The people who work for us

Edition 1214 of 'Private Eye' caught my eye in a "Gavel Basher" article on MP's expenses. As the vast majority of the house voted in a series of debates to keep their controversial expenses system and ignore the important parts of the salary reform system proposed by Sir John Baker, the MPs who objected were shouted down. One Liberal Democrat MP was called "sanctimonious and arrogant" for criticising MP's who claimed travel expenses for a second home when they lived twenty minutes away from Parliament.

David Maclean (who also proposed the disgusting act that reduced transparency in the house) actually said: "I've had pay freezes in the past and look what good that's done us". I find that to be bizarre and non-sequitur logic. It is basically saying that if MP's are not doing a good enough job, they should be paid more!

His self-indulgent, self-pitying whine continued:
"He compared our salary to that of a head teacher. Our salary was £60,000 and the head teacher was on £71,000. ..........There is therefore no doubt that we have fallen considerably behind those whom the SSRB considered our comparators. "


It would be interesting to see if the 'head teacher' in question had to pay for his or her own petrol , stationary and "extra costs" from that 71 grand. I'll happily wager they did. David didn't, he claimed 147,000 pounds in expenses last year. Of course, that would average his salary out to just over 72 grand, above that of the teacher.

Maclean continued:
none of those people—except a colonel in Afghanistan—is working long hours. Most of them are not doing 70 or 80 hours a week. Apart from those on the very front-line who are making tactical decisions involving life or death, most of them do not have the responsibility that we have of voting on issues that do include life or death,

Yes, poor overworked David who has voted in a grand total of 55% of debates this year and has almost as many holidays as the head teacher. Perhaps he uses all that time off to write letters, hence his 1,000 pound stationary allowance.


Perhaps the best quote of the bunch came from Patrick Cormack MP who actually claimed: "There are people in catering who get paid more than us". I'd be remarkably interested to know which caterer gets more than 63,000 pounds plus an insane amount of expenses (140,000 in his case) each year, sadly Patrick did not give specific details.

Another Lib Dem MP proposed that MP's submit receipts for scrutiny by a separate committee. Another MP actually rejected this by claiming .......wait for this....."If you hire a lock smith and submit the receipt for public viewing, it could help a thief to break into your home". As Nigel Farage likes to say: "you couldn't make this stuff up!"

How do we let people get away with such shameless corruption? And how can we - the next wave of politicians - ensure we don't become like them?

One of the debates is available to read here and is a textbook example of duplicity and doublespeak amongst politicos. Note how they unctuously praise the idea of transparency and auditing proposed by John Baker, then vote to ignore it and use their own system instead.