Despite being a Tory, this is one area in which I’m in total agreement with this candidate, and the SSP.

I hate to sound cynical, but I’ll believe it when I see it. At the same time, it is important for MPs – who, let’s not forget, are supposed to be elected to represent us – to at least have some idea of how their consitituents live, something which most of them have little clue about. I would be very interested to see if there are any other MPs or parliamentary candidates who would be prepared to take a pay cut of this magnitude!

I’m only familiar with the workloads of Lib Dem MPs, and things might not be the same in other parties, but if we assume that £36k is for a 35-40 hour working week, and scale it up pro rata to the hours an MP works, it would come out pretty close to the current MPs’ salary.

Dave Nellist and Terry Fields used to do this – they took the average unskilled worker’s salary, until Labour expelled them.

What does “invest the rest in making sure that local constituents get the best possible service from their local MP” mean – exactly?

I take it the £36K figure comes from something like this story. Is there much reason to think that figures like this are at all reliable? £36K as average wages seems like a lot to me, even for Reading, and the method mentioned — “the figures, calculated by internet search engine allthetopbananas.com, followed the analysis of the salaries for 11,020 jobs advertised in Reading between January and June this year” — doesn’t really inspire confidence.

#5 I subscribe to Lorna Spenceley’s request for clarification.

However, in principle, I think Ms Dodds’ idea is certainly commendable.

Does she have another income, does her spouse work? This is a dangerous gimmick.

Why is it a dangerous gimmick? When you get into parliament with your £65K + expenses, you are insulated from the everyday income pressures your constituents face. If you don’t share those conditions, how can you be expected to understand their problems and represent their interests adequately?

@8, that’s obvious nonsense. If you’ve spent years beforehand doing ‘normal’ jobs for ‘normal’ pay, then you’ll have a very good understanding of the income pressures your constituents face; if (as is far more likely to be the case for most MPs) you have family money and/or money from your partner’s job, then a few years on the average wage isn’t going to make a difference.

Labour spent the first 20 years of its life fighting for MPs to get paid a good wage so that able people without private incomes could enter parliament. Moving away from that to a system where anyone who’s able but not privately wealthy is seriously sacrificing their income to become an MP is a massive retrograde step, and will mainly favour the likes of David Cameron.

I’ve always rather admired Denis (whassisname…the Beast of Bolsover) for one thing: his decision during the miner’s strike to take only the equivalent of strike pay.

I think 99.99% of his ideas are entirely barking at the moon of course, but that one did strike me as admirable.

As above – we have seen it: Dave Nellist and Terry Fields only took the average workers salary – I think to be fair it was the average skilled manual wage . this policy was actually based on the position of the Parisian communards in the nineteenth century. Equally worth noting that all the semi-clandestine payments channeled to MP’s through expenses were designed to trick public sector workers making pay claims: The abuses in the allowance system grew up as a way of secretly rewarding MP’s when Ministers (both Tory and Labour) were publicly claiming they were capping their own pay in order to help impose public sector pay freezes.

Mean-averages don’t work for salaries, because they have a very skewed distribution — a small number of people earning very high wages, pulls the mean much higher than a typical salary.

I suspect the median salary in Reading (50% people earn more and 50% earn less than it) is closer to the national median of about £25500 (http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=285).

It’s an admirable move from Dodds, but focussing on the mean when discussing salaries risks promoting systems that have a high overall wage bill with greater inequalities within it.

Well, these comments already show the problem – MPs are damned if they do and damned if they don’t (and the comments here will probably be a lot more sympathetic than those on many other blogs).

Not that Ms Dodds has a cat’s chance of being elected. Labour will get 120-150 seats next time, and none of them will be in the Thames Valley.

I disagree with Mike – both Reading seats are winnable for Labour. Annaliese’s move is a commendable one, (and more principled that the populist move of saying “I won’t claim expenses”, imo) although personally I think all MPs should take the median wage of the UK, with regional weighting and a generous but tightly controlled expenses as a top-up.

As for #3, I agree, that sounds about right for the amount of hours most MPs work, but bear in mind MPs are not subject to normal employment law as the rest of us are. I think the value of keeping them in touch with the lives most people lead outweighs the principle of paying them for overtime. And even if they have worked normal jobs for a workers’ wage for 20 years before entering parliament (and I dearly wish that more MPs had), Westminster is such a bubble that we still need every measure possible to keep them in touch with ordinary living.

I fully support the idea. I’d also go further and suggest that MPs also should have to send their children to state funded schools, use NHS hospitals and dentists. They should also have to spend a couple of weeks every year living on a council estate in their constituency.

I also always admired the stance of Dave Nellist and Terry Fields (despite the bonkers politics).

I’ve argued for a link of MP salaries to the average earnings index rather than comparisons with Doctors or Headmasters or whoever, and at the 90% point – which would bring it in at about £50-55k not £65k.

A link to GPs etc reinforces the “but we need the status through the money” nonsense, and of course GP incomes jumped by a huge amount in 2004-2006 ish (+50-60%) – voted through by Parliament.

The massive inflation in MP packages has been since the mid-1990s, and consists of a 28% salary jump then, and all the “Expenses” and “Allowances” which have mainly been added and made open to fiddles since. Apart from that basic salaries have roughly tracked Average Earnings since the mid-1970s.

The point that ‘MPs who are insulated from everyday pressures can not pass reasonable legislation” is a telling one, particularly with regard to Complex Taxation Systems etc.

#15

If you’re not being sarcastic, I like the ideas about not being allowed to use private health insurance or send their kids to private schools (although the law would get trickier here than just setting a salary pegged to the median wage). I don’t agree with the council estate thing, though – it would be both patronising and act to reinforce the idea that council estates are terrible places to live.

I disagree with Mike – both Reading seats are winnable for Labour.

Labour are at about 9/1 with the bookies to win Reading East. Tories massive favourites at about 1/16…

@16

‘Bonkers politics’ that allowed them to win elections, with increasing turnouts and increasing majorities?

Seems a bit less bonkers than the sight of New Labour trying to out-tory the Tories, whilst turnouts fall to 33% because people are fed up of corrupt, neoliberal careerists.

The point that ‘MPs who are insulated from everyday pressures can not pass reasonable legislation” is a telling one, particularly with regard to Complex Taxation Systems etc.

Eh? For 75% of workers, including everyone on the median wage, the complexity of tax is an irrelevance: you get paid some money into your bank account, you get a bit of paper each month saying how much you would have been paid if you hadn’t been taxed, and then a bigger bit of paper at the end of the year saying much the same thing.

If you wanted MPs who understood the impact of regulatory costs on small-to-medium businesses, the last thing you’d want to do would be to pay the median wage.

A patronising gimmick. If she thinks she’s getting too much for what she does I’d rather she just worked harder.

The recent brouhaha over MPs salaries and expenses mask significant the antidemocratic trend embedded in public debates. From the MPs who abused a position of trust and, more so, from the Telegraph, the Tories and others who dislike the nature and consequences of elected and representative democracy.

Anti democratic rhetoric is now part of everyday speech; dished up without end by our daily papers, and other news outlets, plus across much of the blogsphere . Moreover, anti-democratic comments are often accompanied by considerable cynicism and deep suspicion of the motives of others.

The Tories narrative on the ‘Broken Society’ includes an assumption that elected representative democracy is also broken and beyond repair. I disagree that it is broken. But in the UK it is under sustained attack from those whose greed knows no limits, because however imperfectly, our elected institutions are a barrier to their avariciousness .

The commitment by Annaliese Dobbs is a brave attempt to challenge anti democratic voices. The effectiveness of her defence of democratic values can be measured by a number of vitriolic comments this post has attracted. This Labour candidate is doing something right; I only hope that other Labour candidates would make similar commitments and follow her lead.

. .

[22] You’re quite sure that Ms Dobbs hasn’t written her chances in Reading off, and is indulging in “left populism” to make sure she’s shortlisted for the first winnable by-election in the next Parliament?

The facts lead as much to this (cynical) reading as to your romantic one.

Interesting little snippet this.

Anneliese Dodds was never a supporter of the Militant in her younger days was she?!

Other commenters have referred to Militant MPs Dave Nellist and Terry Fields doing this in the 1980s. The successor to Militant – the Socialist Party – maintains this policy, and if I recall correctly also takes this approach in trade union elections (where their candidates can and do sometimes get elected).

I imagine some other far-Left groups do the same. You may not agree with their politics, but fact that just one MP/parliamentary candidate from any of the three main parties is willing to countenance such an approach compares pretty unfavourably with the raging hordes of MPs desperately fighting to cling onto every last penny of expenses….

MPs don’t need astronomical salaries, and they don’t need open ended expenses. They do need a support structure for research and office work (probably less than a full time equivalent), which ought to be provided on a cab rank basis by some external body. If that was in place, then a salary tied to the middle of the civil service Executive Officer grade with London weighting (somewhere around £26k) would seem about right.

Eight pounds fifty sucks. Altough if you can get a sunday at double time, then you feel you’re cashing in.

Work the hours starting at 5 am and you can be taking home a whole four hundred pounds. (That’s with overtime).