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Chatterblog

Five Ridiculous Claims Made By British Politicians

Oct08
by Zoe Kirk-Robinson on October 8, 2019 at 2:54 pm

“Children say the darndest things,” as the twee old saying goes but do you know who says more of those “darndest” things than children? Politicians. They come out with some right old claptrap that is easily disproven, yet they get away with it all the time; usually because the people who hear them say it are too dumbfounded by the utter stupidity to call them on it in time.

Well here at All Over the House we don’t have that problem because all this stuff was said long enough ago for us to think “hang on a minute” and gather our wits back up. So let’s take a look at five utterly ridiculous claims made by British politicians. We will keep these pretty recent because if we went back through the centuries of British history for even more examples, we could probably write an entire book on this stuff.

We’ll start with…

5. MP blames “a breakdown of communication” over a pair of shoes

Look, we all know Star Wars is the single most important thing that has ever, or will ever, happen. We get it, we have an altar to Nien Nunb in the corner of the office, just like you. Our lives all revolve around the ancient battle between good and evil across a galaxy far, far away. It’s only natural.

Despite this, we have never considered writing a letter of complaint on House of Commons headed paper just because we didn’t get to buy the pair of R2D2 high heels we really wanted. Angela Rayner MP did.

Would you sacrifice your reputation to complain about these shoes?

This lady really, really wanted those deadful-looking shoes (I’m serious about them being dreadful – poor old R2 looks like he’s been glued on as a temporary measure because the proper heel fell off) and wasn’t too pleased when the shop she put her name down for a pair at sold out before she could buy some. These things happen but most of us are grown up enough to realise that sometimes we don’t always get what we want. Not so for Angela.

When the news of her ridiculous display of “do you know who I am”-itis got out, she blamed “a breakdown in communications with the company” for the problem, even though we can’t see a single way in which the company could have made her use her work’s letterheaded paper to write her complaint.

Maybe the shoe shop used a Jedi Mind Trick to get her to try this stupid, stupid stunt? We hear that stuff works well on the weak-minded.

4. MP Claims to have knocked on 25,000 doors during an election campaign

Politicians knock on a lot of doors during elections. I personally knocked on so many during my last campaign that my knuckles swelled up and started to bleed. It’s an endurance test of sorts. That’s why when Jess Philips MP claimed that she had knocked on “25,000 doors” during the 2017 election, I initially didn’t think it was too big an exaggeration. I mean sure it wasn’t true but it couldn’t be that untrue, could it?

It turns out that yes, it really could be.

Unbelievable. pic.twitter.com/K8d6ZmDG1P

— DSG (@thedsggroup) October 8, 2019

Let’s do the maths on this one. The 2017 general election campaign lasted for fifty days. Fifty gruelling days in which politicians, activists and anyone else we could persuade to be dragged along to help (for which I once again apologise to my long-suffering wife) pounded the pavements, knocked on doors and tried to convince people to vote for us when they probably just wanted to sit down and watch TV.

Fifty days isn’t a long time for an election campaign. Now the average campaign day begins at about 8AM but nobody is knocking on doors at that time because if you do, you get shouted at by angry people who are trying to get ready for work. Campaign days usually end at 10PM too, although door knocking will normally end earlier than that because people don’t want you waking their children up by knocking on the door or ringing the doorbell. It’s a fair point and most of us respect it.

So what you usually end up with is a workable time frame for door knocking of about 8 hours per day; with the rest of the day taken up by phone calls, meet-and-greets, leaflet deliveries, press release writing and other campaign activities. A good campaign manager will see that you get a nice assortment of activities each day, so you don’t get worn out or bored to tears only doing on thing all day.

Eight hours per day for fifty days gives you a total door-knocking time of 400 hours; or 24,000 minutes. If Jess’ claim of knocking on 25,000 doors is true, that means she spent less than one minute on each door (57.6 seconds per door, to be precise).

It’s no wonder she then went on to claim that only 12 people mentioned Brexit to her – she was probably too busy rushing to knock on the next door to hear everyone else! Were all the doors she knocked on lined up in a row, or does Ms Philips possess Flash-level super-speed? We must know!

3. MP Claims 10,000 new police officers will cost £300,000

“The police are underpaid!” is a common complaint and in many ways, it’s a justifiable one. If you want someone to battle crime all day, you’re going to need to give them a decent wage to do it because criminals are notorious for not wanting to be caught. They tend to put up a fight.

Enter Diane “the Abacus” Abbot MP, the Shadow Home Secretary and favourite politician of the howling trolls on Twitter. Diane’s grasp of economics is about as solid as my grasp of Swahili, which is why she is loved by so much of the Internet and when she gets up to speak, we all collectively grab the popcorn and sit back to watch the fireworks.

In a radio interview on LBC, Diane was asked how much the Labour Party expected to have to budget if they wanted to recruit 10,000 new police officers. She claimed it would cost £300,000; which equates to £30 per officer. Not since the Victorian era could you claim that was a good wage for anyone.

This is one of those rare occasions where a politician is actually called out on their stupid claims while they are making that claim. The expression on LBC’s Nick Ferrari’s face when she makes the claim is amazing and from that point on, you know the rest of the interview is not going to go well for her. It’s amazing.

2. “There are no seats,” claims MP on a train with plenty of seats

Even non-Brits tend to know who Jeremy Corbyn is these days. He’s the guy who’s nominally in charge of the Labour Party, and he’s the former lover of Diane Abbot from item three on our list (he even invited some friends ’round to show her off while she was naked in his bed, he’s that kind of guy!). As a politician, Corbyn is not unfamiliar with the tactic of making ridiculous claims. Enter Virgin Trains.

Corbyn wants to re-nationalise the train network in the UK (something that is illegal under EU law because it violates the EU restrictions on state aid and competition, which may go some way to explaining why Corbyn is being so shady on what his Brexit policy actually is) and to get the public on-side for his campaign, he decided it would be a good idea to show how bad British trains are. Did he do this by simply filming a commuter train during rush hour? Did he do this by simply speaking to the people who have to endure packed trains every single day of their working lives?

Nope. He faked a video by walking past a load of empty seats on a train that wasn’t full and then sitting on the floor at the end of the carriage. You know, as you do.

The video was debunked within hours of being published and Virgin Trains even released CCTV footage showing Corbyn walking past some empty seats. According to the CCTV footage, Corbyn walked past the empty seats, spent 40 minutes sitting on the carriage floor (during which time he filmed the video that caused all this trouble) and then got up, went to an empty seat (which, we should reiterate, he could have done from the start) and sat there for the rest of his three-hour journey.

This has to be one of the most ridiculous and unnecessary stunts ever. Every rail commuter knows the train network is overcrowded and sucks harder than a black hole. We don’t need faked videos to tell us there’s a problem with how trains are being run in Britain. We already see the problem on a daily basis.

What a wally.

1. An MP stands near a policeman, then says he’s never seen a policeman

Look, we all have our off days, you know? For David Lammy MP, he’s pretty much having an off decade. Not content with attacking the charity Comic Relief over their work in Africa (an incident that was then followed by an £8 Million drop in donations to the charity), Mr Lammy has also been known to take to Twitter to fire off almost as many stupid claims as Donald “great and unmatched wisdom” Trump.

We could fill an entire list with the stupid things Mr Lammy (and President Trump) has tweeted but today we are going to focus on one claim he made on television. The interview was in conjunction with the ongoing problem of knife crime in London, which is a serious subject and we aren’t going to make jokes about it. Instead, we are going to focus on Lammy himself.

People are scared, people are frightened, my community is grieving four lost lives since Christmas. My constituents are angry and they have every right to be and I will continue to speak up on their behalf. pic.twitter.com/hrV2FGbmXv

— David Lammy (@DavidLammy) April 5, 2018
He actually posted this video himself, which is simply amazing.

During an interview with the BBC, Mr Lammy claimed “we haven’t seen [any] police and I’ve been here a while now”; which sounds like a perfectly reasonable thing for a person with a policeman standing behind him to say. Who amongst us hasn’t experienced the issue of invisible police, after all? It’s a terrible problem, it really is.

Maybe the police are only visible for the short amount of time a £30 per year wage will pay for? If that’s the case, David should be talking to Diane about upping their wages, then he would be able to see them all the time.

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Top Five Scariest Saints

Sep13
by Zoe Kirk-Robinson on September 13, 2019 at 12:37 pm

There’s no-one more pious and nice to be around than a saint, right? These guys (although they aren’t always guys) are great people, paragons of virtue who lived selfless lives in the service of their God. Well, except for the ones that didn’t, of course. Let’s take a look at five of those who broke the mould and then went the extra mile by breaking a few more moulds as well.

And by moulds, we usually mean people. We’ll start off lightly with…

5. Blessed Bartolo Longo

Let’s start things off with a modern one. Back in the 1860s, Italy was going through a rather turbulent time, what with the whole “let’s unite Italy again” thing. It had been quite a while since the whole of Italy was one country and most people had forgotten how to do it, what with them not being Ancient Romans, so the whole place was in a bit of an uproar. During this time, the Catholic Church was feuding with the new Italian Nationalist movement, because the Nationalists wanted to get rid of the Pope and the Pope… didn’t.

In the midst of all this, a young law student called Bartolo Longo entered the scene. He was studying law at the University of Naples (a rather prestigious university, what with being very, very old and all). The University of Naples was a hub of nationalist, anti-Papal sentiment; and also witchcraft. No, I don’t know how those two got mixed up together either, just go with it.

Anyway, Bartolo seemed to really get into the whole witchcraft thing and then he moved on from there into Satanism, becoming a Satanic Priest. Look, everyone does some wacky stuff when they’re a student, okay? Most of us get really drunk and accidentally join a political party, or maybe the local LARP group, but clearly old Bartolo here was an overachiever.

But hey, if a satanist who was into nationalism and the occult isn’t scary enough for you (and sure, he did eventually recant and turn to Catholicism, you’ve got us there), you could always try…

4. St. Vladimir

Vladimir, a Prince in Kievan Rus (now mostly part of Ukraine but also a bit of Russia) decided to start his political career by killing his older brother. Top guy, this one. Truly a role model for us all. The thing is, that was just the start of his adventures in epic bastardry because once he’d finished killing his brother he later went on to rape his sister-in-law. He didn’t stop there, either; he added her to his harem of “several hundred women”, because apparently this guy can’t stick to sexually assaulting just one woman. What a charmer.

So anyway, old Vlad here decided he needed a new temple to all the gods and the only way to kick this thing off in style would be to murder a guy and his son. So that’s lovely. I don’t know who would have enjoyed human sacrifice more: the pagan gods he was dedicating the temple to, or Vladdy Boy here, who was clearly a prick of epic proportions.

“I murdered my brother and raped his wife, so you’d best get my smile right for this coin!”

But this wasn’t the end of Vladimir’s descent into being an utter shit because he came onto the radar of the Emperor over in Constantinople. Byzantine Emperor Basil II (“this time it’s personal”) needed some help dealing with a rebellion and he thought a psycho like Vlad would be the man for the job. Vlad thought so too but he wanted something in return: the Emperor’s sister. He wanted to marry her because his existing seven wives (and his massive harem) apparently weren’t enough for him. Nobody here at All Over the House can work out what Vladimir’s problem was but we have an inkling that a lot of his antics could have been stopped with a few bromide tablets, if you catch our drift.

Weirdly enough, Emperor Basil II agreed as long as Vlad converted to Christianity – and Vladimir did. He went to Constantinople to deal with the rebellion, married the Emperor’s sister and went home… where he immediately started demolishing pagan temples and converting his people to Christianity. For this, he was made a Saint; because apparently you can forgive rape and human sacrifice if you sign up enough people to a new religion. Who knew?

3. Saint Cyprian

Cyprian was a 3rd century sorcerer, born (or possibly made up out of whole cloth because nobody is actually sure he existed) some time in the 200s AD. He hung around Antioch, performing acts of sorcery, which included using magic to sexually assault some people. He’s a top notch guy and absolutely destined for sainthood, is what we’re saying.

At some point in his life, he encountered a lady called Justinia, whom he fell head over heels for. Being a stand-up dude who was respectable in all his deeds, he decided the best way to win over the lady he had just met was to concoct a love spell, because just talking to the woman and showing her he was a decent guy never seems to come into the equation. The love spell didn’t work, so he decided to do the next best thing: fall into a deep despair and repent, converting to Christianity and winning Justinia over that way.

“Based on a true story”?

Following his conversion, Cyprian quickly rose through the ranks of the Christian Church and, in the process, came to the attention of an even bigger bastard than himself: Emperor Diocletian. You may not have heard of Diocletian but you’ll have heard of his inventions: the divine right to rule, and feudalism. That’s a guy who knows how to get what he wants!

Anyway, Diocletian was in the middle of one of his angry phases and he was busy persecuting Christians. Cyprian and his beloved, Justinia, were both martyred during the same purge, around 304 AD, becoming saints thereafter.

Whether Cyprian existed or not has been the subject of much debate, especially since his life story sounds an awful lot like the story of Faust. We’ll let you decide whether he’s real or not.

2. Saint Olga

When it comes to listing all the female saints, a lot of the early ones have a similar biography: they were widely known for having sex with anyone who wanted it, then they converted to Christianity and lived selfless lives in the service of the Church. Saint Olga does not fit this mould. Saint Olga blazed her own trail – and by “blazed”, I mean she burned a lot of people alive.

Olga was a Viking who lived in what is now mostly Ukraine, although some of her territory is also in modern Russia. She was the wife of a local ruler who was murdered by a neighbouring tribe. Representatives from those neighbours then turned up at her court and told Olga that they had killed her husband, so she should marry one of their Princes if she wanted to keep being in charge. Olga had them burned alive in a pit; and to be fair that might be a bit extreme but we kind of see where she was coming from on that one.

That wasn’t the end of things for Olga, however. Still angry at this neighbouring tribe, she sent a message to their leaders that they should send “their distinguished men to her in Kiev, so that she might go to their Prince with due honour” (her words). What she actually planned however was to murder everyone that was sent over – and she did. This time she decided all the men had travelled a very long way, so they were probably all sweaty and needed to bathe before she would meet them. The men, not knowing what had happened to the messengers that had been sent over before, went to the bath house to bathe. Olga had the building sealed up, and then set fire to it.

“Re-light my fire, your death is my only desire”

Olga still wasn’t satisfied, however; and by this point we are starting to think her neighbours were a bit thick because she sent word that she was coming over and they let her. She told them to prepare a vast amount of mead, so she could hold a funeral feast for her dead husband, which she did in fact do. The local tribesmen joined her in this feast, and proceeded to get utterly wasted on the mead she had ordered them to assemble. Then she had her men kill all the enemy tribe. All 5,000 of them.

Then she went home and assembled an army, to wipe out what remained of the tribe. At this point, the enemy tribe had finally worked out what was going on, so they holed up in a city and Olga had to lay siege to it. Sieges are costly and time-consuming things, so Olga decided to speed everything up. She told the Drevlians, the enemy tribe, that she had already satisfied her thirst for vengeance over the death of her husband and now all she wanted from them was a small token of tribute: three pigeons and three sparrows from each house in the town. How could the Drevlians refuse such a small token in exchange for peace?

They sent the birds and hoped the campaign of terror was over. It wasn’t. Olga had sulphur and rags tied to every one of the birds, set fire to the rags, then released the flaming birds back into the city. The entire place burned down and the survivors desperately tried to escape the flames. Olga had her soldiers massacre many of them, capture some as slaves and then leave the remainder to rebuild the city.

What we can take from this is that you really don’t want to anger this woman, because she will absolutely get you for it. Anyway, she later converted to Christianity and tried to convert all of her kingdom too. As it turned out, murdering immense amounts of people was what she was really good at, not missionary work. She died thinking she was a failure, but the Church venerated her anyway.

1. Saint Constantine (the Great)

If there’s anyone scary enough to top this list, it has to be Emperor Constantine the Great; who is venerated in the Eastern Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches. The guy who essentially codified the Bible as we know it was a devout Christian (after his conversion from Roman paganism, where he had regularly employed soothsayers that conducted animal sacrifices) but that didn’t stop him from waging several bloody wars during his rise to power. He entered the War of the Tetrarchy, a period of Roman civil war, as one of the minor players in the battle; but ended the conflict as supreme ruler of the Roman Empire.

Constantine started his career as a Roman ruler by killing lots of people in Britain, as part of the regular Roman occupation (in both senses of the word) involving massacring Picts to maintain control of the province. He was proclaimed Emperor while in Britain later moved on to Gaul, then Italy; where he burned down the gates of the first city he encountered and took the town quickly. To show how nice a guy he was, he ordered his men not to loot the town. No doubt the townspeople were really happy about this, once they’d put the fires out.

He then proceeded toward Rome, to face the other Emperor, Maxentius. This encounter ended badly for Maxentius, who drowned in the river and was trampled by his own soldiers as they fled upon defeat of his armies. Constantine had his rival’s body dredged from the river and decapitated, with the head paraded through the streets of Rome. Nice guy!

After this, he converted to Christianity and decided it was time to sort out all the arguing between the various sects once and for all (because apparently when you’re Emperor you think you can just make things be true because you say so?). He convened the First Council of Nicea, where everyone decided Jesus was definitely the Son of God, and the two representatives who disagreed were banished. Again, apparently you can just decree this stuff if you’re Emperor and everyone has to go along with it.

For all of his killing, war-waging and redefining of Christianity, he has become a Saint in the eyes of the Eastern Churches. For our part, we aren’t going to disagree with him because the dude seems rather good at getting what he wants.

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