traditional university papers like Varsity and Cambridge Student. One of the trio, third-year student Taymoor Atighetchi, says: “There’s a huge amount of snobbery around. We do not think what we are doing is sexist. It was always our intention to have a debate about these issues. The website is a tongue-in-cheek version of the tabloid newspaper — we are not just emulating it.”Racist overdriveA major debate in British schools these days is on what construes as a racist spat among schoolchildren. As of now, under the Race Relations (Amendment) Act 2000, schools in England and Wales have to report “racist incidents” to local authorities. Teachers are made to fill in lengthy forms about name-calling, jokes etc. A recent report says, an estimated 2,50,000 racist incidents have been reported in schools since 2002. But a civil liberties group The Manifesto Group, questions the numbers, saying children are being branded racist before they even know what the term means and playground spats are being turned into full-blown racial incidents.The Group has brought out a report— The Myth of Racist Kids — which lists 5,000 incidents in Yorkshire schools between 2006/07, the majority of which were in primary schools. In Essex, most incidents involved children between the ages of nine and 11.The report’s author Adrian Hart says: “Such actions (by teachers) can create divisions where none existed. There are a small number of cases of sustained targeted bullying, and schools certainly need to deal with those. But most of these 'racist incidents' are just kids falling out. They don't need re-educating out of their prejudice — they and their teachers need to be left alone.”However, schools minister Diana Johnson says: “If racist bullying is not dealt with in schools, then this will send a powerful message to children that racism is acceptable — not only in schools but in society as a whole.”Fat chanceObesity is slowly becoming a national dilemma. One out of four Britons is obese and latest figures reveal that in the last year obesity-related admissions to hospitals jumped by 60 per cent.There were 8,085 admissions to hospital for obesity in 2008-09, up from 5,056 the previous year and 1,746 in 2003-04, official figures from the NHS Information Centre show.The figures were released just a week after it emerged that the world’s heaviest man could be airlifted from his home in Ipswich for specialist care. Paul Mason, 48, a former engineer who weighs 70 stone, is due to undergo surgery to help him lose weight but struggles to leave his home.And it’s already telling on the National Health Service which is spending taxpayers’ money to buy wider and sturdier hospital beds, ambulances and lifting equipment.Surgery is officially the first line treatment for patients with a Body Mass Index (BMI) of more than 50. Some of the surgical procedures cost up to £12,000.