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

[pseudomonas.livejournal.com]

23K seems rather a lot for a home, even for one in London. It's pretty much exactly the national median gross income, from which the average person pays a hell of a lot of other expenses besides home upkeep.

[fjm.livejournal.com]

I like the hotel idea: a Parliamentary campus!

[del-c.livejournal.com]

When you're eighteen years old and unemployed, they seem happy to spend £23,000 a year paying someone to obsess over whether you're *really* looking for a job, or are just enjoying the good life on that sweet corrupt £23 a week. But when you're an MP, it seems your little feelings would be hurt if anyone queried whether you really needed that £23,000, on top of your large salary, to do your job.

Is this like that thing where if you pay poor people less they work harder, and if you pay them more, they slack off, but if you tax rich people more, they slack off, and if you tax them less, they work harder? The theory seems to be that rich people and poor people are two different species of human, with bizarrely opposite behaviour patterns.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

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

That sounds disturbingly sensible. Also because it officially says it's ok to have this, so any more scrupulous MPs do not have less opportunity to be resident in london if necessary. But that it's not just a random perk of "Hey, become an MP, get to swan around in london". An MP campus would be better for politicking, because lots of colleagues would be handy, and worse for entertaining mistresses...

[beingjdc.livejournal.com]

In fairness to the poor sods, The Politics Show got some random punters off the street and asked them to investigate this and they came up with pretty much the same proposal - increase the basic wage and cut all the expenses and allowances.

[tau-iota-mu-c.livejournal.com]

But that class of building is for the commoners!

[pavanne.livejournal.com]

Well... filling in expenses forms is hugely tedious and timewasting. And, if the expenses are just going to be paid however extravagant they are, maybe it would be best to give the MPs what amounts to a cap and an incentive to economise.

So it depends if £23k is reasonable, or not reasonable. I'm not sure; I've tried living on £17k in London, and I've tried living on £40k [both gross]. I can't remember how I managed the former, and I feel entirely happy and comfortable with the latter but I do still live in someone's spare room. If you wanted to bring some members of your family with you - not totally unreasonable if you're going to spend 2/3 of your life in a place - £23k might be necessary...

I'm mostly playing devil's advocate here. The 700-room hotel sounds a better idea, and I would even have thought more comfortable, what with people around to change the sheets and fix the washing machine and stuff.

[jiggery-pokery.livejournal.com]

would it make more sense to get Parliament to buy a random seven-hundred-room hotel, a class of building which London hardly lacks

The downside is that it would become as big a target as the Houses of Parliament themselves. Buying, say, 350 unloved houses, all within reasonably easy walking distance of Westminster, would seem to me to be a better plan; it would probably be of benefit if they weren't too nice, plus MPs had to share. Alternatively, there's always the prospect of trying to further increasing the quantity of technology in use (teleconferencing, etc.) in an attempt to increase the time that MPs spend in their constituency with their families and constituents and decrease the amount of time they spend away in London.

I know the backgrounds of two MPs. One of them (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashok_Kumar_%28UK_politician%29) worked at British Steel Technical as a researcher. (I worked alongside him briefly between his former stint as an MP and his current one. Smashing bloke.) The other (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Palmer) was pretty senior in IT management for a global chemistry firm and has said (IIRC - I like him too, so if I do not remember correctly then this is not intended as a smear) that he made the equivalent of ~£95k before becoming a MP, roughly halving his wage when he did so. I rather like our MPs frequently being high flyers in their chosen profession before they go into public service; while British Steel aren't super-generous, both these MPs earned doctorates the hard way and are clearly made of good stuff.

I think MPs are going to be inreasingly incentivised to prove themselves cleaner than clean to a sceptical audience, with the benefits to the public of Freedom of Information and increased connectivity, and I also believe that most of them do a pretty clean job already, and getting more so. Good.