If you can afford to own a million pound home , ( no offence intended to those of you on this forum who do , m’lord .) you should be able to afford to decorate it and maintain the garden yourself.

I think we should be clear here that the expenses claimed by MPs should be those incurred while carrying out their job. Sometimes their job requires them to own a second home so that they can attend parliament.

However it also seems clear that some MPs have been on the fiddle and have got caught…

…and are now being asked to pay back money they have defrauded the taxpayer out of going back for the last five years (even if they have been happily defrauding the taxpayer for ten or more years).

Personally I think some of them are making a fuss because they know they’re not going to be MPs in a few months so that’ll be the end of the gravy-train…

…well, ain’t life a bitch! :diablo:

It is a pity that threads ‘vanish’ so quickly on the General Discussion forum as I seem to remember quite a few of us being up-in-arms when there was that protest against British troops in Luton…

…weren’t those protesters exercising their right to free speech?

I think our concept of ‘free speech’ depends very much on our opinion of those exercising it. :diablo:

In martial-arts combat if the hero is set-upon by numerous enemy (and let’s be honest, when doesn’t that happen? :rolleyes:) the bad-guys will always surround the hero…

…and then attack him/her one-at-a-time, in-turn, so that their numbers are no advantage! 😀

The fact that they would rather people died because of their own inaction means that they will never have my respect.

I think you’re being a little hard; we could probably all do more and the fact that we don’t doesn’t make us bad people…..or maybe it does.

How much does it cost to save a life? In the case of becoming an organ donor possibly nothing except the time to explain our wishes to our families.

What about those starving, or dying of easily treated illness in the world; how many lives would the cost of our iPod have saved? It makes you think doesn’t it?

Any aircraft suffering ‘explosive decompression’ will instantly go into a power-dive and make a sound just like a ‘Stuka’ but can be brought under control by the hero simply pulling really hard on the control-column (even if the aircraft is a modern airliner with powered flight-controls)! :rolleyes:

I agree that this is a tragedy but it is not as clear-cut as first appears.

Firstly I don’t think there are ever enough transplant organs to go around; and how many of those criticizing actually carry a donor card? (I don’t.) And I don’t think it is policy to give organs to anybody who has a chance to survive without them.

Secondly I heard it reported today that half the lungs used in transplants have come from people that smoked. Now that surprises me (and I’ve been unable to confirm it) but remember the donor has to die of something and the circumstances of death that allow organs to be donated aren’t as common as we may think.

It seems that errors were made in this case but I don’t think the NHS deserve the general criticism they have been given; after all how many former-smoker’s lungs are transplanted each year and how many other recipients have died of cancer?

Not sure I can count to…

Born Free, Died in Debt – Profit! 😉

(We’re all being a bit dark aren’t we?)