MPs Have Lost Their Morals & Ethics on Abortion & IVF

I think it is now official. Our MPs on both sides of the house are stark raving mad and wholly removed from the society the represent. This has been confirmed by the results of voting on the various life topics covered by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill which has gone through Parliament this week.

I was surprised when they allowed human/animal stem cell research. This was always a contentious subject with arguments fully entrenched in religion. I’m not sure that the religious argument was ever the strongest but it was always well supported.

I was shocked that the term for abortion remained the same despite very strong public support to the contrary. The cause for shortening the term has been strengthened over the years by numerous examples of babies at 20-24 weeks being born and surviving. There appears to be strong evidence that the foetus begins to feel at this stage of the pregnancy and has developed enough for viability. We are totally out of touch with the rest of Europe on this. We are in fact the abortion capital of Europe with somewhere in the region of 200k abortions a month. People in fact travel to the UK because they cannot get an abortion in their home countries. It strikes me as being wrong that we are pouring resources into abortion instead of general health care or the promotion and education of responsibility. If abortion was a bit harder to procure then perhaps kids would be a little smarter about how they spent their evenings and weekends. The government it seems must have a reason for ignoring public opinion on this one but what that reason is precisely is a mystery to me at the moment.

What has floored me though is the decision of MPs to remove the need of a male role model from IVF treatment. Words cannot begin to explain my anger on this decision. As far as I am concerned now, the government have officially lost the plot. On the one hand they are beginning to accept that it is the breakdown of the family in modern society that is to blame for the epidemic of anti-social behaviour that grips us today. Experts galore have been saying for years now that a fully functioning family, which means a mother and a father is vital to promote natural values and healthy development of children. What is the point of paying these experts to advise our government if the government is going to ignore them wholly and allow presumably single women of lesbian couples to pursue IVF without any form of male influence other that the sperm needed for the creation of life. As a man I think this is abhorrent. As a society this is precisely the type of thing we should be looking to put an end to yet here are our politicians saying that more children should be brought into this world without natural and correct biological influences in their lives; a matriarch and a patriarch. I suspect that in tune with pretty much all of this governments decisions, this comes down to money in some way shape or form and the fact that there are probably supporters somewhere who have been able to use their influence. Either that of someone told Gordon that it would be good for the economy and/or his image if he put his weight behind this vote.

I hope that the Conservatives who opposed this incredible concession will revisit this subject as soon as possible when they come into power after the next election.

Teachers? Solidarity Brothers & Sisters.

I am going to come out on this issue from the start. I am in favour of giving the teachers of the NUT what they want. They are striking today because they find themselves in a position where they cannot afford to live and probably particularly in London. At a starting salary of £20k they are expected to work and live in often extreme conditions for long hours. Now if you look back to my article about poor Leona Lewis who was complaining that she was struggling to survive in London and get a decent home for around the £500k mark, I think it puts things into context.


For a teacher to afford a property, one would need to borrow 25 times that salary in order to find somewhere nice to live; not likely either now or a year ago when the banks were falling over themselves to lend money. So realistically what could a teacher afford? Well based on maybe three and a half times their salary they could afford a property worth c.£66k with a 10% deposit. Now the last time I looked in the paper, in 1996 this was possible, however today for a teacher to buy a property on his/her own, is an impossibility.


The fact is, these striking teachers are not asking for wage hikes allowing them to afford properties worth anywhere near £500k or even really a quarter of that. They are asking for their pay rise to be in line with inflation. What is wrong with that? Do these people not perform a valuable service on societies behalf? Do our children and did not we ourselves (or some of us anyway) give teachers a hard time at school every day and at every opportunity? Their student loans are linked to inflation and I don't understand why their salary cannot be too. I don't understand what anyone would have against someone being paid enough to justify going to work and doing the job they have chosen to do.


I get the impression that as long as you are paid from the public purse, you are expected to work for peanuts. The same can be said about nurses and the armed forces, who have all been utterly exploited and taken for granted for years if not centuries. I think that this is an awful indictment on our society that our public servants are expected to survive on the breadline only for the reason that they have a sense of civic duty which compels them to serve the rest of us and provide services that society cannot do without.


It makes my so angry to hear about the inconvenience that this strike has caused. I think that this is an utterly selfish point of view and amounts to nothing less than emotional blackmail. As far as I am aware, the purpose of a strike, as an action of last resort is in fact to cause disruption. I fail to see the personal inconvenience of having to look after the kids for an extra day. I personally cherish every day I have with my family so from my point of view that argument stinks. I understand that it causes businesses problems because they have to allow for absenteeism. Big deal! if the business hasn't been built to survive minor blips like this then it deserves to go bust because it is a bad business. I understand that it might affect some peoples money if they are forced to take time off work but again, if you haven't planned to deal with blips then I can offer no sympathy. Perhaps an insight into what it is like to have less money will demonstrate to those who do lose out what it is like to be a teacher.


The interesting thing about all of this however is the silence from Downing Street on the issue. The government and Prime Minister who sailed into power with cries of "Education, Education, Education" appear to be a bit quiet on the issue. Is it that they are still recovering from the battering they took in parliament yesterday and in the papers today? Are they sitting back, waiting to see what the popular opinion is on this issue before they commit to a course of action. They need to get it right because the local and mayoral elections are round the corner so I suppose I can understand their hesitation. I would've thought though as the name of the party suggests and the support, both financially and politically that they receive from the trade unions that they have no choice but to support the TUC. However as we've all come to expect from New Labour, they seem to be more worried about the City and economic effects of the strike than its social cause and effects. What really confuses me is why the opposition has failed to come out and take the high ground in Labour's reluctance to do so.

If you pay peanuts, you get....?

....Leading politicians have come under more scrutiny than ever today with the publication of expense claims for key individuals. Amongst them Blair, Kennedy, Howard, Cameron, Brown and Prescott have all been highlighted by the press in some tiresome quest for muck to sling. £4k here £20k there, council tax, TV licenses, mortgages and even food (to the delight of the anti-John Prescott-brigade).

I was also in the car listening to LBC and a debate about MP's salaries and how they wanted to raise them. Putting expenses aside for a moment, our MPs get paid somewhere in the low £60ks a year and they are complaining and suggesting that it should rise to £100k or in that region. Predictably the media was adamant that this was extravagance to the extreme (bearing in mind that the media knows nothing of extravagance itself). Even I started off feeling anger at the prospect that these loafers who hardly ever actually go to parliament anymore and appear simply to do no more than mince about for the cameras in an attempt to persuade us that we've never had it so good, could be suggesting that even more public money be diverted to their pockets.

Then I started to think about it. Perhaps the reason why it seems like all our politicians are fiddling expenses and /or in bed with dodgy businessmen and doing shady ppp/pfi deals or worse (if there can be any worse) is because they don't get paid enough to deter them from corruption. When you consider what these people actually do for the country.....they run it! I think they actually get a very bad deal considering the reason why a lot of these people go into politics in the first place is because they are idealists wanting to make a positive change to the country and possibly the world or even the galaxy perhaps Mr Blair? You could almost suggest that as tax payers we even exploit our MPs to a certain extent, expecting them to run the country for £60k a year when you consider what some of us get paid for doing much less important and mundane jobs and I have found a couple of examples from both the celebrity and non-celebrity world to exaggerate my point

JK Rowling according to Forbes in 2006 was earning over £100k per day.

CatwalkQueen.tv claims that Kate moss earned £4 million in 2007 (up to £15million in previous years).

According to the Times in 2007 David Beckham is earning £70k a day

However I very quickly want to mention that poor Leona Lewis is only earning enough to survive (see previous posts).

Leona and JK aside, I probably wouldn't want either Beckham or Moss anywhere near to positions where they would have an atom of the responsibility it needs to run a country. David Beckham managed to achieve nothing as captain of England other than unmitigated failure for years. Kate moss is a Drug user who take off her clothes for a living (or puts them on? I can never remember), yet they manage to command much bigger salaries than our politicians. JK has amassed her fortune writing children's books for Christ's sake. Now I want to make it clear that I am not knocking any of the people I have mentioned for having made money or even how they have made it (I would love to make it too after all) however I am trying to make the point that considering what these people earn and the ultimate importance or what they do do, we pay our politicians very poorly in deed for running the country or if you look at it another way our lives.

Kate Moss doesn't model because she enjoys putting on and taking off clothes only. She does it because she knows she can earn £4million a year doing it. Similarly, David Beckham isn't playing football for a living for the love of it alone. JK certainly isn't writing her books solely because she wants to entertain the children of the world. They are all arguably the best at what they do, but they're all doing it for cold hard filthy luca. If there's nothing wrong with that, then why can't MPs expect to be paid more for the job that they are doing. Presumably they are also the best at what they are doing, or maybe they are the best for the money we are offering.

On the other hand, perhaps if we were to offer more, or even a lot more, then we would attract a different caliber of politician. Imagine a country run by blue chip CEO calibre politicians. We would probably be much better off in the long run. We would probably have to speak to people in India if we ever had occasion to call government departments and it would probably take over 30 mins to get through to anyone (hang on a second that already happens!!!) but at least the country would be profitable. Who knows....even I might put my name in the hat if that were to happen.