Waterhouse witticisms

An email from a reader alerted me to the death last week  of British journalist and writer  Keith Waterhouse.

His final column for the Daily Mail, published four months ago, was It’s English as she is spoke innit?

If these two quotes, attributed to Waterhouse, were applied to New Zealand at whom and which city would they be directed?

(Of Margaret Thatcher) “She addresses people as though they had lost their dog.”

“Brighton is a town that always looks as if it is helping police with their inquiries.”

They make the rules

I don’t make the rules, I just play the game  is often used as an excuse for questionable behaviour.

But politicians do make the rules about their own spending and reports from Britain continue to show gross abuses of them.

The Daily Mail and the Taxpayers Alliance have launched a campaign to ensure any MPs who have broken the law in rorting the system are brought to justice.

If there are no Crown Prosecutions the Bring Them To Justice campaign will launch private prosecutions.

The New Zealand system of reimbursing MPs’ expenses is less generous and not as open to rorting at the British one, but Kiwiblog has worked out how some NZ MPS benefit from parliamentary expenses.

No-one is suggesting anyone is breaking the rules. But it does raise the question of whether the rules should be changed to make quite sure that the tax payer isn’t being taken for an expensive ride when covering MPs’ expenses.