Benefit Claimants Ask To Be Treated Like MPs

After rolling around on the floor laughing for several minutes on hearing that MPs are wailing about being “treated like benefit claimants” under the new parliamentary expenses regulations, Britain’s claimants are asking if they can now expect to be treated like MPs.

“My little heart bleeds for MPs, who are being forced to provide evidence of family members living at the address which they are claiming as their primary residence, along with proof that the travel expenses they are claiming back were incurred on genuine parliamentary business,” said one jobless who has spent a fruitless year searching for the job vacancy in Cornwall.

“But I’d like to point out that - unlike MPs, who whine that they won’t be able to claim for taxi travel before 11pm - I’d be bloody lucky to reclaim the cost of the ten-mile taxi trip home from Bodmin Parkway if I went for an interview up the line, even though the 19:03 from Paddington doesn’t pull in until 23.11,” he added. “Of course, I could always come back a bit earlier and try to claim for a peak-time journey – but something tells me I’d be laughed right out of the Jobcentre. Mind you, it’s not very likely, is it – after all, we only get reimbursed after we’ve paid for our travel, and us doleys don’t tend to have a spare £239 burning a hole in our pockets very often.”

“And, while I’d quite like to take my mum along so she could enjoy a day out in the West End, somehow I doubt the Jobcentre would cover it,” he added. “Birth certificate or no birth certificate.”

Meanwhile, a paraplegic disabled who has been milking the taxpayer for his entire life mentioned that he would quite like to find himself in the onerous position of having to pay pension contributions out of his own pocket for family members who do things for him, such as taking stuff out of his pocket for him, if that meant the taxpayer would pay them a living wage.

“By the way, I’d be quite happy to pay 15% of my phone bill,” he added.

“When we said we were being treated like benefit claimants, of course we didn’t actually mean real benefit claimants,” explained a poor, victimised MP later in a half-hearted attempt at clarification. “We were just using a sort of verbal shorthand for the lowest disreputable scum of society.”

“We would have said ‘dirty thieving criminals’,” he added, “But we didn’t want to prejudice the trials of Elliot Morley, David Chaytor, Eric Illsley and Jim Devine.”