Our greedy, thieving MPs try to justify their £10,000 pay rise. Good grief!

Over the past few days there have been several articles in the press by MPs and sycophantic Westminster journalists trying to justify giving our useless, underperforming MPs a £10,000 pay rise. The arguments they rehash are always the same: if MPs “only” get £66,000 a year, then only the rich can afford to “serve”: if you want quality people in parliament, you have to pay a decent wage: and it’s not the MPs who want a pay rise, it’s the supposedly “independent” IPSA that is recommending the pay rise.

So let’s look at a few facts:

1. With the EU making about 75% of our laws, we don’t need 650 MPs any more – 200 would be quite enough. Remember, the US only has 435 members of Congress for about 300 million people

2. As their workload has gone down over the last 15 years, the number of people in the political classes has almost doubled. MPs’ staff numbers have gone up by over 30%. Moreover, in addition to 650 MPs, we now have 129 MSPs in Scotland, 60 members of the Welsh Assembly, and 108 politicians in Northern Ireland. They too have huge numbers of secretaries, advisers and hangers-on

3. One good scam our MPs have is the “Government Minister Scam” – in Westminster there are an incredible 90 supposed government ministers. This gives Britain around twice as many government ministers as Germany, France, Spain or Italy. Why so many ministers? Because it gives MPs 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.

4. IPSA (Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority) is not “independent”. A couple of years ago, Cameron threatened to abolish IPSA if it didn’t become more “MP-friendly”. Since then, IPSA has increased MPs’ allowances and loosened expenses rules so that MPs are now claiming around £40,000 each in tax-free expenses more than they did before the expenses scandal broke

5. One of the major concessions IPSA made under pressure from MPs was to increase MPs’ allowance to pay staff 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

6. MPs have long being lobbying for a salary increase from around £66,000 to closer to £90,000. IPSA bureaucrats had two choices – either they could oppose MPs’ pressure for a pay rise and lose their well-paid, well-pensioned bureaucratic jobs. Or they could cave in to pressure from MPs and recommend a pay rise. It’s hardly surprising IPSA decided to keep their jobs and give more of our money to our thieving MPs

7. As the EU and regional assemblies make so many of our laws, our MPs have less and less to do. Ten years ago, they “only” had 90 days holiday a year. Because of a lack of parliamentary business, this has been increased to over 100 days a year

8. Our MPs have so little to do that many have second, third and even fourth jobs earning many of them hundreds of thousands of pounds a year each

9. If we look at the result of our MPs’ work, we’ll see their incompetence. Our debt is increasing by £120bn a year and we’ll soon go bankrupt – how can MPs who achieved so little demand ever more money?

Sadly, there is nothing we can do to stop this new attack on our money by our utterly corrupt, hypocritical, self-serving, thieving MPs and sycophantic political journalists. But as our MPs appear on the media justifying bigger salaries and bigger expenses, please remember – they are not worth it and most of them are not even necessary

(To find out more, a few people could buy a copy of my latest book GREED UNLIMITED. Maybe?)