Tilou's View: MPs nice and toasty... OAPs nipping and frosty!

The phrase "Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells" is a generic name used in the UK for a person, usually with strongly conservative political views, who writes letters to newspapers in a tone of moral outrage (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disgusted_of_Tunbridge_Wells).

In respect to this blog, I can quite legitimately take on that mantle - having been born in Tunbridge Wells - to express my political view (though not necessarily conservative!) in regard to the latest news headlines revealing that over 300 MPs have claimed heating costs for their second homes.

Naturally the British press are reporting this story in relation to the fact that, only last week, the Energy Select Committee hauled up the Big Six energy company bosses for a grilling regarding the increasing rises being foisted on their customers. And those customers - the British taxpayer - have every right to be angry at this latest revelation that shows how there is always one rule for MPs and one rule for the proletariat.

But there are another group of British taxpayers who are not just angry but incensed at yet another example of MPs feathering their own nests (or, indeed, having their noses in the taxpayer trough) to the detriment of those that they should be representing.

We are, of course, the British expat. A group of people who worked and paid into the British tax and National Insurance system all our lives (well over 40 years in most cases) and then took the decision to spend our retirement years in the relative peace and tranquility of a neighbouring EU country, using the legitimate and available to all those citizens living within the EU... the "Free Movement" principal (see below).

And it is under this EU principal that eligible British pensioner expats are able to receive an annual winter fuel payment, like their British-based counterparts, of £200 (or £300 if aged over 80). A mere drop in the ocean when compared with the nearly £6,000 claimed by Conservative MP Nadhim Zahawi for heating his second home for one year... and it does not take a genius for anyone to calculate that £6,000 would pay a pensioner couple's annual WFP of £200 for the next 30 YEARS!

In fact, the total annual amount claimed by these MPs in one year, quoted as over £200,000, would pay 1000 pensioners their £200 WFP... or, if wanting to be facetious, one 80-year-old pensioner their annual £300 WFP for the next 666 years! Now I wonder how that number appeared in the equation - a sign, maybe?

However, as readers of this blog are aware, the coalition government (for that read the Devil incarnate himself, IDS) has decided to remove WFP from British expats living in supposed "hot" countries, from 2015. Those countries being: France, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Malta, Cyprus and Gibraltar... but not, you may note, Italy, which has been decreed to have a colder annual average climate than the south-west of England, on which the Government's "temperature test" is based!

For anyone interested in how this calculation works - particularly in respect to France - you can read about it here: http://tilou62.blogspot.fr/2013_08_01_archive.html

So yet another MP scandal hits the headlines... and, in this case, comes too as a complete slap in the face to those who have paid (and in many cases continue to pay) into the coffers from which these heating payments have been purloined, I can - and indeed will - be signing off this blog and letters to our parliamentary representatives as...

Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells