Friday 19 July 2013

Sketch: The MP


Election time might seem a long time away for most of us – the next national vote will be in the May of 2015 – but for those mysterious people actually working Britain’s political machine, it is heading towards us like a bus full of unconvinced voters, unimpressed thus far and travelling at speed.
It is in the midst of this machine that we find political offices full of hapless interns, tired but smiling politicians and graduate journalists working for small local news stations, trying desperately to grow their twitter followings.
An MP walks into one of these political offices somewhere, wiping the sweat from her brow with the back of her hand (taking her set smile off with it). Straight-faced, she makes a joke and asks for a coffee. An excitable intern gets the coffee wrong and doesn’t get the joke at all. In the background a photocopier whips out minor accusations on glossy leaflets for an ever-dwindling squadron of elderly party volunteers to deliver to a neighbourhood of people who really aren’t impressed by this constant tit-for-tat of politics, but always seem to vote for whoever most often shoves such leaflets through their letterboxes.
It is an east London office. Two scathing councilors from her own party are due in a quarter of an hour, incensed by a change in government policy regarding grit bins. At council level these things often get surprisingly fraught, even if nobody outside their microcosmic world can quite work out why (MPs included).
For now she sits and leafs through a local gazette. It started up not long ago and is put together almost exclusively by young and ambitions graduates of Journalism who have yet to work out what the essential point of journalism is. She spots a double typing mistake in an article about the criminal activities of a top builder in London. The gentleman (who owns a booming firm specializing in the installation of street furniture such as grit bins) has not, it scandalously transpires, been ‘laying his faxes’ properly. She wonders what a street paved with faxes would look like. Eyeing the floor of her office, she realizes that she knows exactly what it would look like.
As she drops the open gazette down beside her overly milky and therefore cold coffee, a knock on the door rattles a small sign hanging thereupon which reads, “Don’t forget to wash your cups!”
She calls out in greeting and two crimson-faced councilors come in. From the other door – which leads to the photocopying room and the kitchen – comes the intern. The intern takes another set of coffee orders and the councilors sit down. The MP smiles towards them.
Later, at a coffee evening with aforementioned volunteers, she laughs about her meeting over a much better coffee served to her by an ageing stalwart of the party. No councilors have turned up and she can joke with her volunteers in the knowledge that nobody there is inclined to gossip. As it turns out, she had managed to very convincingly fob the councilors off by explaining that the changes which Parliament had to make to Britain’s grit bin legislation were necessitated by the reckless behavior of people like Mr. Grimes of Tower Hamlets, whose tax affairs have been hidden in a small legal loophole since his company set up back in 2009.
The councilors were unconvinced until the intern (who at this point proved himself to be really quite useful) reported that an opposition councilor had ties to the gentleman’s business. They left very happy indeed.
The MP didn’t particularly care for such partisan and petty wrangling and her beaming volunteers agreed. Politics, though, is politics and when the currency is scandal and outrage, business must be done where it can be. She took another sip of her coffee – which was still nice and hot – and told her volunteers about her plans to put a question to the Prime Minister on Monday. She would detail how the opposition’s incompetence was nowhere more clearly visible than in her own constituency, where the council which they run had ignored this shocking tax evasion to continue unabated for five years, only finally interrupted by her own extensive efforts to alert Parliament to the scandal for the benefit of her voters who, frankly, deserve better.

Monday 1 July 2013

Let's pay our MPs more

I initially wanted to call this post The Idiots at IPSA. It wasn't the risk of offending the officials at the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority that stopped me, but the risk of readers not bothering to read on if I had.

So of course the title I chose is a sarcastic one? Well, no. British MPs are not paid a particularly high salary given that they are tasked with collectively managing the world's sixth largest economy. German, Irish and Italian MPs are paid more.

"But they're doing a terrible job!" comes the incredulous reply. Well, then, you surely need to have better MPs. How do you get better MPs? Offer a salary that will attract better people. That seems to be IPSA's response.

And, after all, find an ambitious manager, negotiator or economist who will eschew the six-figure salaries of the private sector to serve her or his nation. Tall order? Now find six hundred and forty-nine more.

But - and here's the problem - we're talking about a long-term, theoretical, best-case scenario. Look at Britain in 2013 - it hardly qualifies as a 'best case scenario'. The economy is flatlining, exports to the far east are miserably low & trips to the supermarket are an increasingly austere routine for a lot of people. Theoretical arguments give way to public outcry*. Now is not the time, IPSA.

It's worth saying again: now is not the time. What were the officials who recommended a £7,500 pay rise for MPs thinking? Have they not noticed the austerity? Or read a newspaper? Do they have any idea what 'public opinion' means? Did they imagine that their recommendations might - just might - be picked over by the press?

You might say idiots is too strong a reproach. I disagree. These people had about as simple and limited a job as is possible to imagine: make an informed recommendation for MPs' pay. Not complicated. "Informed" might suggest that they take a look out of the window at the state of the country's finances. Or acknowledge the pain that millions of Brits are going through. Or consider the effect of offering the nation's custodians a huge pay rise  - while everyone else has to cut back - on public trust in politics.

Here's my recommendation: for this appalling decision alone, let's give everyone at IPSA a temporary 10% pay cut for the year 2015-16. That aught to give them a better indication of how the rest of the country are feeling for next time around.

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* Highest-rated vs. worst-rated comments on BBC website at time of writing.