At last, someone telling politicians what they ought to hear, not what they want to.
The Italians, however, are not reserved people. Instead, more than
330,000 of them queued for hours in the hot sun recently to tell their
politicians: vaffanculo! (roughly the equivalent of "f*** you").
Obviously my command of street Italian is not quite what I had thought (hey, we left the country when I was 10). I thought it meant f*** yourself, not f*** you, but the general sentiment is sound.
The 630 MPs in the lower house of parliament cost just under £14,000 a
month each. They get £9,000 a month in wages, and £5,000 of "automatic
reimbursement fees" for travel, expenses and electoral costs. They also
get free train, plane and car travel, and free entry into cinemas,
theatres, galleries and football matches. They have subsidised meals in
their canteen and cheap haircuts (the barbers in the parliament
building are paid £90,000 a year). One senator asked for free ice cream
this summer, since it was so hot that he was having difficulty thinking.
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