Politics

Who are they?

Charles. Moore

Who do MPs think that they are? I ask this question unrhetorically. I only ask, like that annoying woman in David Copperfield, because I wish to know. I wish to know because I am puzzled by their attitudes towards their salaries, their allow- ances, their accommodation and how they should spend their time.

From the beginning of this month, an MP outside the London area has been able to claim up to £6,696 for the expenses of renting or owning a second house. He can also claim £12,546 for a secretary and/or a research assistant and/or office equipment. For his car, he gets 39p per mile, if it is a big car; this is for the first 20,000 miles after that, it comes down to a paltry 19.5p per mile, and after 25,000 miles he will suffer the indignity of having to detail how he has managed so much driving.

An MP's pension is now quite large and, when the present scheme was introduced, those Members who came into the House before the relevant date were able to convert their back service to the faster accrual rate at 40 per cent of the full cost.

Members also get first class rail travel to and from constituencies, some rail travel for wives and children, some foreign travel, pay-offs when defeated, tele- phones, stationery . . . .

If one had to single out a trend in these privileges, it would be their growth. There was, for instance, no 'additional costs allowance' (the second house) before 1971. And the increases in percentage terms are large. Although the Supply Estimates for 1985-6 say that House of Commons ex- penses (which here include salaries) are only 5.6 per cent larget than the forecast out-turn for 1984-5, a sharp-eyed colleague points out to me that out-turn includes a supplementary estimate. The percentage increase of MPs' expenses is 9.6. On the Estimates' own favourable construction of the figures, the increase in travel expenses — from £3,558,000 to £4,317,000 is 21.3 per cent. Expenses, less publicly embarras- sing and less bald than salaries, have a way of rising much faster.

Which is not to say that salaries are not rising too. This year, an MP gets £16,904.

He has increases coming which take him to £18,500 on 1 January 1987. After that comes the blessed, longed-for day when his pay is permanently linked to that of a grade in the civil service, and so MPs will be able to escape debating how much the public should pay them. They will be able to collect the money unimpeded.

What's wrong with any of this, many MPs will say, we deserve a better standard of living; and anyway we aren't making ourselves richer — only covering real expenses. Why is the press so snide about this, and what about journalists' expenses?

It may very well be that, as we hacks squint down the beams in our own eyes, we get a distorted view of the motes in theirs. There may not be good answers to all the MPs' objections. But what is interesting is how our elected representatives react to public discussion of the matter. They become self-justifying, self-doubting and, quite often, extremely angry.

The Members most zealous for increases divide into three categories. There are the comparability boys, the do-our-job- properly men and the just plain greedy. It is an agreeable convention of the Com- mons that all honourable Members are honourable, so that last category is never admitted, and we shall say no more of it.

Let us take the comparability boys. These are the people who appear to have got into the Palace of Westminster by mistake, and are pleading to get out. Sometimes they are reluctant exiles from industry. They remember the days when their feet sank into deep pile carpet in large, air-conditioned offices, and they sit down by the dirty watering holes of West- minster and weep. Sometimes they are Euro-enthusiasts, or veterans of inter- parliamentary delegations, whose green eyes have fallen on the gigantic staffs and salaries of Brussels or Washington. No debate on allowances, for example, is complete without Mr Hugh Dykes dilating on the splendid facilities of the Bundestag or the European Parliament.

The do-our-job-properly men are moti- vated less by envy than by a misplaced conscientiousness. They are people like Mr Alf Dubs, the diligent Member for Bat- tersea. They think of themselves as doctors to their constituents, and they think that they are doctors forced to work with blunt needles and pre-war X-ray machines. Both categories of Member share an uncompre- hending view of the building in which they have chosen to spend large parts of their lives. In the debate on allowances last summer, Mr Tony Banks, MP for New- ham, who is in charge of Culture at the GLC, said: 'Visitors . . . may admire the many marble statues which we have around, the wonderful neo-Gothic design of Pugin, Barry's architecture and the majesty of Westminster Hall, but behind that elegant façade there lurks a legislative slum.' Parliament is quite foreign to many Members' way of operating. Without facili- ties and status, they are genuinely at a loss, just as modern clergymen really cannot imagine how you can run a church without

coffee-bar-cum-toilets and a dozen notice boards all over the church entrance.

What are the reasons for this 'aliena- tion'? One minor, but real and unnoticed one is that fewer MPs than in the past have been to public school or in the army. In the first, I know, and in the second, I am told, you learn that it is perfectly easy to do whatever you want with virtually no 'facili- ties' of any kind. Privacy is minimal, comfort often non-existent. At public school you quickly discover which particu- lar piece of isolated radiator in a corridor is

most likely to ...keep you warm, which

younger boy or member of domestic staff can most easily be persuaded to do some work for you. You learn to forage and fend for yourself, and so how to be an MP. Those who attend day schools, particularly boys, and particularly working class boys, are cossetted, and so unfit for the rigours of Westminster.

The deeper difficulty is that MPs seem to be suffering the crisis of identity common to many people who pursue formerly re- spectable occupations in increasingly adverse circumstances. MPs now think that being an MP is a 'job', like being a management consultant or a civil servant.

(It iA as civil servants, indeed, that they more and more demand to be treated.) Many of them will even claim that it is immoral to have another job and be an MP at the same time. Such a vision of their role is of course self-fulfilling. If they have no other pursuit, they will spend more time round the Houses of Parliament, wanting more room, or persecuting their constit- uents by attending to more and more of their problems. If they have bigger and therefore more distant offices, they will spend less time in the Chamber. They demand more money for various sorts of expenses, and so they feel that they should pursue the activities for which those ex- penses can be claimed. They get a research assistant, and then he wants more room to do his researches, and would really like an assistant himself.

These are the trends, and their effects have a very dispiriting effect on MPs. They ask to be treated like civil servants, and find that they are treated like second-rate civil servants. They want more resources to take on Cabinet ministers and government departments and they find that they be- come pale, despised imitations of those ministers and departments. They imagine that they are deprived of any amount of vital information when in fact 90 per cent of what they need to know is in Hansard.

government publications and the newspap- ers. They do not believe that they can act as private citizens representing private citizens. In this they share a common modern despair at the might of govern- ment and bureaucracy, which is under- standable, but sad. MPs are perfectly capable of embarrassing, arraigning and to

a large extent controlling governments. But they do not think that they are, and so, on the whole, they don't.