Hands up who's surprised?

Don't look at me. I was never a great fan of the allowance. If they left because they were above retirement age why should they get an allowance to ease them to another job? Also it is not as if they did not know that they could lose their seat. They also had five years to prepare for the outcome, and had been fiddling their expenses. It would not surprise me that the MP's in gaol for expenses fraud recieved it as well. I hope that buggered up their legal aid claim.

OK so I hate MP's but in reality if you were offered £65k as effectively redundancy payment wouldn't you take it ?

So its the system that's wrong

As I understood it, £65K is the standard "constructive dismissal" settlement for everyone anyway.

Well it is a redundancy payment (OK a generous one but still a redundancy payment)

IIRC you only get the full amount if you are over a certain age or been in the house a certain number of years. Otherwise I thik its a lower (but I’m sure still generous) payment

Its back to the old problem that if the person who sets the remuneration is the same person that receives it then it will be very generous. This is the same whether its PM’s or CEO’s of companies

Actually, isn't the one thing it is absolutely not is as 'redundancy payment'. They haven't been made redundant. Their job hasn't been phased out. There still will be an MP for Dunny-On-The-Wold or wherever, unless boundary changes have made their seat actually disappear then fair enough. In the case of the rest of them though, it's just the people who get to vote have decided some other bugger can do the job better than they can. They're not being made redundant they're effectively being sacked for incompetence or, if they decided not to stand, have effectively resigned. I'm sure most of the people being paid statutory redundancy pay -which is what, a weeks pay per year of service or so isn't it? - from public service jobs that have been cut because MPs decided to use umpty-billions of our money on bailing out merchant bankers who dug themselves into a hole, threw further billions down the drain of Iraq/Afghanistan and give multi-millions to pay for the education of the children of Pakistan while simultaneously closing down libraries all over Britain look rather poorly on MPs getting far more money far less deservedly and calling it the same thing.


Quite. I see no reason why the increase in MP's pay shouldn't be linked directly to say, the average rate of pay increase for other public sector workers.

Better to link it to minimum wage. Which since the Tories want to whither would over time reduce the cost of paying them.

You don’t want to hear my plans for MPs pay, do you? Oh, you do.

They get paid the average pay for the public sector. They also have to relinquish any personal savings and property worth more that a certain amount (possibly linked to the average house value that your average public sector worker can afford). Any extra saving,s property, shares etc., etc. must be held in trust and cannot be released until 5 years after they stopped being an MP, OR until any disciplinary hearings/expenses fiddling/wrongdoing court case/prison time are done - whichever ends the latest. So, behave and you get your stuff back after 5 years. Misbehave, and you may not get it back until you are out of prison. Any fines that you can’t pay can be taken from the value of the trust fund. You must, of course, be a UK citizen, paying tax. You must also be able to demonstrate employment outside of the field of politics for at least 5 years prior to becoming an MP. Whilst am MP, you can not hold any other positions. Want to be an MP? Then it’s your full time job. It is not a hobby.

You also get lodgings in London - which come as part of the job,. If you must have a second home, you must fund it entirely out of your own pocket.

When ceasing to be an MP, you would also be barred from taking employment in jobs which may benefit from your previous position - for five years.

Basically - if you want to be an MP, you have to have your feet on the ground. None of this being a graduate from some Economics & Politics course at Oxford nonsense which they all seem to have now. None of this buying or influencing your way up the pole either.

In addition to that comprehensive list I would like to add that MPs must only use the NHS for all healthcare including dental, and public transport whilst commuting.

Why not link housing costs to housing benefit? That way if housing benefit is so generous they will have no trouble finding a place in central London. Linking it to average civil servants wage will be rigged because they will link it to the top civil servants who they have linked to top businesses. There needs to be an end to the corruption of ex ministers joining the industry that they were in charge of.

Also a ban on MP's from ouside the constituency, and also a three year residency requirement. So no more of these parachuted candidates. A ban on party lists.

Also one requirement is that MP's must use state services where possible, no private health care and no private schools.

I said “public sector” which includes nurses, teachers, etc. all those well thought of but poorly paid people. I meant the whole lot - not a cherry picked handful of Whitehall mandarins.



Yes - I’d go along with that.

I can understand what you mean but I do not see this even being remotely acceptable. It will get rid of many who are only in it for the perks of power and contacts that they can use afterwards. Look at Tony Blair made millions personally since leaving office.

Sounds perfect to me

There will be comments that high pay is needed to attract decent candidates. I doubt that. I would imagine that there are many who would make great constituency MP's no matter what the pay was.