11.07.1996

MPs’ gravy train

Tension mounted this week in workplaces up and down the country. All eyes were fixed on parliament as the nation waited to see whether those loyal servants of us ordinary folk would decide to follow the advice of John Major and Tony Blair and limit their salary increase to three percent to ‘set us an example’. Or would they make use of their ‘free vote’ to ignore their leaders and vote themselves a 26% rise, as recommended by the Senior Salaries Review Body?

That would give them an increase of £170 a week, from £34,000 to £43,000 a year. The prime minister’s salary would be hoisted from £84,000 to£134,000, while the leader of the opposition’s would go from £64,000 to £98,000.

The review body report also considers that it ought to make, over and above this salary, “additional remuneration for holders of certain positions of additional responsibility in the House”.

On top of their ‘basic’, MPs claim all manner of perks and expenses. For example, they are entitled to 74p a mile for driving their souped-up motors to and from their constituencies. Two Tory MPs, Nicholas and Ann Winterton, pick up £230 extra every time they drive their £45,000 Land Rover on the round trip between Westminster and their Cheshire constituencies.

Last weekend two Conservative and two Labour MPs spent a hard-working couple of days in Malta, “building links to bring in more business” at the side of their luxury hotel’s swimming pool, as well as attending banquets and having to endure sight-seeing tours. Such ‘hard work’ is commonplace, as big business and bourgeois governments the world over try to persuade our dedicated servants to use their influence in support of the latest money-spinning projects.

MPs do not even have to attend parliament to pick up their pay. However, the ‘conscientious’ ones who do show up usually work just about a three-day week and have 17 weeks’ holiday every year. This ‘work’ consists of sitting out sessions of the House of Commons for pre-arranged votes whose outcome is almost always known in advance, and some members even volunteer to sit on parliamentary select committees to ‘fine-tune’ the new legislation.

Many law changes actually go through unseen by parliament - decided in Whitehall and Brussels. But the two select committees whose job it is to monitor these changes have an absentee rate of well over a third.

Several bourgeois commentators have suggested that MPs should be paid ‘by results’. So how will those results be judged? By simply adding up the hours they spend in useless talking-shop debates or warming the seats of committee room chairs? Or perhaps by how successful they are in forcing working people to work ever harder to rake in capitalism’s profits?

Conservative MPs in particular are incensed at attempts to limit their rise. They know they are about to wave goodbye to all their perks and privileges after the next election. But their pensions will be linked to their retiring pay, so they need to milk the system now for all it is worth. Several Labour members, who expect to be sitting on the other side of the House in a year’s time, are happy to ride on the Tories’ self-interest to line their own pockets. One remarked: “If we don’t get the pay rise now we will never get them under a Labour government.”

There are of course those ‘left’ MPs who feel a bit embarrassed by it all. Chris Mullin said: “You cannot have one rule for MPs and another for everyone else.” He thinks the working class should content themselves with £2 or £3 an hour, and he will ‘show his solidarity’ by making do with his £34,000 and giving any rise to “good causes”.

Genuine working class representatives in bourgeois parliaments have always shunned their perks and privileges and accepted only the average worker’s pay. Even the opportunists of ‘official communist’ parties handed their salaries to headquarters and took only the party wage.

We reject completely the idea that we have to pay our representatives bloated salaries in order to ‘attract the best’. Strange that this argument only holds good for those at the top, isn’t it? Our delegates should be chosen not on the basis of what they can get out of our organisations, but what they are prepared to give in the service of the working class.

When we set up our own organs of direct working class rule, we will ensure that our representatives can be instantly recalled and if necessary replaced by their electors if they do not fit the bill. Our own workers’ councils will exist genuinely to serve the needs of the community, and its delegates will receive only their normal workers’ pay.

Alan Fox