The hypocrisy now rampant in Britain is a very unpleasant experience. There is a bandwagon - a consensus - that everything said about MPs by a most unpleasant crew in a dumbed down, once great, newspaper is always and absolutely true. Therefore MPs have overnight become pariahs whatever their record.
The truth is very different and here Antonia Senior paints the actual picture. Let’s add one example - If you have a family home where the MP husband normally does the heavy gardening at a weekend why should it be considered wrong that he should charge to expenses the cost of replacing his labour while he is engaged locally on constituency affairs - meetings, surgeries, functions etc?
There’s one simple answer to the whole system. Cut the number of MPs, treble or quadruple the salaries of those left (adding a distance allowance), and abolish all expenses altogether . MPs would exercise great economy in expenditure since it would come out of their own pocket and the whole Commons’ Fees Office could be abolished.
This would deprive the mass of the population of their new found sport of attacking MPs for behaving exactly as most of the people behave themselves - making false welfare claims, submitting fraudulent insurance claims, taking a week’s paid holiday with non-existent Swine Flu. There are times when I am ashamed to be part of such a degraded society.
Christina
THE TIMES
14.8.09
Just how short are rations at Westminster?
Aspiring MPs beware: the hours are terrible, you will rarely see your families and the pay will not even cover your costs
Antonia Senior
For a fraction of a second, I thought about answering David Cameron’s call over the summer for new parliamentary candidates. In the space of a blink, I saw myself as a newly minted MP, gurning behind shiny Dave as he assumes the mantle of power. A Dave babe.
By the time the blink was over, the idea was dead. What sane, financially literate, normal, likeable person wants to be an MP? In the pros and cons scales that I carry in my head for such emergency decision-making, the cons side tipped so hard and so fast, it nearly hit my navel.
Even before the expenses scandal, that side was pretty loaded. The job description for MP, even then, read: “Exciting opportunity to work 12-hour days, and weekends. Career prospects are good, but involve intense brown-nosing, party-line toeing and sycophancy. Successful applicants must kiss goodbye to their privacy and their spouses and kids. Perks include inevitable infidelity by MP or spouse, and liver failure. Interested candidates must first devote ten years of their life to schlepping around in the rain delivering leaflets to people who shout abuse. Pay? Rotten.”
Since the expenses furore, the cons have tipped even farther, and the job description is even more toxic. Alan Duncan, the Conservative MP for Rutland & Melton, was vilified yesterday for being caught saying privately what many MPs privately think; MPs are being “treated like sh*t” and live “on rations”.
Here are two more cons to add to the pile. First, to become an MP is to surrender your right to an opinion. Where can MPs talk safely now? In the dead of night, perhaps, under the duvet, with all the windows closed, there are Tory MPs whispering to themselves: “Don’t tell anyone, but I still hate Europe. I’m not Green. I don’t like single mothers.”
The second weighty addition, which became clear with the Duncan fuss, is a realisation that the fissures that opened up in June between the MPs and the electorate run deep. To become an MP is to invite ridicule, disrespect and even hatred from those very people you ostensibly serve.
But what of Mr Duncan’s contention that MPs are surviving on “rations”? Let us test the proposition. Say that, in a fit of misguided ambition, I decide to stand. The salary for an MP with no other responsibilities is £64,766. Imagine that I am lucky enough to pass the selection for York Outer, a Tory target seat, and am elected. I would have to buy a house in York, where the average price of a family home is £256,759. Most lenders demand a 25 per cent deposit now, particularly if you are borrowing on a second home. Assuming I have a spare £64,189 lying around, the monthly repayments would be £956.83. on the best available two-year fixed rate of 3.34 per cent with First Direct. The average council tax paid in York is £91.80 a month. Add, say, £100 a month for other bills.
I would need a second home in London: commuting from York is not an option. The average price of a flat in Southwark — close to Parliament and with grotty bits I might be able to afford — is £305,254. Monthly repayments come to £1,137, with council tax of £88 a month, and all other associated bills.
Who is looking after my child while I’m at Westminster? My daughter’s nursery charges more than £900 a month, and adds £2 a minute if I arrive later than 6pm to pick her up. An excuse that the whips would find laughable as I leave ahead of a big vote, in my usual whirl of nappy bags and BlackBerry. So I would need a more flexible arrangement. Nannies in London are paid an average of £449 a week.
The new financial puritanism that we demand of MPs would make me reluctant to charge any of this to the taxpayer. One slip and I’m out. But if I don’t charge any of it, my take home pay is minus £559.63 a month. I’m paying £559.63 for the long-suffering, hard-done-by taxpayer to employ me the overpaid, underworked parasitic loafer.
The figures could work out if I could persuade my husband to become a wife. We could run two households and educate our daughter in whatever local school our cheap house is nearest, all on £64,766. But is that what we spent a combined total of six years in higher education for? To get by on a salary one of us could earn as a trainee barrister?
Tout an MP on the open market, and £64,766 begins to look laughable. Matthew Wall, from Taylor Bennett, the executive search firm, points out that MPs are under considerable pressure, and need both brains and leadership skills to navigate the pitfalls inherent in their positions. He says: “Replicating these qualities and nous in a corporate sector leadership position could command a salary in the region of £150,000 comfortably.”
Financially, then, being an MP is an absurd thing to do. Socially, it is suicide. The only possible weights to put on the pro side of the scales are a desire to do some good, coupled with a belief that only you can do it. or a great, pulsing ego.
Mr Duncan said in the covert video that “no one who has done anything in the outside world would come to this place”. He is entirely, lamentably right. Only those with insatiable egos to feed and family money to feed their children will be tempted on to the green benches.
In Anthony Trollope’s brilliant novel Phineas Finn, a poor but ambitious politician struggles to make it, hampered not by lack of talent, but lack of cash. I thought it was fiction, a 19th-century curiosity. It turns out to be a template for our future system. If we want more middle-aged men of independent wealth running the country, let this new financial puritanism run rampant. The green benches will be entirely populated by Duncan clones; the rich and the childless.
The job of being an MP is so awful that we should be begging people to do it; enticing them with golden parachutes; binding them with golden handcuffs. Instead, we are giving them buttons and expecting them to be grateful
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