Another Voice

4 July 2009

It is good that MPs have second jobs — but they should share the proceeds

It will at once be obvious that we who take the second view should be embarrassed by how imperfectly the House is shaped by the nation it represents. I am embarrassed. Too many lawyers, too many City types, too many former teachers and researchers. We might also reflect that the politically correct advocacy of ‘quotas’ is actually rather old-fashioned. To hold (as Cameron Conservatives do) that in a nation including blacks, Asians, gays and rather a lot of women, any parliament should contain a fair share of these, is quite traditionalist. Those who harrumph that a Sikh MP is not there just to represent Sikhs, or that you don’t need to be a woman in order to champion women’s issues, should ask themselves what this logic does to the argument that the House is enriched by Members who know industry/farming/banking from their experience on the inside. Women know women from the inside; men know men; Sikhs know Sikhs. The Commons is well served by these kinds of knowledge.

So if we hold, as I do, that the Commons needs living, breathing links with the world outside, and that some of this may be provided by outside interests, we must think harder about which particular ‘world outside’ we have in mind. It should include the whole of our country. But that’s no reason to denigrate or diminish the many links that survive in the form of many MPs’ second jobs. How, if we think that valuable, do we protect it from the Brownite populist onslaught?

It’s becoming clichéd to quote di Lampedusa’s ‘if you want things to stay the same, things are going to have to change’, but here it’s apt. The important principle of maintaining outside interests, if it is to be defended against the prevailing public mood, can be defended only by considerable personal sacrifice — or else all is lost. We need to swing the terms of the argument back in favour of a hybrid House. If MPs are credibly to argue that their outside interests are not a sort of distracting, moonlighting extra, unrelated to their political work and undertaken for profit alone, then they must argue — what’s true — that second jobs are often connected with being parliamentarians. Parliament benefits from having dentists and bankers in its ranks. Banking and dentistry benefit from having serving politicians in their ranks. We should also admit that their involvement in politics is the reason some MPs are offered part-time positions in business and industry in the first place.

So MPs should share the proceeds. I’d propose an even split. Channel it back to the Exchequer. Or set up an umbrella Commons charity. Or choose charities of their own, in or out of their constituencies. Logic proceeds best by living demonstration, and if the dead weight of public opinion is to be swung over, a generous and eye-catching gesture is needed. Otherwise, like the monkey with its fist clenched around the nuts in a narrow-necked jar and reluctant to unclench, second-jobbing MPs are set to lose the lot — and, with it, a deep but unappreciated strength of our House of Commons.

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Brian John Nicholson

July 2nd, 2009 12:15pm Report this comment

Many people with the power to award or influence contracts later serve on the boards of companies involved. Is there really a difference between this and second jobs?

JohnAnt

July 3rd, 2009 3:15pm Report this comment

Matthew - The way anybody gets to know about the world of work (business, industry, agri,etc) is by doing it BEFORE becoming an MP. Not while being an MP - that simply brings a conflict of interest, financial and personal.
That Hague does after-dinner speaking, or Lewin works for a bank, is simply being greedy. I'm sure they both feel it 'helps' their work in the Commons. But to the rest of us, it's just greed and self-indulgence. MPs are adequately paid, and I'd suggest putting an embargo on all second jobs until their legislative drafting improves - at the moment it's pi** poor.

paul gilboy

July 3rd, 2009 6:46pm Report this comment

Nonsense ! why should anyone work to give up their income. parliament benefits by different interests being represented in parliament.
mr browns proposal will see a political class cut off from society, totally beholden to a party machine for their liveli hood.
he speaks nonsense and your parrying it, quite literally.

stephen bull

July 6th, 2009 4:58pm Report this comment

Many MPs do now have second jobs - as ministers. Should they not be asked to reveal how much time they spend on their Whitehall duties at the expense of their constituents? The growing insistence on the full time nature of the job of an MP might make some think that ministers should not sit as members at all but be replaced by substitutes while they hold office. They must of course be answerable in the Commons for the Government's policy but they would not vote in the name of their constituents.
Not really Parliamnetary democracy but that is at a low ebb anyway and it does work elsewhere in quite successful countries!
(Charles Moore was writing along these lines today however my letter to The Times was rejected.)

Shaun Hexter

July 6th, 2009 5:26pm Report this comment

A novel idea, but nobody else would dream of voluntarily sharing the proceeds of their labours to such an extent. I think the argument should be rephrased along the lines that law making is NOT a full time job and should not be so. As someone else has commented, representatives without outside jobs would become a political class cut off from reality. Indeed, it is a testament to those with such jobs that other companies are willing to employ them - after all, we do not know our MPs well enough to decide if they really are employable and therefore useful to the wider society. It also gives them a valid reason to earn a living without resorting to dubious expense claims. Indeed, I think that not only legislative representatives (MPs and peers) should be encouraged to work in the 'real world' but I would argue that other representatives should also be ordinary people - judges spring to mind. Magistrates are real people, supposedly able to empathise, like jurors, with the judged and the victims, so why not judges? Indeed, I would argue that having more ordinary people in such positions would ensure that judgements and sentences do not stray so far as they have from what ordinary people would consider natural justice.

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