Can I just say that I agree with what David Cameron said yesterday about MPs getting a pay rise of some £7000 a year? “You’re paid a rate for the job and you should take the rate for the job and it’s done independently”. Mind you, I don’t agree with what he said about it two years ago when starting the proposed pay rise was “simply unacceptable”. But that’s Dave for you, facing whichever way the political wind blows.
I wonder, though, what chancellor George Osborne thinks about the 10% pay rise MPs are getting. He has been saying for many years that “we are all in this together”, which implies that, well, we are all in this together, except that some are more in it than others.
The slight contradiction I can see is with the pay of public sector workers. I have long believed that they too should have their pay determined independently and where appropriate by comparison with other workers in the private sector, but for some odd reason the government doesn’t seem to support it for anyone other than its own people. Funny that. Public sector workers have been condemned to a further four years of 1% pay rises, or as should call them, pay cuts. No independent evaluation here, then. Just a simple diktat from our rulers that they’re all right, Jack. They are more important than us because they deserve their pay rise and everyone else doesn’t. Only MPs, according to the Tories, can have a rate for the job. And have the increase backdated three months.
All this proves is that MPs are no brighter than the rest of us and maybe even less so. There was, and indeed remains, much anger at the recent expenses fiddling scandals by our MPs, their profession tainted by their own dishonesty and arrogance. They reckoned that their pay was below the level it should be and in order to ensure that the public could be convinced that they were not calculating how much they could get in salaries, they allowed someone independent to do it. Did it not occur to any of them that many public sector workers were not entitled to the same thing and therefore be slightly less than thrilled with it? And now it’s a mess, with politicians squabbling over their pay rise which they wanted to be sorted out by someone else and now it has been, they don’t like it.
This is yet another issue that the government is getting out of the way early in its term. Like closing down the BBC, flogging off the NHS, castrating free trade unions and cutting benefits, giving themselves a large pay rise is something they think they can get away with and you know what? They will.
The Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (IPSA) decided two years ago that MPs’ pay had fallen behind, presumably behind other MPs in similar work. Public sector workers – unimportant people like doctors, nurses, soldiers, teachers – will get what we tell them they can have. We can’t have some independent organisation sort it out: we might all get a pay rise.
The blatant and brazen behaviour of our politicians becomes ever more breathtaking.
