Son of Mathonwy wrote: ↑Mon Oct 10, 2022 4:14 pm
Banquo wrote: ↑Mon Oct 10, 2022 12:16 pm
Son of Mathonwy wrote: ↑Mon Oct 10, 2022 12:09 pm
Agreed, state fund the parties, ban lobbying. I would also ban second jobs unless they are severely limited in time dedicated to them and no income is received.
Raise their pay as well.
Agreed, never a popular move but should be done at the same time as banning outside pay.
See, now I know the traditional argument for this one is that, "If we don't pay the MPs enough, then people in lucrative jobs won't want to come and be MPs and we'll be missing out on all that experience and education," but I have to say I disagree on the importance of this for a couple of reasons:
1) Ability to earn a good wage =!= competence or intelligence. This country is very far from a meritocracy, so the idea that talent is concentrated in the people earning big bucks is absolutely specious. And, even if it was true, we're already not paying enough to draw in the very top echelons (and that will go doubly so if we're banning outside jobs and pay), so what we're actually competing for is the mid-range people. Unless we're talking about doubling MPs pay, which I'm going to assume no-one is brave enough to suggest.
2) MPs currently earn £84k, not including expenses, allowances, and freebies (which are far from insubstantial). The average wage in the UK is £31k. They earn well over 3 x the average wage when everything is taken into account. They're fine - no-one who's an MP is every going to be struggling for money. Yes, there will be some people turned off if they can only earn X amount rather than Y, but are those the people who we really want to be in politics? We might have a bit more of a representative parliament if we had a few more average people standing for whom £84k + £20-30k in allowances would be a dream pay rise, and a fewer who would see it as a pittance.
Puja