MPs' pay: the other metric

MPs and their pay, again. Boring boring.

And I say boring because the debate is so rubbish (though as an issue it is also intrinsically a bit boring). I don't really know where the right compromise is between enough and too much for MPs, but I find our summary of IPSA's logic pretty clear and it looks like they've got it about right, particularly as the overall cost of paying MPs will be flat. I could be persuaded otherwise.

However, what I'm struck by is how the debate totally ignores the rules for how MPs' pay will go up in future - in line with average earnings. This obviously does two things. Firstly it risks their pay getting out of sync again (their benchmarks may go up more or less than average earnings), secondly it gives them an incentive to support changes in the economy that improve average earnings, for which we should be grateful, I suppose.

But it doesn't go far enough. The average here is a median, so what this means is MPs will be judged on how much the person is in the exact middle of the list of earners does. But that's not how I would judge them; and that's not what the rhetoric of both sides is based on. They should be judged on how the worst off do (inter alia, I think making sure the average does up is the best solution to that too). So I would link MPs' pay to the mean average incomes of the poorest (10%; maybe 25%). That's what their real job is; they should be encouraged to do it.

Bibliography, November 2013

BOTM: A. Sisman, Hugh Trevor - Roper

J. Betjeman, Summoned by Bells
T. Holland, In the Shadow of the Sword
M. MacCambridge, America's Game: The Epic Story of How Pro Football Captured a Nation
J. Major, My Old Man: a personal history of Music Halls
G. Orwell, Nineteen eighty-four*

What a month! Four of the six books here could have been BOTM in almost any other month. Honestly, by the time I got to Orwell's masterpiece I felt I was on a downward spiral (it would still have comfortably taken prizes in previous months). Honourable mention to MacCambridge's history of American Football, which is essentially perfect, though as a subject not quite up there with Sisman. That wasn't perfect - I felt the seventies were undercooked - but it was brilliant.^ Peter Brown once described PhDs in Late Antiquity as choosing your bishop. Perhaps more modern biographers should choose their academic. In both cases, it's a fantastic way to hang a history of a period and a world, especially if, like HTR, they knew everybody. It's also a great triumph of taking a world which now feels very remote, though with familiar contours, and making it immediate. Finally, of course, it immaculately allows us into HTR's own head - and that's compelling. Sisman also writes excellently, with some lovely barbs hidden in the text. This was a favourite.^^ 

^I should of course disclose a more personal reason for finding this all fascinating: as well as being a Christ Church man, HTR was also my MSt supervisor's stepfather. He makes the odd appearance, very sympathetically too.

^^I did in fact have lots of markers of wonderful gobbets to quote, but the child took them all out, despite being supervised by A at the time.