http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-31624695

Staggering. Just staggering.

An accusation which of course could never be levelled at the Tory party.


Remind me again William, what jobs have you had other than politics?

I appreciate politics by its' nature trades in hypocrisy, but Jesus wept.

Every constituency votes for a party. The MP returned is based on a random selection of those who voted for that party - a bit like jury service. It could, quite honestly, be you.

I like the idea, but isn't it notionally at least supposed to be a secret ballot

Indeed it is, but as your ballot paper number is recorded against your name when it's issued, this can work.

Whilst nice in principal as always the devil is in the detail

After all what I do in my free time is my choice – If I am an MP and work the 40(ish) hrs a week for my constituency what I do at the weekends is my choice - be it watch rugby go dogging or give speeches for £5k / time

Also what about continued development – there any many jobs that require a number of hours of work to keep your licence (from a doctor to an HGV driver)

And then there are so many loop holes – I set up a Company with my wife as the director and it books and organises my speaking engagements. The Company pays me nothing ( I do it for free) but bills £5K for my time. Under the rules I have not earnt a penny . Now if you stop this you will also stop me working the weekends at my local charity shop for free

Well of course.


In principle, yes. In practice, what about conflict of interest? Nobody's saying you can't be a doctor or a window cleaner but what about paid directorships at companies that are tendering for government contracts? And there's the fundamental fact that a lot of MPs don't actually do anywhere near 40 hours a week. If they did, they wouldn't actually have time for so many paid outside interests.

Fundamentally the point of the argument is this : If you are employed as an MP, your job is to represent your constituents. That should be your primary responsibility. Anything which conflicts with that either in terms of interest or effort should not be allowed. If you can't stick to that rule, you shouldn't stand as an MP.


Parliament gets quite significant scheduled breaks. I think it would be perfectly fine to say 'during these times we expect you to work say 20 hours a week as an MP and the rest of the time you can use to keep any other vocational skills you have up to certification'. No need to change the current system very much at all, really.

Although I suspect there is not and never has been an MP who was a certified HGV driver when they successfully stood for election. This the problem I have with some of the rhetoric around this argument - a lot of the cases people bring up for not doing this kind of stuff are actually not realistic. Parliament is stuffed with professional politicians and lawyers. They're the majority of people in there by a large margin. Saying 'this will stop road sweepers from becoming MPs' is ludicrous when the deposit required to stand is far beyond the means of any road sweeper in Britain. Being an MP is a role where in the vast majority the people who take it up have either a career political or professional background. Any rules should be tailored towards the reality, not spurious edge cases that have never happened and almost certainly never will anyway.


This is how the declaration of interests system is supposed to work - it's fine to do stuff like that as long as it's publicly declared you're doing so. The issue with that system is that it's essentially self-policing and the public at large, with let's face it significant justification, have no longer any reason to believe MPs are capable of policing themselves. There need to be strict, unambiguous rules and significant (i.e. jail time) penalties for breaching them. Until we get that, this argument will rumble on indefinitely.

And (in theory they do declare it – now it should maybe better policed and more serious punishments made for those that transgress but banning all work in OTT




Agree – see my statement above re better policing