MPs’ Expenses

There’s a good reason that public fury about this is far from over.  It’s a very simple reason: MPs set the rules for the rest of us, but don’t want to follow them themselves.

Take the Bedroom Tax.  They made the rules, using the argument that public money shouldn’t be used to subsidise a home with spare bedrooms.  Are there exceptions due to personal circumstances such as disability or part-time custody of children?  No.

Do these rules apply to MPs’ publicly funded second homes?  No, they do not. 

It’s as simple as that.  Those on low incomes, disabled people, unemployed and disadvantaged people are savagely penalised, but it’s absolutely fine for MPs.  And they make the rules.

Working Away From Home

Sometimes apologists for MPs will say “ah, but they work in Westminster, which may be hundreds of miles from their constituency”.  Indeed, well let’s look at that.  What about other people who have to be away from home due to work? Oil rig workers, for example, are put up on the rigs in accommodation provided by the company.  So let’s do that.  Let’s provide hostel accommodation for MPs, something like student halls of residence, say. 

Travel

The rest of us cannot claim expenses to travel to work, only travel that we do for work.  So travelling between a second home and Westminster should not be subsidised by the public.

The new rules are admittedly attempting to be seen as tackling this, but still the provision for MPs is far more generous than ordinary people would encounter.

Lunches

Most of us do not have our lunches subsidised by our workplace – that comes out of our own pockets.  The same should apply to MPs.

Beer

MPs also have cheap beer provided to them, subsidised by the public purse.  And yet they cheerfully discuss minimum alcohol pricing for their constituents. They should pay the same prices as the rest of us for alcohol, food, or anything else.

The Average Wage

MPs are out of touch.  A good way to focus their minds on keeping in touch, it is sometimes argued, would be to award them the national average wage.  Self-serving as they demonstrably are, this would ensure that they strove to raise the average wage.

Average versus Mode

There is, of course, a problem with this, since “average” needs to be clearly defined.  Were I in a room with a bunch of people on the national minimum wage and Bill Gates walked into the room, the average income in the room would jump dramatically without the wages of anyone else being affected.

It therefore follows that MPs could raise the average simply by further enriching multi-millionaires, as they do now.

For that reason, it is sometimes said that the mode wage - that is, the wage most frequently paid - would be a better benchmark.  I have done some looking into this, and can’t find any statistics kept on the most frequently paid wage.  My working assumption is that it is the national minimum wage.  (Should anyone have any information on this, I’d be happy to see it, and make it known on this blog).

A lot of people doing hard, unpleasant and important work are paid the minimum wage.  Since they set the minimum wage, I’d welcome a justification by MPs of why those people deserve the minimum wage and they do not.  As with all matters regarding authority, the burden of proof lies with them.  They must demonstrate, with powerful argument, that it is fine to pay some people the minimum wage, but that they deserve more.  I’d like to see that justification made, and not just to the satisfaction of the media elite.  I think a lot of us would.

Second Jobs

MPs should not have second jobs.

There are two issues here.  Many employers would feel that a full-time employee cannot devote their full energy to the post if they have another job. It is a condition of many people’s terms of employment that they do not take second jobs. 

More importantly, though, is that MPs often have business interests that conflict with their stated task of representing their constituencies.  If, for example, you are an MP and have business interests which would profit from the NHS being dismantled, then it can be legitimately asked  in whose interests they are actually taking their decisions.

This leads us again to the question of representation.  

Representation

It is sometimes said that if such conditions as discussed above were placed upon
MPs, then only millionaires could afford to be MPs.  This is an interesting argument.  I earn far below the national average wage, and nobody subsidises my beer, and yet I do my job without being a millionaire.  Millions are in the same positions.  It rings rather hollow to them to hear that only a millionaire could possibly afford to live their lives.

Representative democracy must answer the central problem of whose interests it serves: who exactly is represented, how are they represented, and how is that ensured?

Over a century ago, the cry was to increase the working class presence in Westminster.  Well, that was tried, but they very quickly went native.  No matter their good intentions, they were faced with an institutional artifice telling them “Oh, but that simply can’t be done”, and they found they were overruled and eventually co-opted.  It’s the same today. There are all sorts of reasons that things “simply can’t be done”.  Well, now they are being called on that assertion.

What the public outcry over expenses amounts to is a challenge to representative democracy to answer that central question: whose interests does it serve?