Be Excellent To Each Other

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-23262503

MP's getting a pay rise eh? £74k a year, up from £68k

Too bloody right I say, they should be paid more than that even. Being an MP should be a job that people aspire to, that attracts the best and the brightest. Pay them a wage commensurate with their position in society and stop politics being the domain of the independently wealthy.

Discuss.

I agree, but I would have made it not take place until the next election, and until then they should get the same pay rise as the rest of the civil servants.

Malc

The Ipsa proposal is for a big rise in the base and a big cut in expenses. I haven't seen any media tackling the question of whether the typical MP ends up out of pocket as a result of this, and if they are up, by how much.

Crappy media.

The bit about not taking place until the next election is what is happening. I agree with the second bit. If they are to be paid more they should at least be seen to do something and not sit and shout and each other. At the moment it's hard to say what they do.

That applies to 99% of jobs. Craster's tried explaining his job to me loads of times, and I still just assume he checks a WENUS.

Much of MPs' time (and that of their staff) is taken up with constituency casework, helping constituents navigate the bureaucracy or seek redress of grievance. Just because they're not sitting on a green bench doesn't mean they're not working.

Mrs T still has no idea what I do. The only time I have come close to being able to explain it, was when I worked on the Compare The Market website.

You're the singer?

I don't know whatr MrsA does for a living, save for sending emails to people. I've little idea what I do.

I don't know what I do for a living....

I need to come up with an interesting description. The question I hate most in conversation is "what do you do?".

Well, that and "Are you aware that you don't have any trousers on?".

I'm intrigued by the idea of a job so complex/boring you can't find a way to explain it; feel free to use me as a guinea pig for this interesting description you're working on.

"I'm Batman."

Unless pressed I answer that with stuff about being awesome, riding bikes & climbing. Nobody really gives a fuck what people's job is, it's just shitey smalltalk. Fuck that, skip to the interesting stuff.

Unless you're Batman.

"i'm a time traveller. Your future self sent me back to speak to you. You need to listen very carefully, we have little time. Soon, you'll be approached by a young man offering you something. The thing to do is -URKKKK!"

Being Batman isn't his job though, it's just what he does for fun

Heh, true. He doesn't have a job, of course. Workshy scum that he is.

It's IT Architecture. Designing infrastructure systems for delivery of enterprise services and applications to mobile devices - both staff and customer.

It's not complicated, but it's not getting you laid any time soon.

Much like your face.

Good burn.

I didn't realise it was supposed to get me laid. I've been doing it wrong all these years!

Similar to mine, I just do it for the government..

I've usually responded to that with top secret international spy.

MPs' pay should be means-tested. Posh MPs who don't need the money, like my MP and most of the cabinet, should get nothing, as they aren't short of money, and MPs from regular working class backgrounds should get the full salary, with a sliding scale in between.

But what if that stopped a good (rich) MP from becoming an MP?

It's a great explanation, but everyone switches off after IT, so they don't hear it.

Cras works in IT I think.

Wayne Enterprises don't run themselves!

I think that sounds like it'd be headed to a corrupt system pretty quickly. it's a noble idea, but, in reality, pretty unworkable.

Well that's supplanted today's leader for most petulant and ridiculous thing I've read all day. And myp has been texting me for much of it, so the bar was already high.

I agree, it would be.

Incidentally I'd begrudge MPs salaries less, or not at all, if loads of them didn't have jobs for life (almost) due to FPTP giving them unloseable safe seats.

Phrasing slightly less petulantly than apod, why should someone wealthy earn less than someone poor for the same job?

Fptp?

"First past the post"

One imagines that MPs in such seats must bring an awful lot of expertise and knowledge to the table for them to be selected in those seats.

Austerity in action!

Or that more qualified people don't bother standing against them, as the pay isn't enough to interest them,

Surely if we should understand what anyone does it should be the person we voted in? How else can we comment on them?

which reminds me that my mp hasn't got back to me about PRISM since his assistant told me would once Hague had replied.

I fucking love democracy.

Pay the most for the 'best and brightest'

OR

Pay very little, thus ensuring that anyone who wants the job does so because they have a geniue desire to make a difference for their local community by being their representative in parliament. Maybe.

I know what you mean, but desire != achievement.

Pay not very much, and people who are very rich are going to be over-represented, as they can afford to take the job.

How much do people get paid to run a large company? Surely we should be paying those that run the country more than those that run a large company!

Malc

Whilst I agree with that sentiment, Malc (after all, quite a few of us on the board will earn more than an MP's basic salary), a lot f MPs earn more from their other pursuits.

I don't think there's a simple answer, unless we can ban all alternative revenue streams for them.

Fixed.

In any broth, the scum rises to the top, and whatnot.

Quite. Like Curio says, I don't think there's a simple answer.

I wouldn't mind so much, but the notion of a party whip rather precludes the basic idea that the MP is there to represent the opinion of their local constituents. To allow a whip to even exist, to me, seems a basic affront to the underlying principle of democracy.

The concept of political parties wasn't even legally recognised until relatively recently. The whigs and tories and that were just names given to groups of people who tended to vote with each other and had similar outlooks. Of course, back then you got voted in by two blokes and a pig and the only people who could run were the ones who could fund their campaign themselves i.e. toffs and rapacious factory owners. So, swings and roundabouts.

Not sure what to do about that, though, short of give people state-funded interest-free loans if they want to run for MP. And only ask them to pay it back if they don't win. Or something.

+1

Surprisingly perhaps, but I think an MP should be paid at least £150k pa (as well as having some pretty generous "golden goodbye" terms, since it is by definition often a relatively short term job).

It's like anything in life: pay peanuts, get monkeys. What are there, 650 MPs? Even at £150k/pa, that's an annual salary bill of £100 million - a piss in the ocean in public money terms. That'd be a price well worth paying, over time, for a Houses of Parliament eventually bursting with genuinely talented, gifted people who could've had lucrative careers elsewhere.

Create a good enough incentive and the best, high calibre people will come. Doing the opposite is a total false economy (as per usual, pandering to the bullshit, politics-of-envy sentiments of the populist gutter press and media); these people are needed to run the country.