“The readiness of politicians to relinquish power amazes me…..Take the European constitution, now rebranded as the Lisbon treaty. I read all the drafts of that document, spoke to lawyers and became convinced that its calculated opacity was a charter for the creeping takeover of national policy by bureaucrats and judges. There were brilliant MPs who could debate every inch of the detail – David Miliband, Gisela Stuart, David Heathcoat-Amory, Chris Huhne. But I met others who hadn’t even read the document and looked incredulous that I had. When the annual EU membership fee is £6.5 billion, when EU directives have driven almost half of the regulations passed here since 1998, and when implementing those regulations has cost £106 billion (according to a recent study by Open Europe), it is not surprising that people ask what MPs are doing.”
As she points out in an excellent Times column, the contempt many of us feel for MPs is not just driven by their corruption. It is far more serious than that. It is that a group of people, either through apathy, venality, EU fanaticism or blind cowardice, have decided that they need to transfer powers away from the traditional cockpit of British politics. MPs are admitting they have little point other than to vote on minor, parish-pump matters. In which case, there is little case for paying them more than a local town councillor, or paying them anything at all.
The Times has a pretty good editorial on reforms that are needed. I have my quibbles, but it is generally on the right track. My main point of disagreement, however, is that none of the changes will significantly alter the balance between the state and the individual until the former is drastically reduced in size.
“The readiness of politicians to relinquish power amazes me.
No reason for amazement. Giving up power is exactly what most modern politicians desire. For with the power goes responsibility. With that shed you can enjoy a very pleasant lifestyle.
Far better to stay idle in office among hundreds or thousands of other office holders and be responsible for nothing. Just keep running up those big expenses, attending pleasant gatherings paid for by others, drawing a generous salary, and waiting for the even more generous pension to follow.
It isn’t as if being ruled from the EU means an MP will in any way be inconvenienced. The average member has virtually no power anyway. And, given the chance, he/she would no doubt double or triple the number of MPs so as to have even less.
M.P.s deny that they are in Parliament for the pay and perks (most recently in the pathetic defence of M.P.s presented by the B.B.C. “Today” radio show – with an actor reading the sad words of an M.P. being driven to despair and some leftist from the “Independent” comming on and so on). However, whilst they are paid the idea is there.
If someone makes too much of a problem of himself (for example by demanding that power be taken back from the European Union) they will find the chances of promotion in the establishment political parties (including, sadly, the Conservative party) decline.
For those in politics for the money (or, to be polite, to “provide for their families”) or for those who do not start out that way but end up that way – this fear of damaging their chances is an important factor.
For a Parliament where people really did not fear “losing their jobs” (because their party establishment, rather than the voters, turned against them) one would have to return to unpaid M.P.s (as they were before 1911).
Remember the American Congress is not really better – most of the people there do not read the hundreds of pages long Bills they pass (with the trillions of Dollars of government spending they contain).
This is why they can pass ever more government regulations (for example under Bush) and then say the financial crises is caused by “deregulation” – and so on.
They pass spending bills without reading them and the pass regulation bills without reading them.
Recently the (wildly corrupt) Chairman Henry Waxman mocked the idea of reading a globle warming regulation Bill – he laughed at the idea of reading the Bill before passing it (and admitted he did not really know what was in the Bill). He even had a “speed reader” in to read the Bill (after some Congressmen made the point that it had not been studied) – as a public stunt mock the whole notion of knowing what a Bill was about before passing it.
Whilst members of Congress (both House and Senate) get paid and look on politics as a job (or come to look on politics as a job) this sort of thing will continue.
Of course it is true that “pay, perks and pension” are not the only things that motivate scum (and they are scum) like Henry Waxman, Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank and Chris Dodd – they are also motivated by a general ideological position of ever more power for the government.
However, there will never really be a real check on statism (whether it is the ignorant statism of George Bush, the semi ideological statsim of Gordon Brown, or the fully ideological statism of Barack Obama) while politicians know that their whole world will come crashing down if they make too much trouble.
Once people become financally dependent on politics for their income hope of real oversight (of the E.U. or anything else) grows weak.
Looks like some of you good folks have lost the place. The media has already given you the whole story.
Everything that went wrong in the Mother of Parliaments was all the fault of that evil, stupid working-class Speaker. He forced — forced! do you hear — all those good MPs to fiddle their expenses and line their pockets. But now he is gone. Sauron is Dead!
The entire Political Class can now return to business as usual. And the people are once more free to devote their entire attention to the next episode of “Coronation Street”.
… the contempt many of us feel for MPs is not just driven by their corruption.
But ‘us’ ≠ ‘the general public’. (I’m not sure it includes me either, because I don’t feel contempt for MPs in general, though I couldn’t say the same for most current ministers.) Both you and Cavendish suppose far too much political/constitutional awareness and interest on behalf of the general public, I fear.
I wish the article were correct in that respect. I really do. But I don’t think it is. The analysis of the real problem with Westminster politics is first class. But to attribute current public anger to any widespread appreciation that MPs have little power and are therefore ‘getting money for nothing’ is mistaken. Nor is it really anger at hypocrisy. I think Anthony Steen’s diagnosis of envy is actually more accurate.
The received wisdom of the man in the street has always been that politicians are ‘all the same and only in it for what they can get’ – which is doublethought with an authoritarian presupposition that if there is any social problem, substantial or confected, ‘the government’ (a term encompassing both Westminster and Whitehall) or ‘they’ should do something about it. What’s changed is the availability of detail.
We live in a world where daytime TV and lottery scratchcards can present £100,000 as an unimaginable, life-changing, prize. For a majority it might well be. Most people cannot comprehend how well off their GP is – doing at least as well as an ordinary MP. But they never see it.
It is because the meaningless cliché of political corruption is now embodied in terms the most ordinary person can understand, with pictures of the sort of objects purchased with ‘our money’, that there is such fury. That the part-time chairman of the South East England Development Agency spent more of our money on taxis in 2006-7 than all MPs put together made a headline or two, but I never heard calls for quangocrats to be hung from lampposts – it is all too abstract and aggregate. An £8,000 TV, a floating duck house, ‘moat dredging’ have metonymic force: they form a dramatic impression of what may be a new idea to many: that all MPs live with an opulence that will forever be denied to the average punter, at the average punter’s expense. The picture readily attaches itself to MPs because the corrupt politics cliché has prepared the ground.
The truth is that weird though their system may be, MPs have their hands less deep in the public pocket than others. Much of the senior public sector (not to mention its consultants), lives at the public expense at a similar level to managers and partners in corporations or professional firms. For the average punter this too is unreachable – but also invisible and unimagined – opulence. An executive director in an executive agency can expect about £130-£140,000 in salary plus a pension and other benefits. Guido, who is not disposed to underestimate, calculates thus:
I wonder if a top broadsheet columnist can get by on that? The Telegraph’s series on ‘the coping classes’ a couple of years back is anything to go by, probably not. But the public in general finds it to be incomprehensible riches, and does not bother to grasp what MPs are doing at all. Those of us who wouldn’t mind what they cost if only they could and would control the growth of the modern bureaucratic state, are in a small minority.
“would not mind what they cost if…..”
Guy – if people are dependent on the government for their income they are not likely to “rock he boat” by questioning basic statism.
A few very brave people may challenge things, but most will think to themselves “if I attack the N.H.S. or other such things, the leader will put pressure on for me to get out of the Parliament and my local Association will go along with the party line – and my family will suffer”.
Once a person (particularly a family man) depends on politics for his income then the chances of him being an effective limit on statism are very low.
The payment of M.P.s should stop – and the days and hours that Parliament sits should be drastically reduced.
Texas has many millions of people in it (I believe more than 20 million) – yet its State Legislature sits for only a tiny fraction of the number of days that the British House of Commons does (although, sadly, members of the Texas State legislature are paid – although the lower house of the New Hampshire State Legislature were paid virtually nothing till very recently, and New Hampshire followed policies of strict limits on government).
M.P.s must have the time to earn a living (not depend on politics).
It is the independence of M.P.s (not the amount of time they sit in Parliament) that matters.
And that independence must include financial independence.
Being in politics should not be a “job” or a “career”.
If it becomes such a job then we get people like Speaker Pelosi, or Chairman Waxman, or Chairman Wrangle, or Chairmen Frank. To point at the American House of Representatives as a example.
People who have never had honest employment in their lives – and who allow wild statist Bills of hundreds of pages to be written.
Indeed they puch these Bills into law – and even admit that they do not even bother to read the Bills, indeed they think it is all a joke.
Such are the consequences of making politics a profession.
Although things have got worse over time – as Glenn Beck pointed out, whatever one thinks of the main highways Bill back in the 1950’s, at least it was only 27 pages long and the members of Congress had actually read it.
Of course in those days the mainstream media were not so blatently biased as they are today.
The media were mainly on the left (even in the 1950’s) – but nothing like in the way they are now.
For example a Chairman of one of the main committees of the House of Representatives could not have first had a political relationship (indeed a sexual relationship) with the head of Fannie Mae, pushing this institution into making insane loans – and then come up smelling of roses when the thing collapses.
Such things as the nonreporting of the corruption of Barney Frank, Barack earmark Obama, Michelle hosptial payoff, Obama – and so on, this could not have happened in the 1950’s to anything like this level.
However, this leads me to conclude that the mainstream media in America is doomed. As even the moderate left is becomming disgusted by the bias and the cover ups of the mainstream media.
Paul points to what the founding fathers in America knew and said. Only secure property can create an independence from government. In that respect the rich can govern better.
Of course wealth alone is not sufficient. It must be in the hands of leaders who worship neither wealth itself or themselves for owning it.
Money was not cited as the root of evil. Love of money is the disease.
Marx had the same insight about poverty equating to dependence. As we know, he saw a different remedy.