Does anyone remember the row over Owen Paterson and second jobs? It was only late last year. And in response, the government said it would do something to put an end to the hidden abuse of lobbying via second jobs.
Only now it has changed its mind. As the Guardian note today:
Plans to cap MPs' earnings from second jobs have been dropped months after the issue provoked a sleaze scandal that plunged Boris Johnson's government into crisis, the Guardian can reveal.
Ministers told the Commons standards committee that a time limit or ceiling on such earnings would be “impractical”.
The government, in true neoliberal fashion, has backed down, healing the same trait that I have noted the Institute for Fiscal Studies displaying this morning, which is that in the face of any issue they say that there is nothing the government can do to solve the problem.
This brought something to mind that I wrote a while ago. I described something that I called the Cowardly State in my book The Courageous State. I described this in 2011 as follows:
Cameron and Osborne, with their allies Nick Clegg and Danny Alexander ….have become the apotheosis of something that has been thirty years in the making: they are the personification of what I call the cowardly state. The cowardly state in the UK is the creation of Margaret Thatcher, although its US version is of course the creation of Ronald Reagan. It was these two politicians who swept neoliberalism into the political arena in 1979 and 1980 respectively. Since then its progress has been continual: now it forms the consensus of thinking across the political divide within the UK, Europe and the US.
The economic crisis we are now facing is the legacy of Thatcher and Reagan because they introduced into government the neoliberal idea that whatever a politician does, however well-intentioned that action might be, they will always make matters worse in the economy. This is because government is never able, according to neoliberal thinking, to outperform the market, which will always, it says, allocate resources better and so increase human well-being more than government can.
That thinking is the reason why we have ended up with cowardly government. That is why in August 2011, when we had riots on streets of London we also had Conservative politicians on holiday, reluctant to return because they were quite sure that nothing they could do and no action they could take would make any difference to the outcome of the situation. What began as an economic idea has now swept across government as a whole: we have got a class of politicians who think that the only useful function for the power that they hold is to dismantle the state they have been elected to govern while transferring as many of its functions as possible to unelected businesses that have bankrolled their path to power.
The references to the people of the day are, of course, out of date. The analysis remains the same. The argument within neoliberalism is always the same. It is that 'there is nothing that we can do'. The aim is to undermine government itself. And I do not buy that.
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Downing Street does not care. There is no moral hazard in following their self centred agenda. Nothing changes.
The country is moving towards the common view that politics is all about self service rather than public service, a further corrosive element in a failing state.
Again this is what Tim Snyder muses on so you are in good company.
He says that the only idea is that there are no ideas when he talks of ‘inevitability politics’.
Adam Curtis calls it ‘Oh Dearism’ – we note what has happened briefly and then get on with what we were doing previously.
It’s a recipe for disaster and enables those with money to run riot.
I think that what this generation of politicians lacks is character or self respect. In fact the love of and deference to money we have developed as a society I think is a result of this.
Thanks Margaret!!
What is impractical about saying, for example, “you must devote no less than half of your working time each week (and a minimum of 35 hours per week) to your primary role as an MP representing your constituents, and must not earn more than the current MP salary [or half or quarter or whatever] from any other positions outside parliament”?
Perhaps they should fill in weekly timesheets to show where they are spending their time, and submit monthly or annual returns of income. Publishing their tax returns would do. Done.
You could write that law
I could write that law
They apparently think it impractical to write that law
So it’s ‘won’t’, not ‘can’t’
My experience with employment law stresses the importance of simplicity and clarity. MP’s receive a more than adequate salary enormously enhanced by generous expenses. So NO repeat NO outside paid work. This would have many benefits, with far fewer media appearances as they would have to do it for free…
Next onto NHS consultants…
While the idea that this is too difficult is ludicrous, the obvious answer – no outside work is, sadly, too simplistic. there are certain professions, medicine being one, where taking 5 years out to be an MP for a single term effectively ends the primary career. The resolution to MPs not doing their jobs as MPs does not simply lie in banning them from doing anything else.
Nothing we can do.
Really Nothing we want to do.
Obviously the question that is being avoided by MPs is the American one: ‘Who’s your Daddy’?
If MPs are earning money from external work, how the hell do we know they are being impartial and allocating time to the needs of those who elected them to Parliament?
Does anyone know how our ‘friends’ in Labour voted or responded to this?
While it would be good to specify in law MPs’ primary commitment to parliamentary work, I can’t see how it would be easily done without effectively favouring those with external wealth income (share dividends for example, or rental income) rather than earned income. Certainly the approaches discussed above would have that effect.
Is there a solution to that? It wouldn’t be good to return to the nineteenth century domination of Parliament by the landed classes.
You appear to be saying that it is not possible to live on an MPs salary ! Tell that to the vast majority of people in this country.