Should we give our MPs a pay rise?
Did you see Question Time last night on ´óÏó´«Ã½1? The Tory chairman Eric Pickles was jeered by the audience when he tried to justify his MP's expenses. He claims a second home allowance despite living only 37 miles from Parliament. as "jovial and blunt-speaking" by The Guardian's Nicholas Watt, Mr Pickles told the audience that commuting wasn't practical:
"I was leaving home at 5.30 in the morning to guarantee I was going to be there and I wasn't getting back until about 12 or 1 o'clock in the morning. Now you can do that once or twice, you can do that for a while but you've got to understand the House of Commons runs like clockwork..." To which the Green Party's Caroline Lucas said: "So does the rest of the world actually!"
Now, let's be clear. Mr Pickles hasn't broken the law, he hasn't even broken any Parliamentary rules. Furthermore, he's never claimed his full allowance and anything he has claimed he's published on (if you want to see what your MP claimed in 2006/07 ). So is it fair to be so critical of Mr Pickles? Or is he guilty of greed?
Of course, Mr Pickles isn't the only one. Yesterday we heard how Parliament's standards commissioner has decided to about Labour minister Tony McNulty's second home expenses.
So what should we do about it? The former MP Matthew Parris told us on today's Morning Extra that we should scrap most expenses and pay MPs £140,000. It wouldn't cost us any more because, according to the last figures to be published (in October 2007), the average expenses claimed by each MP is already £135,600.
And our final caller this morning, Douglas, said they should be paid even more! He said: "I think people running the country are more important than footballers."
What do you think?
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