The political sense of a bucket of lightly-drowned weasels

[fivemack]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7420848.stm

"MPs could seek to avoid future expenses criticism by awarding themselves an automatic lump sum of £23,000 a year for second homes, a newspaper says"

"If a lump sum payment were made to each MP, the need for these documents to be produced would disappear and there could be a considerable cash boost for those MPs who spend less than the £23,000 permitted."

Handing out lump sums in cash to MPs is the kind of behaviour for which we tut and deduct at least three points when rating the governmental virtue of random countries in South America; what's next, black Mercedes? Is there any merit at all to the idea that important people do not need to provide receipts when spending public money?

If the issue is that MPs need second homes in London, would it make more sense to get Parliament to buy a random seven-hundred-room hotel, a class of building which London hardly lacks, and have them live there?

Comments

[naath.livejournal.com]

Hey, Obama says in his book that he had a teeny flat in DC... clearly some people put up with it.

Hmmm, salaries are hard to find data on... MPs get 60K (ish) and then expenses. That's a pretty damn decent salary from where I'm sitting (on pretty much the UK average of around 20K), and more than many professionals. Not however as much as top city bankers.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

I'm sure Paul Wellstone's salary as a senator exceeded what he made as a college professor, too. On the other hand, people at the executive levels in business tend to make a lot more than that. Doctors and lawyers are all over the place (surgeons making a bundle, pediatrician's mostly making less, like 1/4 as much very vaguely since both have considerable range).

I'm not sure I want being a representative to be a hobby for rich people who like the power. One way to avoid that is to make it a viable career in terms of reward, compared to the alternatives, for the high-powered people you want in the job. But that may not be the *best* way to get the right people in the job, either. Also, if they feel underpaid relative to the people they see as their peers, it's likely to make them more subject to corruption.

The whole issue of what the "right" salary for a specific job (in any sense other than "market price") is one that there's wide disagreement on, and this case is I think harder than most.

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

MPs are on average about fifty, and generally fairly high achievers; 60k doesn't seem an unreasonable salary. The large PDF I linked to has details of how MP salaries were set back to about 1911 (before then it was assumed that you had private means; there was a deal whereby a union levy to pay MP salaries was replaced by some degree of public funding for MPs); in 1990 the idea was 'at a yearly rate equal to 89% of the national maximum point (excluding range points as later agreed) of the Grade 6 (old Senior Principal) pay scale in the non‐industrial Civil Service' which sounds very reasonable. Another comparison would be regional managers of a large company, but I've no intuition about what the person responsible for every Tesco in Bristol is paid.

I don't have a very good idea of the background of the average MP, and theyworkforyou doesn't have biographies; picking a random debate and the first four participants listed, and looking up their Wikipedia entries, we have a miner, a manager of a small shop, a law lecturer and the leader of Leeds City Council. Though three of those four served for a fair number of years as full-time politicians before getting to Parliament.

[naath.livejournal.com]

Ah, but see - MPs get to set what the minimum wage is. I reckon that if they actually had to try *living on it* they might put it up a bit (well, OK, minimum wage plus a free studio flat in London because MPs really do need to live in 2 places and most people don't).

I do think that MPs need to be paid 'enough' to live on, because of course making only rich people MPs is bad and if being-an-MP was unpaid then only rich people could be MPs. However a great many people in this country have to live on a very great deal less than 60K a year and seem to get by.