When Gladstone was Prime Minister he earned £5,000 a year. Estimates vary, but today that could be worth around £2,000,000. Today MPs earn less thantrainee lawyers while Cabinet ministers get less than some of the civil servants they employ.
Surely they all deserve a massive pay rise? Well, let’s hold on for just a minute.
There are of course many factors that need to be considered when setting MPs pay: but the one argument which should be treated with great caution is measuring their pay with other professions. Being an MP is completely different to any other job. To compare it to investment banking or the highest tiers of the civil service is far too simplistic.
Often people refer to the professionalisation (horrid word) of politics, but I think that is incorrect. In truth, politics is a vocation. You don’t stand for Parliament because you want to earn big bucks. Most MPs I know got involved because they believe they can do a good job and that their values or ideology is the best for the country. In this respect – if no other – MPs are more like vicars than bankers.
Sure, they need to earn a wage (as holding a second job is increasing frowned on) but that is not the reason most MPs do what they do. Pay rates need to understand this. Personally, I think Robin Cook got it about right when, in 2001, he said: “The pay of a Member of Parliament should not be so high as to become the primary attraction of the job, nor so low as to deter suitable candidates from standing for election”.
Of course there may well be an issue with the general quality of MPs but at £60,000 p.a. it is so unlikely that low pay is the cause. Much more likely is the lack of influence backbenchers really get in modern party structures and the low levels of support you get from the general public. Solve these issues, and the quality of our elected representatives will rise.
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well said. I agree.
Factor their rather generous allowances into their salaries, and I think you’ll find that they don’t do anywhere near as badly in the salary stakes as they’d like us to believe…
>Today MPs earn less than trainee lawyers
Hmmm. “Trainee” after 5 years is pushing it a bit imho. I’d suggest that shows that lawyers are overpaid rather than vice-versa. After all, the £60k basic for MPs places them in the top 7-8% of all HOUSEHOLD incomes in the country. And that is without the £20k or so a year towards a flat in London (which they can keep), and a pension scheme to die for. And the extra payments that many of them have for “extra responsibilities”.
Any argument for significant MP salary increases is whistling in the wind – at least from the point of view of making a rational argument for them. Instead, we should start off by making sure that property bought using Housing Allowances comes back to the people who paid for it.