Political commentary

From the soup kitchen

Charles Moore

Iis a pitiful sight. Men in pin-stripe 'suits shuffle in the queue to the soup kit- chen which, with a touching remembrance of past gentility, they still call the Members' Dining Room. In the Smoking Room, a member bends furtively down to pick up a cigar-end. As the evenings draw in, the men huddle together for warmth and company on the green benches which for them are home. How would you like to live on £14,510 a year, plus allowances for secretarial and research assistance, free postage and telephones, travel expenses and an additional costs allowance?

A benevolent old gentleman called Lord Plowden wanted to do something for these wretched people. Sensitive to the pride which is their only comfort, knowing that they would not accept 'charity', he devised a tactful argument purporting to show that 'MPs', as they call themselves with pathetic jocularity, deserved a lot more money.

To support his argument, Lord Plowden enlisted the help of some clever young men called Hay Management Consultants, who said, at the beginning of their report, 'We have taken it as given that parliamentary jobs should be regarded as jobs.' With that in mind, they introduced some concepts of their own about jobs. They asked whether the job of MPs had requirements of 'know- how', 'problem-solving' and 'accoun- tability'. They compared these re- quirements with those of people like General Sales Managers, Home Fire Managers and Divisional Personnel Managers; and when they came back with their 'findings', Lord Plowden felt free to suggest that MPs should receive 19,000 per annum.

All would have been well but for Mrs Thatcher, the woman who takes it upon herself to regiment the lives of the old (and young) lags. She decided that men like that would not know what to do with the extra money and would only spend it on drink. She tried to give them four per cent. Only the intervention of Mr Du Cann, another saintly old gentleman, and a bit more chip- ped in by Sir Hugh Fraser, mitigated her severity. They will now get something like the £19,000 but only in five years' time.

If my picture of suffering does not touch your heart, that can only be because I have never been trained by the Daily Mirror to write that sort of thing. It needs such a pen to do justice to the feelings in the tea-room over the past week. There, self-pity and righteous indignation have mingled in a noxious brew, and the unfeeling response of the national press has caused very real distress, The rumour that Sir John Junor earns £62,000 a year just about did it.

Here are some of the cries from the souls in torment. 'We get less than a polytechnic lecturer.' The deputy chef of the House has almost caught up.' How can I send my children to decent schools?'

And to these grievances is added an em- barrassment at having to decide their own pay so publicly. To some MPs, this is 'sor- did', to others, 'immoral'. The best thing about dear Lord Plowden is not the amount he proposes but that, if only the Govern- ment would leave him alone, his recommen- dations could go through on the nod, put- ting up the pay steadily year after year, without 'controversy'. This was the great advantage, you may remember, of Pro- fessor Clegg, who did a similar thing for less exalted persons, and by doing so managed to ruin the first 18 months of Mrs Thatcher's economic policy.

With becoming reticence, MPs held their debate on pay at lOpm on Tuesday night, hoping, perhaps, that the sketchwriters of England would be abed. But I was so keen to watch a bit of 'know-how', 'problem- solving' and 'accountability' in action that went along.

As befitted such an occasion, grand prin- ciples were enlisted. 'Economic theories rise and fall,' said Mr St John Stevas, slipping in an extract from his usual Wet revolt speech, 'Parliament survives.' Service should be the keynote,' said Mr Du Cann, making what he described as his 'devoted attempt to get the House out of a dif- ficulty.' Without enough money, warned this director of Lonrho, some MPs might become paid lobbyists. 'We are the microcosm of the nation,' he added. I fear he is right.

On the stroke of midnight, Mr Enoch Powell rose and pointed out that if MPs in- sisted on being compared with anyone else in their pay (the favoured comparison seemed to be with a fairly senior civil ser- vant), the public would treat MPs at that valuation, instead of respecting their uni- que status. They hadn't thought of that one, and in their late-night mood, they were not going to.

But the central point of Mr Powell's speech was self-evidently true — that any salary paid to MPs is essentially arbitrary. No amount of Plowdenism can show that a system that values Mr James Callaghan, 40 years in Parliament, at the same level as Mr Gerry Adams, never in Parliament, is equitable. As Hay Management Con- sultants admit in their introductory remarks, 'parliamentary jobs cannot be paid by reference to their market rate, because there is no market for them'. So MPs' pay is an invention, with no natural or precisely just way of being settled. The question then is, what are the effects of this invention?

The argument for more money and more office space is that the work of an MP is changing. Some of this change is produced by things that MPs cannot do much about — population growth, a larger number of constituents who are beadily at- tentive to their rights and so on — but much of it has more to do with Parkinson's Law.

If an MP can earn a good living just by being an MP, he is more likely to do so. If he is spending all his time being an MP, he will more readily invent new things for himself to do. And since he is there all the time, rather than merely dropping in of an afternoon, he will chafe at the poor con- ditions.

From that, it becomes natural to com- plain about the whole arrangement of the Palace of Westminster. The confusing Gothic corridors and cramped rooms are obstructions to a way of working which models itself on the methods of interna- tional banks or (I guess) Hay Management Consultants. What about the Chamber itself? Did you know that MPs cannot all sit down there at once? Why not build something bigger, with desks for every Member? Why not televise proceedings throughout the House?

If changes anything like these come about, another change follows. A different sort of person becomes an MP. Instead of being an occupation which could be follow- ed by many people whose main interests were not necessarily political — people, in other words, representative of their fellow- citizens — it becomes work only for the 'political animal', trained from university, even from school, only in politics, a member of a special class.

That is the way, slowly, that things are going. There is nothing sacred about four per cent, or ten per cent (though there is something pretty unholy about 31 per cent). The point to notice is that most MPs are trying to absorb themselves into the ad- ministrative machine. The more unattrac- tive debates there are on the subject, the less this is likely to happen.

Those who demand more tend to be those who are uneasy in their role. They find at the age of, say, 35, that their contemporaries in solicitors' and in- surance and banking firms have soft loans and telex machines and cars, and they only have lockers.

They wish that their little brief authority could be better dressed up. In contrast to them is a minority, still a large one, which thinks that there is actually something more remarkable about Barry's great Palace because it lacks mod cons, and that if MPs want to be civil servants or senior ex- ecutives, they should not stay to overcrowd the building. An MP is a member of the greatest political insititution of the modern world, even after last Tuesday's perfor- mance. That should satisfy him.