MPs’ pay: they’re not in it for the money
Curated from , written by Michael White
Today’s story that MPs made £7m collectively from jobs outside parliament will stir up trouble for them. But should it?
MPs are in trouble again over their pay and outside interests. Or they soon will be, once the Twitterati has read that they made £7m collectively from other jobs in the last session. For purists it will be £7m too much, for more competitive voters it will be: “Only £7m? Aren’t there 650 MPs?” They just can’t win.
It was ever thus, at least it has been since the reforming Liberal government of 1906 introduced pay for MPs – £400 a year – because it had correctly noticed that, with Labour MPs of modest backgrounds being elected, it was important that candidates could be elected without first having a private income.
Thanks to the cowardly opportunism of successive governments in refusing to address the pay question adequately for 40 years – a failure that culminated in the expenses scandal – we’re in danger of heading back, in 2013, to a parliament in which only the independently wealthy and hair-shirted puritans can afford to be elected.
A parliament of Dennis Skinners and es (he’s the barrister who took over as MP for Sleaford and North Hykeham in Thatcher Country from , of alleged moats bill fame) would be interesting. But Mr Skinner’s backbench purity and Mr Phillips’s busy schedule – he made £740,000 in legal work last year – might ensure that not much got done. A jolly good thing too, many voters would mutter, until things started going wrong.
In politics, as elsewhere, life is never going to be fair. Someone who was a teacher or executive before being elected an MP can hardly moonlight on the side in the same way that a lawyer, company director, journalist or dentist can. Sir Paul Beresford did so in the Major era, leading to a famous Guardian headline: “Minister is part-time dentist.” “I do it to keep my skills up,” Beresford explained, not unreasonably.
It did not placate the purists, as today’s report will not either, despite the curbs on allowances and expenses imposed after the 2009-10 scandal and aggressively policed by the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (Ipsa). Unlock Democracy, a pressure group with , complains in forthright terms to James Ball about the risk of part-timers being “beholden to special interests” if they work – and suggests they should at least lose their MP’s pay if they make a living outside.
Oh dear again. It’s a slippery slope, that one. I am sure that plenty of MPs in the 2010 parliament would forgo their pay in return for not having to declare what they make outside, how they make it and how many hours they spend making it. After all, many of them – not all on the Tory side – have given up a lot of income to become MPs. Transparency rightly requires that they declare their interests.
A financial sacrifice is not true of all of them, for some £65,738 may be the most they have ever earned or will wish to earn, but it’s true of quite a lot. What’s more, nowadays they are surrounded by people in their daily lives – headteachers, town hall executives and GPs in their constituencies, as well as bankers and senior civil servants in London – who earn a lot more.
The fact that James Ball’s diligent research finds that Gordon Brown was the year’s biggest earner illustrates the point I am struggling to make. Many people have much to complain about regarding the ex-PM’s career, but few (none that I know) accuse this hair-shirted, complex man of being in politics for the money. So there should be no surprise at the declaration from Brown’s office that £600,000 of the £1.37m he earned last year went to charity and the rest to “support my ongoing involvement in public life” (whatever that means).
It won’t stop the critics, of course, critics who have every right to ask why Brown appears to do so little at Westminster. The answer is that if his party leader, the whips, his constituency activists and the local electorate in Fife are all happy to see him doing what he does – or not seeing it – that should be enough. An MP is elected to do the job in the way that he or she sees fit and answer for it on polling day. The Scottish National party will be stalking the seat.
More than half the £7m – £4.3m – was earned in 2012-13 by Tory MPs, with Brown by a long way the biggest earner on Labour’s side. Alistair Darling, currently chairing the Better Together campaign for Scotland’s union with England in his spare time, made £263,000 – most of it, I imagine, from sales of his memoirs of 13 years in office, including those three at No 11 in the banking crisis..
Jack Straw, who also published memoirs, made £183,000, from his book and other part-time jobs. He too served all 13 years as a Labour minister – Brown, Darling and Straw were the only cabinet members to do so – but also managed to run a campaign to curb the complex fraud surrounding whiplash injury claims, far higher in Britain than in comparable countries.
I’d like to note in passing that – including, bless my soul, Ukip MEPs such as St Nigel Farage – now get a flat rate of €84,000 (£72,000) plus about €250,000 worth of office allowances. The system was standardised in 2005 at 38% of a European court of justice judge’s pay. It involved pay cuts for German and Italian MEPs, but a rise for many, including the Spaniards, whose pay had been tied until then to the rate of an MP in the Cortes (the Spanish legislative assembly), which was €32,000.
Press reports – leaks if you like – have started suggesting that Ipsa, which polices the system with all the zeal and empathy of a traffic warden, has softened a little as it’s come to understand the practical problems that MPs face as a result of the hastily devised 2009-10 system. It wants them to have a pay rise: £10,000 according to some reports, more according to others.
It’s hard to see how any government could concede such a proposal if it were formally to be tabled, not when so many people are suffering pay freezes, cuts or worse in the Great Austerity. So it won’t happen. The system will stagger on and we’ll see what turn it takes.
Meanwhile, MPs’ spouses will continue to divorce them (the 2010 intake’s divorce rate is said to be one in five so far) and say: “Remind me again, why did I agree to you working twice as hard for half/a quarter of your previous pay?” All this in return for being abused by voters, whips, newspapers, bloggers, etc. Some will make money on the side, some will suffer in silence, a third group will feel comfortably well off.
Unless we have a conformist parliament of puritanical automatons – Oliver Cromwell tried that and it didn’t work – it will always be that way. The reason for this apparent masochism is that most of them love being MPs and their motivations are both noble and self-serving: they’re romantics, they believe they can make a difference. But they’re not in it for the money – honest, they’re not.
