APPARENTLY Britons get angry more often than anyone else in Europe.

We, says a new survey, get angry four times a day compared to the Italians who only let off a little steam 3.5 times a day.

And judging from the events of the last week who can blame us? First of all none of our MPs wanted to admit they were milking the system.

Then they said that they were milking the system, but ‘not breaking any rules’.

Then all of a sudden they decided they were in fact milking the system and had been doing it for years.

And to make us all feel better they now wanted to hand over cheques.

If that doesn’t make your blood boil and get you reaching for the nearest bottle of brandy (Vimto in my case) then what else does?

The strangest thing of all after these revelations has been the claim that the general hard-working ‘bods’ on the street were surprised. That we were, in fact, deeply shocked at how the reputation of politicians had been tarnished.

Was that really in any doubt? Were there really people out there who thought politicians weren’t making fools out of us?

The worse thing is, even politicians in the Asian sub-continent were up in arms. One recent visitor I met had the nerve to compare his set of crooks with our . . . well our set of politicians. “Hey, at least our folks are completely honest. They take what they want before our very eyes and leave the scraps for us.”

Now, I love democracy and all its trappings, but there are a fair few people who would have done the exact same thing.

One also has to wonder why these ‘expenses’ are a big problem all of a sudden.

It has been going on for so many years why on earth did no-one notice it before.

Should we really be bothered about how much an MP is claiming on kitting out his bedroom and then ignoring the bigger picture.

Maybe concentrating on how multi-national corporations lobby the government might be a better place to start.

And for those interested, the least angry folk were the Scandinavians.

Must be all those Abba tracks.