Under a cloud: considering the number of MPs who work long hours on multiple secondary jobs, it’s a wonder any of them ever have time to set foot in this place at all.
Once again Rishi Sunak is undermined by the behaviour of his own MPs.
In the week he insisted that a below-inflation, six per cent pay rise for junior doctors (meaning it is a real-terms pay cut) is not negotiable, the obscenely inflated amounts his fellow Tories (and a couple of others) earn from secondary employment have been revealed.
And some MPs are saying they need the extra cash from these second jobs because they can’t make ends meet otherwise.
Their MP salaries put these people among the highest-paid in the UK and they still reckon they can’t live without having more. They cannot justify this while pushing down pay for public sector workers including the junior doctors.
Here’s Sunak, follow by commentary that puts him right in his place by the great Peter Stefanovic:
The Prime Minister has told @BMA_JuniorDocs his 6% offer
“is final, there will be no more talks on pay. We will not negotiate”
So he now plans to IMPOSE a real terms pay cut on them
That’s not negotiating – it’s bullying! #IstandWithJuniorDoctors pic.twitter.com/i0PhkwBhzU
— Peter Stefanovic (@PeterStefanovi2) July 14, 2023
The pay imposition means that, depending on their experience, junior doctors will receive a raise of between £3,000 and £3,700 per year (rising to £32,300 and £43,900 respectively).
If that seems like a lot, bear in mind that these are highly-skilled jobs for which they spend many years in training.
MPs, on the other hand, are unskilled; you don’t need any training for the job – you just need to persuade people to elect you.
Then you receive £86,584 a year as your basic wage (this is the figure as of April 2023), rising to £167,391 (as far as I can tell) if you are prime minister Rishi Sunak.
This puts him in the top one per cent of earners – and all MPs in the top two per cent.
And still they want more.
Sky News has published an exhaustive list of MPs’ earnings from second jobs, and it is a catalogue of greed, with those who have held ministerial jobs among the top earners. Now why would that be…?
The article states:
MPs with second jobs have an average wage of £233 per hour, Sky News can reveal.
The typical rate for MPs is 17 times the national average – and over 22 higher than the minimum hourly wage.
Indeed. According to the pay deal Sunak is determined to impose, junior doctors will get just £14 per hour, which is only slightly better than the absolute minimum wage.
Ms Truss’s most lucrative work since leaving Number 10 has been a speech in Taiwan. She was paid at a rate of £20,000 per hour – nearly 1,500 times the UK average hourly wage – for her insights into global diplomacy.
Even higher than Ms Truss is Boris Johnson, who resigned as an MP last month. His hourly rate comes in at £21,822, but having left parliament, he is free to work without having to publicly record his earnings.
The leaderboard of the MPs with the 20 highest hourly rates in this parliament reveals a clear pattern: 18 have government experience, suggesting a ministerial background is valued by some employers.
Or it means employers have been paying them in order to influence their decision as ministers?
Here’s Sky‘s Sam Coates explaining it:
The average hourly wage for an MP's second job is £233, which is over 17x the average rate for a member of the UK public.
The shortest lived PM in British history, Liz Truss, is on a staggering £15,770 per hour.#KayBurley #BBCBreakfast pic.twitter.com/ZaUCs91UtN
— Haggis_UK 🇬🇧 🇪🇺 (@Haggis_UK) July 14, 2023
Let’s have a look at the list.
Top is Boris Johnson (Conservative) – now an ex-MP after one Partygate scandal too many. He worked 117 hours outside Parliament and earned £2.5 million. That’s £21,800 per hour.
Then:
Liz Truss (Conservative): 12 hours, £189,200, £15,700 per hour.
Alok Sharma (Conservative): four hours, £20,000, £5,000 per hour.
Theresa May (Conservative): 622 hours – that’s nearly 12 solid working weeks! £2.7 million, £4,400 per hour.
Fiona Bruce (not the broadcaster)(Conservative): 245 hours, £733,100, £2,900 per hour.
Sajid Javid (Conservative): 174 hours, £412,300, £2,300 per hour.
Julian Smith (Conservative): 67 hours, £147,800, £2,100 per hour.
Greg Clark (Conservative): 14 hours, £17,770, £1,200 per hour.
Ian Blackford (Scottish National Party): 31 hours, £38,120, £1,200 per hour.
Michael Gove (Conservative): three hours, £3,100, £1000 per hour.
The next 10 are all Conservatives, most notably including Sir Geoffrey Cox at 12 (2,560 hours, £2.4 million, £960 per hour). This means he worked nearly 49 weeks solidly for other employers than Parliament. Has he actually turned up to represent his constituents at all? Even if he has, how can he be expected to have done a good job, working full-time for other employers?
And Jacob Rees-Mogg is at 18 (123 hours, £92,910, £750 per hour).
Some MPs are saying they need multiple jobs because the current salary isn’t enough for them. One can only agree with Richard Burgon:
"We hear of some MPs briefing newspapers that they're going to stand down if they can't have second jobs because £82,000 a year isn't enough. I say to those MPs, good riddance, go! Our democracy does not need you"@RichardBurgon in 2021. 👏👏pic.twitter.com/udguuY1c2E
— Saul Staniforth (@SaulStaniforth) July 14, 2023
Nor does our democracy need Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey, who earns almost as much in a week as many of us do in a year, and wants employers to push your wages through the floor. Here’s Jon Trickett:
The Governor of the Bank of England earns £11.5k a week.
Yet he calls for pay restraint for middle and lower income earners.
Isn't this just the old ruling class idea “do as I say, not as I do”? pic.twitter.com/J6ep1oYeyF
— Jon Trickett MP (@jon_trickett) July 13, 2023
Yes it is. “Do as I say – take home rapidly-decreasing remuneration for the grinding hours of hard work that you do, while I spend increasingly less time in the job where I’m supposed to represent your best interests so I can moonlight for the big corps and earn 17 times as much as you.”
Put like that, do you think you’re getting value for money from your Tory MP?
I don’t.
Note this also:
I remember when the argument was we have to pay MPs a better salary to get the best people. Clearly that hasn’t worked crisis after crisis and MPs now earning an avg £233ph telling people on £10.42 they are greedy for wanting a pay rise.
— Ian Hodson (@IanBFAWU) July 14, 2023
Now consider this:
Not a single left wing MP in Labour, the SNP or the Green Party has been listed today in the list of top 20 double jobbing MPs.
They’re not part of the establishment and that is why they are attacked so much. Because they can’t be bought.
— Tory Fibs (@ToryFibs) July 14, 2023
These are the kind of people we need in Parliament. But Keir Starmer is doing his best to purge Labour of its left wing in order to make it into his dream: a Substitute Tory Party (STP). The SNP is incapable of forming a government because it would never have enough MPs. And the Green Party is habitually ignored by voters who think they have to support Labour or the Tories because their choice is the only one they think can keep the other one out.
Without better representation, the situation described by Robert Peston below will worsen:
We are a rich country. This from @ONS is so shocking:
“around 1 in 20 (5%) of adults reported that in the past two weeks they had ran out of food and had been unable to afford more, this proportion appeared higher among groups including; those receiving support from charities…
— Robert Peston (@Peston) July 14, 2023
Finally: the information provided in this article is vital for anybody in the UK who has a vote. It tells you what you need to know in order to make an informed decision when you come to vote. But I can predict that only around 200 people will read it.
This is because Vox Political must depend on the social media platforms for articles to be seen, and they are run by corporations that depend on other corporations’ advertising revenue to make their own profits, and fear regulation by a right-wing government that wishes to suppress dissenting viewpoints. So of the 42,000+ people who supposedly like This Site’s page on Facebook, only around 300 will actually see the link to this article on their newsfeed.
This is how Sunak, Bailey and the other greedy fatcats keep you down:
By making sure you don’t know how to impose change.
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