Vocal Voices

£5,000 to £16,000 per day's "work".

Those are the figures Malcolm Rifkind and Jack Straw are expecting according to a sting by the Telegraph and C4.

They are obviously at the top of the food chain, but what are other MPs asking for similar "services" and who is asking for these same services.

Rifkind and Straw have reported themselves to Parliament's commissioner for standards to check whether they have broken rules made up by..... MPs.

As far as I am concerned this sort of behaviour should be illegal and the parties involved, on both sides, thrown in jail. The government of the people should not be open to this sort of behaviour.

Workingman wrote:
As far as I am concerned this sort of behavior should be illegal and the parties involved, on both sides, thrown in jail. The government of the people should not be open to this sort of behavior.

I quite agree. I've just been reading in the D.M.about this 'cash for access' business.
What has happened to the old British sense of fair play? Is the quest for more, and
yet more money ruining us? How many more are at it?

There's a programme about it tonight at 8 o'clock on Channel 4.

Aggers wrote:What has happened to the old British sense of fair play? Is the quest for more, and
yet more money ruining us? How many more are at it?

It's been going on forever. Lloyd George sold peerages, honours and influence in parliament to try and bolster funds for the Liberals to keep running back in the 1920's. Old School tie and "Access" via contacts has ever been the way in our parliament. Of course now we can't have Old Etonians in Government because they might actually know what they are doing, it's money which finds it way to power, not a contact network.

If they want to clean this out, then they need to mandate that no parliamentarian can do anything but PM work. Of course then they would have to supplement their incomes to the amount of their potential income out of the house. Some can make millions, that would be fun wouldn't it.....

I'm sorry I don't take a working mans attitude to this. People with skills and knowledge are always at a premium. Whilst there is a fine line between "cash for questions" which is illegal and "Cash for Access", or put another way, paying for introduction, the only way that we will ever see this resolved is to legislate for it.

Interestingly I don't think that legislation has a chance of getting through the house and even less chance of getting through the Lords.

I'm far, far more interested in this. How many press inches did that get in the Gruniaad or the sensatoinals???

Suff wrote:If they want to clean this out, then they need to mandate that no parliamentarian can do anything but PM work. Of course then they would have to supplement their incomes to the amount of their potential income out of the house. Some can make millions, that would be fun wouldn't it.....

I have been persuaded that raising the level of MP's pay in return it for being their only job is not such a bad thing.

If that were introduced nothing at all would need to be supplemented. The salary for the job would be made known and if it is not to the liking of someone who can potentially earn more elsewhere nobody is forcing them to apply. After all, it is not as if the only people with skills and knowledge come from certain social classes and attended a few expensive public schools.

Opening parliament up to the masses, as such a scheme would do, would bring in a greater range of skills and different types of knowledge than with the present system. Bring it on.

Yes WM, it was a bit maliciously TIC wasn't it.

You are right though. If they want people to run the country and they want Good people to run the country, then they have to pay for it. Although our thoughts on this have always been somewhere around "service" and "recompense".

The one thing it might mean is that we have a constantly changing political leadership. Because the only way to get the "recompense" side would be to leave. The question then is, where do you get your experienced politicians? We've just had an abject lesson in political inexperience with that whole mess in Brussels over the last week or so. It was only when the older and more experienced players became willing to face the wrath of Germany that the situation became calmed down and a possible workable agreement was put in place.

Imagine our government working like that. Might be fun to watch them wrestling in the aisles of Westminster but no other country would take the UK seriously. Just as few are taking Greece seriously right now. That is a mistake. Letting a bunch of inexperienced yahoo's loose with a country that has enough nuclear weapons to denude half the European continent is not something I want to contemplate.

So some kind of compromise is going to have to be found for this. After all, the largest corporates in the world have Total assets only slightly larger than one year's worth of UK GDP. The board and the CEO and the Chairman get millions every year in compensation. That is how they attract talent.

Just how much is good government worth??

Suff - I found your link to the article on Entryism most interesting.

Personally I think that, as this country is a Christian country,
persons of other faiths should not be allowed into Parliament.

My biggest disappointment in my lifetime has been the failure
of the leaders of the Church Of England to make a stand against
some of the stupid and debased legislation that has been passed
in recent years. I'm sure you know what I mean - I'm referring to
certain legislation that, in a more sensible time, would have been
sufficient to have the proposer committed to an asylum.

When I was a youngster, churches were always well filled. Today
they are not. Perhaps that is what is wrong with society today.
The Devil has taken over.

Aggers I don't have a really strong objection to them being in parliament. I just don't want the civil service inundated with people who do not observe British values, practise rampant nepotism and are impossible to remove no matter how badly they behave.

If they want to put themselves up and the people want to vote for them, fine.

In fact most of those MP's are dead against the kind of politics which you are alluding to after. They are allowed to say it though. We are not.

THAT is the point which I don't like. We should not pander to anyone, minority or majority. It should be one sensible rule for all and it should be good government not bad.

So on the topic of cash for "favours" (we do think of them as political whores don't we?), if we want to stop it we need to legislate and then we need to compensate them all for the loss of external income. That will wind up costing us more because not all of them can do other work and not all of them want to. But by god they will all take the money and run if we offer it.

Government is like everything else. You get out of it what you put into it. This goes for voting, oversight and funding. Currently the UK has a very poor record on all 3.

I love this idea of compensation...... not.

If I go to work for an employer as an employee they will expect me to work for them, and them alone. If I were to tell them I had a nice little side-line and it paid more than they were paying me and would like to keep it on I am certain that they would not offer me compensation to pack it in, they would more than likely tell me to "sod off". That is what we should tell the likes of Rifkind and Straw... and more than a few others.

If they do not like the deal they can stand down and let someone else do it.

Whatever they were paid, there would always be some MPs who would seek to supplement their income.

At least Rifkind has had the decency to step down at the upcoming election.

Which is more than can be said for Plebgate Mitchell ....