Selfish

A short piece about greed and selfishness caught my eye in yesterday's Metro, acquired from Epsom Station.

It seems that a young man, earning more than £150,000 last year as a self-employed IT contractor, is incandescent with fury that he is going to have to pay £500 more tax next year. He says he is going to emigrate to the US as soon as it can be managed. How can someone earning so much get in such a lather about £500?

But I am reminded, for some reason, of the tight-fistedness of several self-made and well-off small businessmen that I have come across over the years. The former does not follow from the latter, but it does seem to go with the territory. From where I jump to the Surrey based plutocrat who installed pay phones in the hall of his palace - possibly Sutton Place - for the greater convenience of his guests.

I then wondered how much of the £150,000 came from fat COVID contracts let to their chums by our late fat leader and his chums. Does it not cross this young man's mind, that someone has to pay? Someone who certainly does not include the fat late-leader or any of his chums. Does he really not care about the fate of all the people on the bread line, heavily dependent on government handouts of one sort or another, all now overdue for another round of slash & burn? And what about his dear old gran languishing in some underfunded care home? 

Let's hope that there are not too many more like him.

PS 1: the Metro website, snapped above from reference 1, is a lot more lurid than the print version. Perhaps it's the website wot pays the bills.

PS 2: one upside of the thin leader being very rich is that he is unlikely to be tempted by the sort of tasty carrots waved under the fat leader's nose. An argument which used to be run out in the late 19th century when most prime ministers were men of means.

References

Reference 1: https://metro.co.uk/.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/09/red-tops.html. Pervious thoughts about the Metro and its friends.