Brexit and the waning days of the United Kingdom

[Josquius]

I've said it many times before but I really envy the German speaking Swiss and their embracing of dialect.


Back on topic. Won't somebody think of the poor impoverished MPs.
Here is one poor guy having to quit we he can't afford a mortgage on a 110k salary

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-norfolk-68133873.amp

[crazy canuck]

I think there is a significant disconnect between the income politicians earn and what senior decision makers with experience can earn in the private sector and I don't think it is in our interest for that gap to exist.   We see this throughout the public service and judiciary.  Not so long ago (read during my lifetime) salaries for senior positions was a lot more commensurate with private sector wages.  Getting appointed as a judge was once a fairly sizable increase in pay.  Now the gap has grown to such an extent that one has to have a significant commitment to public service to eschew the pay that could otherwise be obtained. 

[Richard Hakluyt]

Yes. the low salaries merely have the effect of excluding some talented people with no independent means from public service. After all, British MPs were not even paid until 1911 and there was no struggle to fill the chamber....with landlords and capitalists.

[The Brain]

OTOH as a politician you get to make decisions you won't be allowed to in the private sector, and you are likely to wield a lot more power. Are for instance top generals paid the same kind of money as they can make in the private sector? At least in Sweden what makes some government jobs attractive is that they cannot be found outside of government, so they don't have to compete on salary.

[HVC]

Graft and connections are also not factored into compensation

[Josquius]

It's definitely the case that the frequent moaning you see against MP salaries is totally misplaced and they are very underpaid considering they're at the top of their profession and the massive loss of privacy they endure.

Nonetheless it strikes me as seriously out of touch for one to moan about not being able to afford his mortgage when he's clearly earning several times the average person.

[Syt]

375 years ago today.

[HVC]

January is a bad month for kings

[Richard Hakluyt]

Britain drops a few more places on the corruption index :

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/30/uk-perceived-as-more-corrupt-lowest-score-global-index-transparency-international

Most of the drop occurring after , surprise surprise, Johnson became PM. I hope this is something that Starmer can get his teeth into when he becomes PM. His experience as a former director of public prosecution must help him in knowing how to deal with this, it will also be a way of saving rather than costing money. The whole VIP lane business for example, that money should be recovered and at least some of the perpetra5tors should see jail time.

[Josquius]

375 years ago today.

I imagine the king has this date marked on his calendar as a day to do stay at home and do some reading.

[Sheilbh]

Most of the drop occurring after , surprise surprise, Johnson became PM. I hope this is something that Starmer can get his teeth into when he becomes PM. His experience as a former director of public prosecution must help him in knowing how to deal with this, it will also be a way of saving rather than costing money. The whole VIP lane business for example, that money should be recovered and at least some of the perpetra5tors should see jail time.

Yeah I can see the case for the VIP Lane. You had MPs every week standing up saying "x company in my constituency manufacturing garments for 35 years and wants to answer the national call to support the NHS in a pandemic. They've heard nothing back from the civil service etc". But how it seems to have worked is highly suspect.

I know I've mentioned it before but I think the recent line of privacy cases in the courts are really bad - but I think it is actively harmful to trust in a way. I've said before that I'm almost certain given how Mone is being covered that there are serious investigations going on. So far in terms of facts there was a report about a year ago that the National Crime Agency had raided her office and in the last month that assets had been frozen. But that's it.

That is a direct consequence of a recent Supreme Court case - ZXC. It was about the director of a publicly listed company. Bloomberg reported that the director and that company were under investigation by law enforcement in the UK and had sent communications to another jurisdiction (I think the US) seeking information. The Supreme Court found that even reporting the fact of an investigation breached the individual's right to a private life (needless to say claimant lawyers sending cease and desist letters have expanded this to include, say, investigations by GNMC into negligent doctors etc). In addition, the impact is assessed by the intrusion into an individual's privacy and what their reasonable expectation of privacy - which is normal, so it is different for a prominent TV host than it is for a regular individual. Here, though, the Supreme Court found the director's prominence - as the director a listed company - meant the intrusion had a bigger impact. So actually now there are arguments that the more prominent people are the more you need to be cautious (when they're already the ones who can afford Carter Ruck) - I would add that a company director's class etc is not a million miles from, say, a senior judge.

The whole law around this is entirely created by the courts with some cases with admittedly horrendous behaviour by the press. But I think it's gone in an entirely different direction without parliament's involvement and I think it is now restricting legitimate news reporting and the balancing of public interest v private rights has been entirely tilted in one direction. And as I say I think the inability of the press to report on the existence of police investigations is actually undermining trust.

375 years ago today.

What could have been

[crazy canuck]

I thought March 19 would be the more important date for you Sheilbh.

[Zanza]

Back on topic. Won't somebody think of the poor impoverished MPs.
Here is one poor guy having to quit we he can't afford a mortgage on a 110k salary

That's about 128k Euro. Just looked and a German federal minister makes a bit more than 200k - which is still low compared to private sector.

[Sheilbh]

On that, I think that as with Chris Skidmore it's as much about getting your name out there as an ex-MP available for consultancy work early given that, before long, there are likely to be many other ex-MPs available for consultancy out there.

I thought there's something to this - both on the general point of not much mattering in this context, but also a six figure salary should be able to afford a mortgage (italics his):

Think before you post
What an ill-judged blog post tells us about political priorities
Tom Hamilton
30 Jan 2024

The first time I can remember doing anything remotely impactful as a new-ish Labour policy officer back in 2008 (I was new-ish, and New Labour was not really new-ish any more) was when I noticed something someone shouldn't have written. It was my job at the time to read everything then-shadow Health Secretary Andrew Lansley wrote. Mostly, this was very dull. But on one occasion, he wrote a blog post on the Conservative Party website for an audience that would have been zero if it hadn't been for me.

"Interestingly, on many counts, recession can be good for us", wrote Lansley. "People tend to smoke less, drink less alcohol, eat less rich food and spend more time at home with their families". I read this, clocked that it was not a particularly wise thing for Lansley to have written and passed the quote up the line, and within a few hours the news that a top Tory was pro-recession (yes, I know he was trying to say something more complicated than that) was being widely reported, Lansley had apologised and the blog post had been deleted.

The point of this anecdote is less to big myself up,1 and more to highlight that the danger of writing something is that someone might read it. One of the many reasons Lansley shouldn't have written that blog post was that - unless it accidentally said something silly, which as it turned out it did - it never had a chance of having more than a tiny readership, and so the effort-reward ratio was poor.2 This is particularly the case given that one of the tiny readership was always going to be someone paid by the Labour Party to check if it accidentally said something silly, which as it turned out it did.

If politicians are so often bland, it's because the alternative is to be interesting. And there are people whose job it is to notice if you say something interesting.

Former Tory minister George Freeman wrote something interesting last week. Too interesting. He wrote on his new Substack that he had resigned from his ministerial job "because my mortgage rises this month from £800pcm to £2000, which I simply couldn't afford to pay on a ministerial salary". I don't know whether the first person to notice that he had said this was a Labour staffer whose job it is to notice this kind of thing, or someone else, but somehow or other the news has reached a wider readership than the subscribers of Innovation Nation, "a newsletter about Building a Science Superpower".

The reason this is interesting is that ministerial salaries are, in the grand scheme of things, quite large. As a junior minister, Freeman reportedly earned around £118,300. According to an online tool being heavily advertised to me on Twitter by The Daily Telegraph,3 which I filled in pretending to be a pre-resignation George Freeman, that is more than 97% of people in Britain (strictly speaking, it's more than 97% of the people who earn enough to pay income tax; people earning less than £12,570 a year don't even count as part of the population you might be richer than so far as the Daily Telegraph is concerned).


Now, I don't say this to call into question Freeman's claim that he can't afford his increased mortgage. £1,200 extra per month is a big chunk of almost anyone's money, and I can well believe that finding it is a stretch for him, even if it would be even more of a stretch for most other people.

I am not convinced, though, by Freeman's argument that, given this additional cost, "We're in danger of making politics something only Hedge Funder Donors, young spin doctors and failed trade unionists can afford to do". For one thing, one of these things is not like the others (Hedge Funder Donors do, presumably, have lots of money; I can tell you from experience that young spin doctors earn a hell of a lot less than £118,300 a year, and "failed trade unionists" looks like a political attack that's found its way here from an argument that's not about rich people).

For another, more important thing, looking at this (real) problem and thinking about it in terms of barriers to access to a political career is to miss the wood for the trees. The real story here is not that it's hard being an MP. The real story here is that, all of a sudden, within the last year or so, someone earning a six-figure salary couldn't afford to pay his mortgage. And another way of telling that story is: oh boy.

There are a lot more people who are finding that they suddenly can't pay their mortgages than there are people who have unfulfilled ambitions to hold political office. Most of those people (for the sake of argument, let's say 97% of them) earn less than George Freeman did. As George Osborne might have put it, we are all in this together. And that's the problem. Freeman has noticed the personal and missed the political.

In his Substack post, Freeman lists "the progress, successes and key reforms I've been lucky enough to be part of":

Shaping our Life Science Industrial Strategy to
    Founding GEL,
    Launching the Dementia Research Institute,
    Establishing DSIT & the S+T Framework,
    Negotiating our Horizon ReAssociation and
    S+T partnerships with Israel , Switzerland and Japan ,
    Establishing ARIA and
    Launching our Fusion Industrial strategy and  £2.5bn Engineering Biology and Quantum programs)

I admit that I don't know what all of these are, but look, they sound impressive and I'm sure they're important to him. And I'm prepared, for the sake of argument, to allow both that they are achievements he should be personally proud of and things for which the Conservative government deserves credit. In the end, though, for the minister responsible for them, they weighed less heavily than the fact that his mortgage was rising from £800 to £2,000 a month.

The fact that Conservative achievements count for less than the state of the economy and the cost of living, and that when you can't afford your mortgage it's hard to care about positive tweaks to government policy, is an important political insight. But - as even he might now acknowledge - it's not one that George Freeman should have written down.

[crazy canuck]

A "six figure salarly" does not mean what it used to mean and especially when the first number in that six figures starts with a 1.