Thursday, May 21, 2009

Congratulations you've resigned

So here's your £70,000 a year pension and a peerage. Yeesh who does the speaker think he is - a banker?

See it's great when you're at the top, even if you completely screw up so badly that all your colleagues gang up to see you go you still get a fat wodge of money and prestige.

Parliament out of touch with reality; nah why would anyone think that?

Ex travel MPs have claimed £86,781,205, with travel £92,993,748. With 39, 645,100 over 18's in this country that means that it is costing us each about £2 a year in expenses; doesn't seem much when you put it like that. Assume each of the 645 MPs also get their £64,766 wages and you can add on an extra quid. More for cabinet ministers so let's say altogether the cost of MPs is around £5 per year for each of us. Again doesn't seem much, but like so much it just adds up to a whonking great sum for them.

4 comments:

Orphi said...

*raises hand* Question: What is the speaker's job, anyway?

FlipC said...

Essentially they're the Chairman in the meeting of MPs. They keep the meeting in order, allow the MPs to enter (and technically leave) the House, call upon MPs to speak, receive the results of votes etc.

As you may gather from what they do it's important that they're seen as politically neutral and effective.

Orphi said...

Sounds like a pretty simple job for somebody who gets paid such a sackload of money. Still, I guess it makes it harder to bribe them. ;-)

Is it just me, or does anybody else find it worrying that our entire political system seems to revolve around a bunch of lads standing around in a room jeering at each other like immature teenagers? Whole policies seem to be decided based on how makes the best soundbites rather than who has a coherant plan that might actually work in the Real World…

FlipC said...

There's a lot of back-room work too.

Hah yeah the only people who can bribe them are the ones with tons of money may be exactly the type of people we don't want influencing MPs.

The Yah-Boo type of politics is relatively recent and may well be influenced by the need for sound-bites and 60 second news slots. I saw this in the Labour PPB which boiled down to "This is what Cameron would do if he were in charge, nasty huh?".

All negative, no positive; but it gets your name and face in the paper and that's what counts.