David Wiltshire MP has announced his decision to stand down at the next election after reports that he paid over £100,000 TO his own company for services provided and paid for by the taxpayer. OK, not much new there. What really got my goat was his claim that on over £64,000 a year with expenses, with all the hours he works he was ‘nearly’ on the ‘minimum wage’.
For those of you who don’t know, the minimum wage is £5.80 per hour for those of us over 22 years of age.
As our friend across the pond say let’s do the math:
£64,000 divided by £5.80 = 11034.482758620689655172413793103
Well, we’ll call it 11000 hours – (by the way did you know that the = sign was a Welsh invention?)
So, there are 52 weeks in a year so that works out at 211.5384615384615 hours a week
We’ll call it 211 hours
To my reckoning the are 24 hours in a day and 7 days in a week which makes 168 hours in a week. I’m sorry if this sounds like
So, this chap, even at minimum wage claims to be working ‘nearly’ 43 hours a week more than there are hours in the week.
Let me tell you something Mr Wiltshire, I’m on Job Seekers Allowance. I get £64.30 a week and spend at least 2 hours a day actively looking for work.
The rest of the time I either spend sleeping OR running this site and its sister site Welsh Icons at http://www.welshicons.org.
I have the ‘great and the good’ queuing up to get their press releases featured and we dedicated most of our time to news that is not covered by the main-stream media (I have to add our strap-line – Politically Agnostic, With No Agenda)
I spend around 12 hours a day running the sites, that’s 84 hours a week.
If anyone from the DWP is reading this, you now where you can go. I do my best, as do my team, to promote the country we love.
OK, time for some more sums: £64.30 a week divided by 84 hours = 0.76547619047619047619047619047619
Again, we’ll call it £0.76 an hour. Who is on the minimum wage now?
Did I mention that I have to cover office costs, utility bills and incidentals as well?
The view expressed in this article are those of Dom alone and may not reflect the stance of the Welsh Icons Team
