Time we paid our MPs smarter

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/09/time-paid-mps-salary-smarter

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Doesn't your heart bleed for our poor MPs? Back in January a parliamentary survey asked them what they thought an appropriate basic salary would be for their job. On average, they plumped for the modest figure of £86,250 per year. Not that they all agreed: Labour and Liberal Democrat members suggested around £77,000 per year as a suitable rate, while the typical Tory thought that £96,740 would be needed to get out of bed of a morning. Those moats won't clean themselves, after all.

This week the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority will rule that MPs should be given a paltry 11% pay rise, taking their income little higher than £74,000. It's an outrage. Were Charles Dickens around today, he would surely be writing Ebenezer Scrooge as Sir Ian Kennedy, the authority's chairman, cruelly depriving little Bob Cratchit MP of even the most basic black truffle and caviar stuffing for his family festivities.

This pay rise for 650 of our nation's finest will cost us a mere £4.6m per year and will doubtless be considered worth every penny by all public sector workers currently looking at their fourth year on a pay freeze, or the hundreds of thousands of people relying on food banks to keep their children from starvation, or the 2 or 3 million contemplating a winter of fuel poverty.

There will be those who will shake their heads dismissively at my chippy scorn. Members of parliament remain underpaid, they will insist. Why would a clever, high-achieving individual from the worlds of business or finance bring their talents to public service when they could make 10 times the money – at the very least – in their original career? This might make sense, in theory, when written down. In practice, I don't think anyone could look at the houses of parliament or the cabinet room and say, gee, what this place really needs is more rich people.

Such is the nature of inequality in modern Britain that an MP's salary is, simultaneously, an almost unimaginably huge amount of cash and a paltry, insulting sum that barely qualifies as pin money.

The figure would appear to sit at a vanishingly remote distance both from the vast majority of the population, who earn less than half that amount, but also from the majority of those influential decision-makers who might be described in old fashioned terms as the ruling class. It's worth recalling that the mayor of London once described the £250,000 he earned from writing a column as "chicken feed".

The reality is that even the most generous public salaries can never compete with the higher ranges of the private sector, and should not even begin to try. Those of us looking at the issue from below the national average will only ever see this debate as an argument about how big the bucket should be to count as a bucketload of cash. It is worth noting, too, that a salary numbering in the sixties or seventies is vastly more generous for a fresh-faced, twentysomething political arriviste than it is for a distinguished septuagenarian with perhaps 40 years' political experience.

One of the less commonly noted oddities in the parliamentary system is how lucrative a cabinet position can be. A promotion to the front bench can almost double a politician's annual salary. This creates large financial incentives for MPs to toe the party line and place obedience to party leadership over conscience or accountability to their electorate. I can't help thinking that democracy would be rather better served if MPs received pay rises as increments, with years of service to constituents being rewarded rather than promotions and internal patronage.

The promise is that, after 2015, MPs' pay will be pegged to the average national income. Although I will perhaps miss these ritualised exchanges between politicians and the public, when each reveals what we secretly think of the other, on balance the change cannot come soon enough. That said, the real question should not be whether we can pay MPs more; it should whether we can pay them smarter.

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