Over the past few days, several newspapers have had headlines claiming MPs were about to lose their gold-plated pensions. But when you read the articles, it became clear that actually MPs were planning a massive 30% salary increase from £65,738 to £85,000. However, to throw up a smokescreen to dilute public fury at their greed, they would also take a minimal change in the terms of their pensions. In fact, yesterday a Torygraph writer even did a preposterous article claiming MPs were underpaid and that they were receiving less in expenses than previously. Lies, lies and more lies. So, as our MPs plan to screw us yet again to fill their own pockets with our money, here are a few things worth remembering about these greedy scum.
1. We now have 129 members of the Scottish Parliament, 108 MPs in Northern Ireland and 60 in the Welsh Assembly. Plus, the EU now makes over 70% of our laws. So we don’t need 650 MPs any more. The US has 435 members of Congress for over 250 million people. In the UK, 200 MPs would be quite enough.
2. Over 90 MPs are government ministers – twice as many as in other European countries. This gives them salaries of around £100,000 a year. Civil servants often complain that it’s difficult to find work for all these supposed ministers and an MPs’ committee even wrote a report titled “What do government ministers do?”
3. MPs have recently had a huge increase in the money they supposedly pay for staff from £115,000 to £137,200 outside London and £144,000 inside London. Much of this money, our money, goes straight into the pockets of MPs’ family and friends.
4. By watering down the rules on their expenses, MPs are now claiming on average £40,000 a year each more in taxfree expenses than they did before the expenses scandal broke.
5. Most MPs have second, third and even fourth jobs earning some of them hundreds of thousands of pounds a year.
6. MPs do very little and get over 90 days holiday a year. Some years they get even more than that because, as most of our laws are made by the EU or regional assemblies, Parliament runs out of things to occupy MPs and so goes into early recess.
7. Each MP actually costs us about £615,000 a year. Assuming they work for us for 180 days a year (and most do much less than this because they’re so busy doing all their other jobs), that’s about £3,400 a day each.
So, as our MPs bleat and moan about “how little” of our money they get for the “incredibly difficult” job they do in “public service” and as sycophantic journalists write grovelling articles in support of MPs, please remember this is all just a bunch of lies put out by greedy, thieving, dishonest, self-serving scum.