The MPs' Expenses Scandal is in many ways old news, although I suspect that 'moats and duckhouses' will linger for years as a symbol of something.
Something that has struck me forcibly about the story is how out of touch people are with each other; indeed, how out of touch I am with most people.
On the one hand, you have members of the public leaving their comments on MSM articles or speaking in voxpops declaring that an annual salary of £65,000 is a definition of rich, and on the other hand you get Tory MPs declaring that such a salary would deter people from a professional or business backgrounds from going into Politics.
Both opinions are simultaneously right and wrong.
And also reflect my own ambiguous views about income and wealth.
All the media reports suggest that my earnings are high, even if I just put in the part time equivalent; if I extrapolated my FTE, I would be higher still. But these reports are caveated that the data comes from PAYE and benefit records, thus excluding those on unearned income, or, I think, the many self-employed who trade as limited companies etc. So, while I am statistically a high earner, my income is considerably less than countless other people I would not consider as 'rich'. And yet, I know that there are plenty of people in skilled or semi-skilled jobs who earn much less than I do (and in many cases have dependents to support from that).
To the best of my knowledge there isn't a shortage of people wanting to become an MP. My childhood ambition was to be Prime Minister, and it certainly isn't the salary that deters me from seeking to be a candidate - the reasons for that are many, none of them is salary.
Even if one was entirely motivated by money, being an MP could be used as a springboard to great financial rewards. Obviously, ex-PMs get to earn millions doing after-dinner speeches, but even relatively obscure ex-MPs can find countless sinecures and non-jobs as non-executive directors, pseudo-journalists, gameshow competitors and so on, if they so wish.
These Tories talk as if somehow they are examples of the high quality people that Politics is desperately in need of, as if there is currently a dearth of lawyers and management consultants on the green leather benches.
What Parliament actually lacks is a critical mass of professionals and business people for whom £65k pa would represent a significant pay rise. Public sector professionals or technicians - real ones that deliver, not bureaucrats like me - who have real experience of how health, education and transport work in practice, or genuine businesspeople, such as publicans, electricians or makers of artisan cheeses, for whom labour costs, regulatory burden and fluctuating exchange rates are everyday realities not theoretical concepts; in other words, the workers by hand or by brain for whom the Labour Representation Committee was formed.
Of course, we want our Parliamentary representatives, legislators and ministers to have the intellectual capacity, experience and confidence to assimilate information and judge conflicting evidence, to draw a conclusion and to understand how to implement the change or eradicate the problem. Which is why there are so many lawyers and bureaucrats in Parliament.
We also need them to be able to think through a logical process whilst empathising with natural human irrationality. We want Parliamentarians who can differentiate between a groundswell and a bandwagon, who can listen to a vulnerable person and inspire a crowd, who can prioritise simultaneously the needs of the community they serve and the most needy and vulnerable nationally and internationally, who can stick to their principles (which makes principles a prerequisite) and can compromise pragmatically. I doubt that we have many Parliamentarians who possess even the majority of those skills, and those that do are not necessarily the most prominent or high-flying.
To be honest, I don't think that I care a great deal whether an MP's salary is £65k or £150k. To me they are pretty much in a range that I could call 'more than I earn but pretty sure that I could spend easily without branching out into a designer/luxury lifestyle'.
Salaries in that range won't attract people motivated purely by money. But I'm not sure they would deter people such as hospital consultants or entrepreneurs who have the drive and hunger to offer their skills.
If they want it enough, they will make the 'sacrifices'; if they don't want to forego the school fees, the expensive holidays, the large houses, they probably don't want to be an MP enough to go through the hard slog of getting selected, and then elected.
I see no point in trying to align MPs' salaries with highly skilled professions or with Chief Executives of large organisations, because neither the skills and training required nor the responsibilities entailed can compare. Granted nothing is more responsible than decisions to go to war, but backbenchers don't make those decisions, and most 'decisions' over matters as diverse as education policy or reproductive rights are matters of detail and incremental.
What annoys me more about the content of what those out-of-touch Tory MPs said was the style in what it was said, their seeming lack of awareness of the actual earnings not only of 'poor' or 'struggling' or 'not well off' people' but also of the majority of professionals and business people who have decent housing, disposable income and a prosperous lifestyle. In one respect I do agree with the New Labour philosophy of representing Mondeo Man or Worcester Woman, because the Tories clearly do not and cannot begin to understand their needs and aspirations. But I don't believe WW and MM should be considered as more important than the poor, struggling and not well off.
