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| Mark Steel |
Thursday 26 February 2015
Cameron is right — nothing keeps you in touch with the
common person like being paid £5k a day
Without second jobs, will the Tories now try to raise the
minimum wage to £67,000?
Members of Parliament should have second
jobs, said David Cameron, to give them a “range of experience”, and keep
them in touch with the common person. So that’s why they do the sort of second
jobs they have, because nothing keeps you in touch with the common person as
much as being paid five grand a day consulting an Arab bank.
At the end of a hard day’s consulting they think “how
refreshing to spend a day with common chief executives and owners of oilfields,
to hear the insights of a broad range of millionaires”. The alternative way to
keep in touch with your constituents would be to spend time with your
constituents, but they’re all aloof and hard to reach, especially if you’re
travelling regularly to Dubai ,
so bollocks to them.
The Conservatives’ Peter Tapsell said allowing second jobs
was essential, otherwise the House of Commons would be full of “obsessive
crackpots”. And it’s the same with any job. You don’t want postmen obsessively
delivering post all day like crackpots, so they should be encouraged to nip off
after half an hour and earn eight grand for speaking at an arms fair, to make
sure they have a range of experience.
In
any case, as Malcolm Rifkind explained, it’s not possible to live in London on an MP’s salary
of £67,000. This means when Rifkind passes a housing estate in Barking or
Peckham, he must assume everyone he sees there earns more than £67,000, and if
he finds out they’re on less than that, that they can’t be living. So it’s just
as well he’s resigned as he must be under the impression that London has been taken over by zombies. No
wonder he needs to earn as much as he can. He’s building himself an electrified
underground bunker to withstand a flesh-eating apocalypse.
This suggests a radical turn in Conservative attitudes
towards incomes. Presumably they will now insist that increasing the minimum
wage to £8 an hour is ridiculous, as it’s not nearly enough and must be at
least £67,000, plus benefits as that’s not enough to live on.
But the politicians who were filmed offering their influence
for money want to transform more than Britain ’s pay structure, because
Rifkind and Jack Straw both say the programme that exposed them was unfair, as
they wouldn’t have behaved that way if they had known they were being filmed.
And this is a reasonable point, just as someone convicted of burning down a
public building might say, “That’s not fair, because I wouldn’t have done it if
I’d known I was on CCTV”.
They also maintain there was nothing underhand about the
services they were offering. This may be true, and when Straw offered to work
for a Chinese company, it never occurred to him that the reason they were
interested in him was he could use his position to influence ministers. He
thought they’d heard he was really good at filing. And when he said he charges
between £5,000 and £8,000 for a speech, he never imagined companies pay that to
get access to the Government. He gets that much because he does a hilarious
impression of Saddam Hussein, and juggles with cauliflowers for an extra 50
quid.
But both of them boasted that their position as ex-Foreign
Secretary would make it easy to introduce clients to ambassadors and ministers,
for information and influence, in return for a fee. Neither of them sees
anything wrong in this, maybe because anyone can do the same. So if you’re
disabled and had your benefits stopped because Atos claimed you were fit for
work, all you’d have to do is offer Rifkind £8,000 and he’ll slip you into a
cocktail party to have a word with George Osborne and get it all sorted. What
could be more democratic than that?
They also both insist they’ve done nothing dishonest. And
again, they haven’t, as long as they can show that when they stood for election
they put up billboards saying “The reason I want to be your MP is so I can
charge eight grand a pop introducing people to ambassadors to take Britain
forward”.
So David Cameron is right, and MPs having second jobs can
only benefit us. He even complained that Ed Miliband’s proposal for preventing
second jobs for MPs “would allow somebody to be a trade union official but it
wouldn’t allow for someone to run a family business or a family shop”.
Precisely, because much worse than MPs using their position
as consultants is the number of MPs who are also trade union officials. At the
moment there aren’t any but what if there were? It’s all very well dealing with
actual MPs actually charging thousands to corrupt their position, but what
about the imaginary trade union ones who aren’t doing it because they don’t
exist, which is typical of the slimy ways of the trade unions.
What if Father Christmas wanted to be an MP? Would we say he
couldn’t, just because he had a second job, even though it brought him a range
of experience? And now all we need is Tony Blair to complain that Jack Straw’s
a disgrace because he should charge 10 times more, and Ed Balls to say whenever
he pays for corruption, he always asks for a receipt for VAT, because that’s
the straight kind of chap he is.
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