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Stop agonising over whether they should be able to have second jobs when it's only a small minority that do, and most of those Tories.

Why can’t they carry on receiving a wage that puts them comfortably in the top 5% of earners and still be banned from having second jobs (with special dispensation for CPD for anyone with an actual profession)? Why does banning second jobs have to come with a pay rise?

Paying massive salaries doesn’t necessarily attract “talent” nor does it do anything to ensure incorruptibility. Let’s take a quick look at the enormous pay checks of all those in the banking sector who were committing massive open fraud in the run up to tanking the global economy in 2008.

Most MPs are not corrupt or lazy, clumping them all together as a bad lot is very useful for the people who want large parts of the public to be disillusioned with politics and with the possibility of things ever being better.

That said, on the subject of corruption, it's very easy to resist temptation when no one is offering you anything. I'm not sure what my price is but I bet I have one.

Most MPs are not corrupt or lazy

Most MP's are Tories, your post is invalid.

Let’s take a quick look at the enormous pay checks of all those in the banking sector who were committing massive open fraud in the run up to tanking the global economy in 2008.

When you drill into it o ny a tiny percentage of bankers were acting fraudulently. The cause of 2008 wasn't fraud, it played out perfectly within the rules. The rules, or effective lack of them, were the problem.

Did you just @ WillMelling !?

a £27,000 takeaway habit

Back when I was paid more than I should have been and lived in Brighton I once ordered so much Deliveroo over a couple of years that I was invited to a party they hosted as some sort of Deliveroo high roller.

Coincidentally around the time I went from 15 stone to 30.

it played out perfectly within the rules

The players pushed to have those rules changed to their benefit, knowing it could put others at unfair disadvantage or put the system at risk. The Glass-Steagal Act was 70 years old when it was repealed, and not a decade later the exact thing it was designed to prevent from reoccurring, occurred.

Paying massive salaries doesn’t necessarily attract “talent”

This is great news - we can save money on salaries of head teachers, heads of NHS trusts, council leaders, most of the people at the BBC etc etc

Sarcasm aside, it is actually Labour who suffer more from attracting talent into the parliamentary party due to the pay levels. There are a lot of capable people out there who support Labour who would never dream of taking the pay cut that would be necessary to enter parliament.

I didn't know you'd been considering running for government mate...

I'm not sure what my price is but I bet I have one.

At a guess, it would involve more clues for BToB.

Roflcopter

more clues for BToB.

Haha, as if anyone wants to go to a convent in Paddington at this time of night

I think to pin the 2008 credit crisis (rather than crash) on the repeal of the GS act is rather simplistic. Boom and bust has been an inherent future of market and bourse driven capitalism since post mediaeval times. In my view the 2008 crisis was driven by an inability to measure risk by state and corporate investors. Nobody had to buy the A rated mezzanine credit derivative options that were actually junk. They chose to.

Creative destruction etc...

If you mean “the full extent of the fraud has been swept under the table in cosy arrangements with settlements and fines” then, yes, I totally agree. And sure, lots of bankers won’t have been directly involved in trading the junk that precipitated the whole catastrophe, so sure I can believe that many of them were caught unawares. But for sure most of the people peddling trash CDOs were fully aware that they were taking massive risks and engaging in misselling, they just didn’t give a fuck. And to be fair to them, they totally got away with it, so they were right to not give a fuck.

Just going to skip right over the word “necessarily” there, huh?

never dream of taking the pay cut that would be necessary to enter parliament

Golf club thread is over there 👉

On the day that Johnson assures the world that the UK is not a corrupt country:

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/nov/10/ex-tory-adviser-married-mp-choose-ofcom-chair

I think to pin the 2008 credit crisis (rather than crash) on the repeal of the GS act is rather simplistic.

That wasn’t my point. I was addressing Stonehedge’s point that finance rules allowed the crisis to develop and the players weren’t to blame; the big banks lobbied to change the rules, specifically Glass-Speagal, knowing full well the risks because it had happened previously. Without GS investment banks were able to gamble with hundreds of thousands of pensions and lifesavings, and they lost. They knew it could happen, but they didn’t and don’t care about the fallout more than they care about their profit.

If you check prospects.ac.uk they list expected salary for a “big 4” employed qualified chartered accountant (which you could probably do before you were 25) as £85k plus a £17k bonus.
A dull degree educated level job without the prospect of being sacked after 4 years or getting murdered by your clients usually.

So…?

Are we arguing that 2.75 times the average national salary (lol, plus some very generous expenses) just isn’t fair or something? What problem are we trying to solve by giving MPs a big pay increase to compensate them for not being able to do an open corruption anymore?

Better: tax the fuck out of every useless exec parasite who earns a metric fuckton of cash every year, simultaneously enriching the public coffers and making MPs feel slightly less hard done by by only just being amongst the very best earners in the country.

Pay the cunts the average wage, second jobs can fuck off, jobs after being an MP are limited for 10 years but there's a stipend available if needed,if they don't want to work for that then they aren't the kind of people that should be doing the job anyway. Make it easier to become an MP for normal people, there's plenty of talented people out there that would love a decent job helping people for 30k a year, or 50k a year once the average wage starts going up if that's what the people in charge are being paid.

Given the choice I would prefer to pay MPs more than have them acting as paid shills in office. Post office pay offs with non-executive directorship needs banning in the Lords too. The cost of having these people in Parliament is far higher than a 20k increase in pay.

If that is the choice, then Labour should try to force the Tories to argue for a pay rise, while cutting Universal Credit, increasing NI and giving sub inflation pay rises to public sector staff.

Which is why it won't happen.

We pay our early to mid-range Sales Engineers more than an MP receives (although without counting an MP's expenses, which can be very significant, but are not meant to be compensation).

Our senior to principal SE's earn more than the prime-minister. Sometimes a lot more.

It's not contentious in our industry - if we don't pay that money, we don't get the good SE's.

Limiting the salary of an MP on idealogical grounds means you get ideologically driven people doing the job, rather than excellent administrators and leaders who may have risen quite high within a responsible role elsewhere - be that corporate, science, public sector etc.

Or, you get people who under the idealogical veneer are determined that they'll enter parliament to ensure that when they leave again they have, through their work, prepared a number of board-level seats with companies that they have helped (see privatisation) whilst an MP.

Half the number of MP's, bring in proportional representation, introduce a written constitution, make the upper chamber run for election (somehow) and pay MP's inline with for example what the big four pay their equivalent level.

I think there's already an understandable trust problem between people and politicians (currently it's decent people against corrupt MPs, a couple of years ago it was hard Brexiters against Parliament as a whole).

I don't think further inflating MPs' salaries to 7 or 8x the national average is going to help much.

I also don't think that there are thousands of talented people who would become fantastic MPs if they could bear the pay cut. Firstly because most people don't get paid more than MPs do, and also because I think the more moral (n.b. not ideological) would do it anyway and not be motivated by money.

Being an MP would be a very highly paid job by public sector standards - and I think they're the area of the public sector least in need of a pay rise to help make it seem more of a 'normal' salary to sales engineers.