Cut MPs' Pay - Public Service Means Personal Sacrifice

Boris is right, we need a Parliament of rebels, MPs who actually consider legislation, tell their whips to get stuffed, and vote with their conscience.

MPs who are in Parliament out of a sense of duty and public service, perhaps?

But if public service is what being an MP is about, then where is the personal sacrifice?

Where is the career forgone, the business neglected, the leisured life abandoned?

Politics today offers what is for most people a lucrative career in its own right. So much so that MPs have lost credibility as public servants: all too many are now revealed as troughers, in politics first and foremost for their personal benefit. It is a politics corrupted.

Unfortunately it is not just a matter of individual personal corruption, but wholesale corruption; a corruption run rife, yet somehow mostly "within the rules".

What has happened is that MPs collectively have built a corrupt and privileged system, which, exploited by the party leaderships, has led to the weak and servile behaviour Boris bemoans.

The trouble is that MPs’ pay and perks are now so great, and MPs' dependence on their party leaderships for their positions is so complete, that MPs will never find it in themselves to be independent. If an MP is disowned by his party it means forgoing not only his seat in Parliament, but his entire career and income.

If we want men of conscience to be our MPs, then we need to cut, or even eliminate altogether, the financial rewards, the allowances and expenses, the plush offices, and the staffs. Let careerists make their careers elsewhere.

We will not eliminate party, but we can reduce its power of patronage.