Just a reminder how much money our greedy, largely superfluous MPs are actually pocketing

As I predicted in my blog on�16 November, our MPs have started lobbying for a pay rise from�about �65,700 to somewhere around �86,000. Of course, they’re not demanding this directly. Oh no. Instead, the misleadingly-named Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (IPSA) is recommending the pay rise. In my latest book (GREED UNLIMITED pp 72-76)�I explain how IPSA has been turned by Bercow, Cameron, Adam Afriyie, Tom Harris�and others from a supposed “watchdog”�into a neutered, toothless and thoroughly obedient lapdog that does whatever its masters tell it.

But let’s remind ourselves how much of our money our MPs get. Salary – �65,700. Their allowance to pay staff was recently increased from �115,000 to �137,200 (and �144,000 for London MPs). Many MPs�hand around �30,000 a year of this to wives, partners, children, friends, friends�of friends and so on. Then there are MPs’ generous, taxfree expenses. So successful have our MPs been in watering down IPSA�s rules and increasing their own allowances that in the year before the 2010 election they claimed about �130m in expenses, yet last year this had shot up to nearer �150m – about �30,000 per MP more than before the expenses scandal broke.

But we’re not finished yet, there’s much more of our money flowing into MPs’ pockets. A truly incredible 90 MPs are supposedly “government ministers”. With 362 MPs in the Coalition, about one in four is a minister, giving Britain over twice as many ministers as Germany, Italy, Spain or France. Why so many ministers? Because it gives MPs (and some Lords) real salaries of from �89,435 (33 parliamentary secretaries) to �92,000 (20 whips) to �98,740 (29 ministers of state)�to �134,565 (21�cabinet ministers). Top civil servants have been known to complain that they can’t find enough things for all these ministers to do.�One parliamentary committee wrote a rapidly-buried report “What do ministers do?” recommending a cut in the number of paid ministers.

Then, of course, many MPs have second, third and fourth jobs – which they only get because they are MPs – earning them �100,000, �200,000, �300,000, to socialist David Miliband’s �500,000 a year while being paid by us to represent their constituents.

But all�this is not enough for our greedy, self-serving, hypocritical, lying, thieving MPs. They want much more. They now plan a two-pronged attack on our money. On the one hand they want to increase their salaries. On the other, they want further loosening of the rules on what they can claim in expenses. Also they want to have their expenses claims exempt from Freedom of Information rules so we can never again find out how much they are stealing.

Sadly, there is nothing we can do to stop this new attack on our money by our utterly corrupt, hypocritical, self-serving, thieving MPs. But as our MPs appear on the media justifying bigger salaries and bigger expenses, please remember we don�t need 650 MPs any more. With the EU and the regional assemblies making most of our laws, 200 MPs at Westminster would be quite enough � after all, the US only has 435 members of Congress for over 250 million people.