Political disbelief

There are two schools of thought about politicians. One is that they genuinely care about us, they're doing their best for us, they're basically upright, decent people who put in long hours on a gruelling job.

The other view is that, with a few notable exceptions, they're devious, dishonest rogues who're only interested in winning votes, feathering their own nests and clawing their way to high office.

I tend towards the second view, as I've said before. Jenny tends towards the first view (particularly as she spent four years as a local councillor in London and I have to say was an extremely conscientious and hard-working one).

But having lived through umpteen governments from Clement Attlee onwards, and having been constantly disappointed by broken promises, the yawning chasm between rich and poor, shoddy public services, and inability to confront vested interests, it's hard to give any politician the benefit of the doubt.

What makes it worse is that when challenged on their failures, they usually refuse to admit them and maintain everything is going fine, spouting a load of carefully-chosen statistics to prove it. Oh for a few Obama-style politicians with the courage to say honestly and frankly "Yes, I screwed up."

This trail of incompetence and slipperiness is exemplified by the furore over banker Sir Fred Goodwin's £700,000 a year pension at the age of 50. The pension was signed off by government minister Lord Myners, who apparently hadn't consulted any of his colleagues.

Now the whole country wants the pension cancelled, but it's a contractual agreement that can't be touched. And this deal was okayed not by a bunch of elitist Tories but by a minister in a supposedly egalitarian Labour government. It makes me want to weep and beat my chest with utter disbelief.

Slumming it

Every so often some journalist or politician looking for attention decides to see what it’s like living on welfare. You know the kind of thing – “My life on a fiver a day” by Terry Twatt.

It’s always completely bogus. They’re not really living on a fiver a day because they’ve got a nice stock of Armani togs and all their hi-tech gizmos back at their real home in some fashionable urban neighbourhood.

They know they’ve only got to survive a week of low-life grot before they can race back thankfully to their normal life and resume shagging their sleek, perfectly-honed bedmate.

They don’t even have to keep it up 24/7 because they can always sneak home for a few hours and make up some plausible diary entry about the Tesco budget loaf being eaten by giant rats.

They know full well that one week in a grubby hovel is not the same as a life-sentence of poverty, dead-end jobs, greedy landlords and constantly struggling to make ends meet.

They don’t have the crippling back story of mountainous debts to loan sharks, four children to feed, a winter’s worth of fuel bills, and windows being broken by the local yobs.

A week of slumming it is about as realistic as having a few pints and pretending you’re an alcoholic.

Instead of grabbing their flea-ridden fleeces and pretending to be poor, Terry Twatt and his ilk would do better to tell us just why poverty is so entrenched and why a long string of British politicians have failed to give the residents of one of the world’s wealthiest countries a decent standard of living.

And why the fat cats running our big companies are paying themselves more and more while the wages of their overworked employees are steadily shrinking.

But that would be far too controversial. And not nearly so entertaining as a bit of down-in-the-gutter make-believe.