MPs are divorced from ordinary life, and should be paid the average UK salary

By Laurie Penny

Yesterday, I spoke on BBC Radio Wales about Tony McNulty MP’s claim of £60,000 as ‘expenses’ on a second home in Harrow, where his parents currently live. Yes, that Tony McNulty, the voice of the punitive Welfare Reform Bill – which had its third reading last Wednesday, with some important amendments – a bill which would employ private companies, proven less efficient than their state counterparts, to bully the workless into below-minimum-wage jobs that aren’t, in fact, there anyway.

Mr McNulty MP, who believes that Britain’s poorest can’t be trusted with £48 a week to live on without stringent conditions. He claimed as much as £14,000 per year on the second home, on top of his considerable MP’s salary and additional expense claims.It has been pointed out numerous times, not least by McNulty himself, that the money he claimed – equivalent to the entire salary of many of his constituents – wasn’t against the rules. I’m sure it wasn’t. I don’t however, give one solitary iced damn if the Queen gave him the cash in a gold-plated envelope scented with the royal perfume, it’s still a tooth-grinding piece of hypocrisy.

Because, well. How dare he, really. How dare he dictate to the poor and needy how they should live their lives, how dare he imply that people are ‘playing the system’ when he himself has been playing the system for at least five times the annual rate of jobseekers’ allowance every year. How dare he tell Britain’s poorest and most disadvantaged young people that they do not deserve the paltry £48 of jobseekers’ allowance they receive every week, when he himself has been claiming at least £270 per week in additional expenses on top of his salary. The sheer pig-headed hypocrisy of it all makes my ovaries itch.

It has further been reported that Mr McNulty claims to have made “considerable” use of the property, but said that he had stopped claiming the allowance in January – get this- ‘because the fall in interest rates meant he could afford to pay the mortgage from his MP’s salary’.

As Mr Eugenides puts it:

“…you have to marvel at the sheer ingenuity of people who only stop stealing from us when they’ve driven the economy far enough into the ground that it becomes temporarily cost-effective to act honestly.”

I mean, what is it with Labour ministers these days? Have they completely lost all sense of narrative subtlety? Do they actually wander the corridors of Whitehall stroking overfed white cats, cackling to themselves and rubbing their hands with glee whilst browbeaten assistants scurry up to tell them that the local orphanage has been demolished just as they ordered? What has happened to this government, when the Conservatives – the Conservatives! – have to suggest to McNulty that “questions need to be answered”?

If you hadn’t guessed, I’m incandescently angry about this.

Of course, it isn’t just McNulty, and it definitely isn’t just the Labour party – having one’s nose in the trough has long been standard parliamentary practice, and since career politicians seem to expect a certain lifestyle, I can see how it might be ever so tempting to try and maneuvre ways to augment a £63-grand-a-year salary that already puts you far into the top wage bracket. But the problem is that right now? It hurts. It hurts that our elected representatives are divorced from the way in which a great deal of their constituents are living in this time of economic hardship. It hurts, it offends, and it’s down right insulting.

Yesterday, citizens called the BBC from all over Wales to express their disgust, and to make the same proposition with which I opened the show: to make sure that their expenses are being used properly, to make sure they really understand what life is like for their constituents, MP’s basic salaries should be kept in line with the median UK wage.

The bright young Tory thing they had on to oppose, Shane Greer, called this idea ‘absurd’. He said that the real issue here was one of ‘transparency’. The trouble is that we already have quite a lot of transparency, and transparency by itself sounds good but acheives little. We can see exactly how our lords and masters are squirreling away taxpayers’ money for themselves, and we can do precious little about it whilst living in a democracy in whose mechanisms vast swathes of the population have entirely lost faith. We cannot trust our politicians to play fair – not even Labour MPs.

The British public deserves politicians who go into politics as a form of public service, and not just for the power and the money. The British public deserves real representatives, representatives who understand the real lives that their constituents lead. If Tom McNulty really and truly needs a second home, I’m sure there are council houses a short walk from his constituency – and who knows, if MPs had to live in them them, perhaps more and better quality council housing might end up being built.

Our politicians can afford to save us from desitutition if they choose, but instead, the cabinet ministers we elected to serve us sit on their bottoms paying themselves vast salaries under the table, in a state of near-perfect inertia. So, my question to Shane and to every present and prospective British political representative is simply this: are you truly prepared to take a pay-cut, not just from a six-figure executive sum to a relatively modest mansion-expenses property portfolio, but a real pay-cut? Are you prepared to live on the average British salary? Are you prepared to live the decisions you make on our behalf?

Because that’s what this argument is about. Not whether or not Tony McNulty or David Cameron or George Osborne or any of the other MPs siphoning off public funds are or are not playing by the rules they invented themselves. No, it’s about how we want our politicans to live. And like a great deal of the British people, I believe that if you’re not willing to live like we do, if you’re not prepared to take home an ordinary salary, then you have no business being in politics.