MPs Allowances

A friend has sent me a 'joke' for me to 'enjoy'. It portrays British MPs as ungrateful self-serving scroungers and ends with the moral : "And that, my friends, illustrates the fundamental difference between the citizens of our country and the Members of Parliament. Vote very carefully next year."

I have been moved to respond :

There are a large number of MPs who have not drawn on their legal entitlement (let alone been dishonest), whose careers now stand to be wrecked by those who have, thanks to journalists whose salaries often far exceed theirs and a stupid system of allowances that developed as a way of avoiding having to publicly increase MPs salaries (which are amongst the lowest in western Europe).

It is the allowance system itself that was morally dishonest, albeit legal and supported across the house. The disgrace is that Parliament resorted to that stupidity as a means of trying to avoid public accountability, and part of the difficulty was that Parliament itself was setting its own people's salaries.

It would have been far better - way back - to have had a proper, open, public discussion about how MPs actually ought to be remunerated. There would have been a lot of shouting about how a £67k salary was outrageous - but then most people have little idea what e.g. secondary school head teachers or partners of law firms get paid. And I have no idea myself as to whether MPs are expected to pay staff and office expenses out of that. In the end it would have settled down, probably on a salary level considerably higher.

To 'go behind the public's back' with the allowances system was insulting to the public's intelligence and good sense. I'm not sure who was really responsible for that decision but I'm sure it wasn't the run-of-the-mill MPs, who simply inherited the system. The Speaker was caught having to defend the indefensible on behalf of his colleagues.

Some have milked the allowance to the limit, presuming that they were safe to do so without it becoming public. A couple (out of 640) have gone beyond the limit into potentially illegal territory.

Most MPs — and I've known a good few — are model citizens, though like most of us they can get out of touch with reality. Especially those who come from very wealthy backgrounds - to hear some of them talk you'd think they still inhabit the 18th century. Most are no different from anyone else. When many citizens of this country abuse their allowances (not expenses) e.g. by treating sick leave entitlement as 'holiday entitlement' or making sure they're not underspent on their annual budgets it doesn't threaten the jobs of their colleagues : I have a lot of sympathy for those in marginal seats that can see their careers disappearing as voters, whipped up to treat them like scapegoats, and not 'thinking carefully' as the joke suggests, vote instead for half-baked or dangerous alternatives like the BNP or UKIP.

Feel free to circulate my response to your circulation list! As you see, I get twitchy when I smell self-righteousness and scapegoating. There is an outrage here, but we're in danger of picking the wrong target. Where did the secretive, dishonest and insulting allowances system originate? Whose idea was it? How long has it been in operation in its present form? Are its originators keeping their heads down, or are they long since retired?