Richard Baum

The spectacular Politics Home Index website has alerted me to yet more gems today, in the shape of a couple of articles defending MPs and taking a swipe at the screeching media who are enjoying lambasting them with even more gusto than normal at the moment.

The first half of this article, and the whole of this one provided readers of The Times and The Independent with an opportunity for a more balanced opinion of the current debate raging about the merits of MPs, and the dubious rationale for their wages and expenses.

I’ve said on here before that I have more sympathy for the MPs than I do for the screaming hacks attacking them. Obviously there are the money-grabbers and the expense-fiddlers, and they should be rooted out. But find any group of 650 people and there are bound to be one or two bad apples. I believe that the vast majority of MPs are decent, hard-working people who do their very best for tens of thousand of constituents many hundreds of miles from home. They need second homes, they need things to put in them, and they need to be paid good salaries.

I read crazy things every day - that MPs should be paid the minimum wage, that they should receive nothing but the state pension, that they should pay for a second home from their salary. These two articles redress the balance somewhat, and provide some sane analysis of what might happen if these things came to pass.

MPs don’t make it easy on themselves. They do look foolish when they aren’t as transparent as they might be. And the few naughty ones being plastered on page 1 of the News of the World makes them all look bad. But these are the people elected by us to make our country better. We shouldn’t begrudge them a good salary and some reasonable extras for doing that.

Rick