MPs convinced pay rise will be a vote-winner

MEMBERS of Parliament are sure their 11 percent pay rise will eventually be seen as a political masterstroke.

MPs said the extra £7,000 a year would make them seem more dynamic and impressive and that their constituents would soon find them utterly irresistible.

Tory backbencher, Sir Peter Bottomley, said: “Ideally, the pay rise should have formed the centrepiece of a pre-election Budget.

“Nevertheless, I will be political chocolate.”

Meanwhile, experts stressed MPs are paid less than GPs ‘mainly because of the medical degree’.

Political historian, Julian Cook, said: “Being an MP requires no qualifications. It is not a profession. They are not professionals. At all.”

He added: “During the 1980s Newcastle was represented by a severed foot.”

A recent study also found that those who knew MPs before they were elected are astonished to discover they now have a job which pays £66,000 a year.

Jane Thompson, who went to university with a Labour MP from the Midlands, said: “If I was him I would see the sixty-six grand for the miracle that it is.

“I thought he would end up at the bottom of a pyramid scheme.

“He is a fucknut.”

My life as a child flare mule

ONE youth’s account of the novelty explosives trade that is ruining football…

Drizzle fills the Midland skies as fans shuffle through turnstiles, like penguins, but penguins who like football.

I shiver amongst them in dread fear of the task that awaits me. I’m 11 years-old and have light pyrotechnics hidden about my person with a street value of twelve pounds and seventy pence. How did it come to this?

Like most child flare smugglers I started young. My family were poor, we needed money to put the dog through kennel college.

So I dabbled with low risk jobs – sneaking clackers into chess tournaments and fun snappers into dressage events. I almost got caught outside a velodrome once with a cagoule full of tiger balloons, but I was young and I didn’t care.

Now here I am outside Villa Park, packing more heat than the Red Arrows and I haven’t taken my options at school yet.

The operator looks up from the child ticket I hand him. He gazes at the base of my unfashionable bell bottom trousers under which I secretly house the flares…..it’s touch and go for a moment…but I’m in!

I then dart through the rows of seats  searching for my buyer… an evil man who I know only as Tony Flare. He takes the product grinning and pays me in sharpened fifty pence pieces.

In my short time I’ve seen flares do terrible things to men, from causing mild distraction to creating a lingering smokey nuisance… but that’s not my problem.

My problem is what the future holds for me. Vuvuzela running in Rio? Or worse, Flare Island Prison? Of course I’ll go where the money is, which will probably mean sneaking a rocket launcher in any  stadia where Luis Suarez is playing.