It’s about time someone injected some common sense into this argument. We should get ourselves out of medieval times and by that I mean take a look at the United States (£111k) or Japan (£167k), even the Aussies are paying their federal MPs 126 grand!
We should be paying our MPs well above £100k, maybe even £150k As a nation we were outraged at how so many of them were ripping us off through their expenses, so we set up a body to look into Members’ salaries, and to stop them writing their own pay cheques.
Now this body has done its job and we don’t like it. For the record the Ipsa has also recommended a crackdown on all sorts of claimable items like taxis and meals, and a cut to pensions as well. Which are all no bad things in my book.
Seriously we need to join the real world, and that means if we want to attract decent people to the important task of government we need to up the money. We need to stop looking at the worst examples of useless, lazy, ineffectual MPs, currently riding the Westminster pig’s back, and getting outraged at them getting, what I agree, is a whopping salary for their meagre talents. Instead we need to treat it as a short term annoyance that will ultimately run these imbeciles out of our parliament and make sure their kind never return, unless they buy a ticket for a guided tour.
Just as our poorest excuses for MPs would never be able to make anything like the £60k plus they can skim as a backbenchers, in the private sector the reverse is also true. While we continue to pay peanuts we will only get monkeys, and certainly won’t attract decent minds from the private sector. No self respecting plumber, lawyer, electrician, chef or scientist (the list is endless) would consider taking on all the aggravation involved in being a member of parliament for the money, and that’s why the current crop are in many cases so poor.
By all means take away their fringe benefits, cut the number we have, limit the amount of terms they can serve perhaps – but give them an attractive wage for the sake of the nation’s future!
