Izzy Wizzy, Paul's Been Busy

My chiselling and devious MP, Mr. Paul Uppal, has been asking a lot of questions recently. Not, of course, useful questions. Instead, they're the kind of small-minded and rather unintelligent kind of questions you'd expect from a pompous multimillionaire with an inflated sense of his own importance.

Let's start with the very best one.

Can the Home Secretary do anything to address the issue of the internet, which is having the effect of radicalising young people on both sides of the political spectrum?

Wonderful. As you may know, part of my job is studying the effects and structures of what we rather quaintly call 'new media'. Uppal's question reminded of nobody so much as my father, who used to ask us to show him things on 'The Google'.

Theresa May is Secretary of State at the Home Office: she's paid to know a lot about this.

My hon. Friend has raised an extremely important issue, to which we need to pay close attention. It is much harder these days-precisely because of the internet-to ensure that young people do not find themselves exposed to these radicalising messages, and we have sadly seen some individuals radicalised by access to it. This is a matter that the Government take very seriously; we are talking with partners about it.

Oh dear. What a waffly non-answer which does nothing other than to tell us that she's as much at sea as poor little Uppal. I wonder what 'partners' you have who can stop people thinking about things?

Now Paul (and Theresa), let's slow down a little. The internet isn't an 'issue', it's a network. It's lots and lots of things. Most of them aren't radicalising anything. You may as well argue that the telegram network radicalised the suffragettes: it's just a tool for distribution of ideas (and porn). If anything's radicalising anyone, it's your government's massive crackdown on the poor, the young, the old, the regional, the working and the unemployed. Abroad, I'd have thought you'd be pleased at the citizens of various countries being radicalised. Unless, of course, you're just on the side of whoever is in charge wherever they are. I wouldn't put it past you.

Anyway, nul points for your grasp of the modern world. Come on Tories: sort out 'The Internet'.

(Readers may also like to read my esteemed and rightwing friend Mr. Carter Magna's take on this story and the others I'm about to rant about).

Moving on. Paul's obviously a cricket fan:

To ask the Secretary of State for Culture, Olympics, Media and Sport what progress he has made on making future home Ashes test matches available on free-to-air television.

A little off-message there, matey. Your friends deregulated broadcasting to open it up to highest-bidder, lowest-common denominator corporations, as part of your party's attack on the BBC. Now you want your favourite bits protected? Cheeky little hypocrite.

Following that, this outrageous opportunist clear scents the opportunity to whip up a lynch mob against those grasping evil bastards ruining our communities: the doctors. He's picked up on some cheap newspaper hysteria about doctors earning 'too much' and wants to expose The Dark Place's Plutocrat Physicians.

To ask the Secretary of State for Health how many GPs in Wolverhampton received over £100,000 from the NHS in the most recent 12 months for which figures are available.

Now, there's clearly a debate to be had about how much we pay our doctors (by the way: Ireland's doctors start on €250,000, roughly what UK ones retire on). But I'm not going to have it led by a man who has made millions of pounds in property speculation. What exactly has he contributed to the nation? Has he saved lives? Does he deal with the depressed, the hurt, the lame and the addicted day in, day out? What makes a man who shuffles rents worth hundreds of times more than a man or woman who spends his or her time up to the elbows in blood, urine, pooh and pain?

Also: I'm quite happy for doctors to earn a bit more. Should they be paid less than lawyers? I don't think so (and let's not forget that they do an awful lot of unpaid overtime). More to the point, the Prime Minister's recently departed spin doctor received a wage bill of £140000, and I didn't hear Uppal complain that he was getting more than the fat-cat actual doctors to whom he so strongly objects, nor to the fact that the tax payer was giving Coulson the salary of the Prime Minister he worked for and more than every other member of the Cabinet. I'm quite angry now. Can you tell?

Finally, what's Uppal's big idea for the year?

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills whether the Royal Mail has made an estimate of the savings which would accrue from reducing the number of postal deliveries to five per week.

To reduce postal deliveries. What a massive plonker. I'm torn between believing that he's just plain evil, and just plain stupid. Perhaps both. And yet he got elected. Those 600 people who form his majority should be ashamed. I argued with Rob Marris, the New Labour predecessor, quite a lot, but he definitely wasn't stupid and he worked his socks off for this place. Yet now we're stuck with a man who demonstrates all the political sophistication of a desiccated whelk and the work ethic of a lazy man on an extended holiday.

Isn't democracy grand?

The Daily Fail - again

The Daily Mail (remember, it supported Hitler, Mussolini and the British Union of Fascists) play another blinder: it found an NHS doctor who earned £380,000 in a year, and it's horrified.

One small problem. This doctor didn't earn that much at all. When the NHS was founded in 1948, the doctors hated it, and so deals were struck. Aneurin Bevan said he'd persuaded them to accept the NHS by 'stuffing their mouths with gold'. The General Practitioners, you may be surprised to learn, aren't salaried NHS staff. Instead, they own their businesses, which they don't mention very often.

So - this £380,000 per year doctor doesn't 'earn' it at all. He receives it, and uses some of it to pay secretaries, rent, nurses, bills, etc. etc. I'm sure he isn't living on beans, but equally, he isn't taking home the same as a lawyer, to draw an appropriate parallel.

Now, how much does the editor of the Daily Mail get for pouring out a daily spume of racism, hatred and inaccuracy? Well, last year it was £1.6m: rather more than four of this doctor's sum and twice the BBC Director-General's salary. It's also over ten times the Prime Minister's pay. Has Dacre saved many lives recently?

Meanwhile, speculation is rife that The Observer might be closed, as the Guardian Media Group is losing lots of money. The Guardian bought the Observer a few years ago, and it looked like a decent fit, as the Observer was a decent liberal paper which had been treated appallingly by some very shady owners. It hasn't worked: although it looks very good, the Observer was drifted further and further to the right, while also becoming quite boring, with some exceptions such as Andrew Rawnsley. I hoped it would become a Sunday version of the Guardian under a different name, but that hasn't happened.

Sunday newspapers are difficult, especially now that Saturday ones are so huge. They used to be run completely separately from the weekdays, and had nice long deadlines so that substantial journalism could be conducted (the model was the Sunday Times and its Insight team before Murdoch ruined it) - now they're acres of fashion and navel-gazing. I'll miss the Observer because it's the best of a bad bunch, but not as much as I might.