A Modern Morality Tale.

If you were to ask most people would have no idea who the old man in the picture shown above is. He lives on an old ramshackled farm where he's spent most of his life. The farm has no running water, he lives off £485 per month and drives a 1987 VW Beetle. A poor man, then, past his prime and with not much to offer the world you might surmise. So who is he? The answer, as surprising as it is unbelievable, is that he is Jose Mujica, the President of Uruguay. The reason he is so poor is that he donates 90% of his pay, £7,500 per month, to charity, refuses to use the limousines he entitled to as the President and flatly refuses to use the Presidential palace in the capital, Montevideo. Under the mandatory rules for officials in Uruguay he published full details of his personal wealth in 2010 as £1,100 - the value of the VW, though he has recently added half of his wife's assets and is now worth a staggering £135,000. Many people might regard him as eccentric, perhaps even a little mad but his view is that this is the way he's lived all his life while the world's obsession with consumption is destroying the environment and killing the planet. When you see the photographs of David Cameron, bulging out of his tuxedo at the Mansion House and swilling his expensive brandy at our expense you have to ask the question as to who is insane and who is not.