It is good that MPs have second jobs — but they should share the proceeds
No columnist should read too much into online responses to what he has written. No more than those who call in to radio phone-in programmes are those who post their comments online representative of readers as a whole — let alone the population as a whole. But I try to read properly the letters readers write or the comments they post online, because the sample of those moved to respond, though unrepresentative, is significant. It may tell you something about way the wind blows.
So were I a Conservative MP I would have been depressed to scan the online response from Times readers to a column I wrote there last week. I mentioned in passing (it was not my main theme) that some people believe MPs should be free to have outside earnings. If any subset of the overall electorate were disposed to give this argument a hearing, it would surely be the readers of quality newspapers.
‘Matthew: this is one of the most inane and hilarious Times Comment articles ever. MPs of any party should NOT have second/third etc jobs — Peter in London.’
‘We think being an MP is just a job… This MUST be full time, liaising with constituents, on parliamentary business and keeping informed on key issues — Richard, Cheltenham.’
Opinion polling will, I believe, powerfully reinforce the impression those two examples give. This issue of second jobs is a straw at which a drowning Prime Minister is now clutching in his juvenile quest to find ‘dividing lines’ with the Tories. But Gordon Brown may be onto something here; and before Tory backbenchers dig themselves into the trench in which he hopes to see them, I want to remind the Parliamentary Conservative Party that for serious politicians it isn’t only a matter of whether the public are right, but whether — if they are wrong — there’s any reasonable prospect of changing their minds.
On second jobs I think we could — but at a cost.
This debate matters. It goes to the heart of what we think the House of Commons is for. The smart modern view is (as Richard from Cheltenham puts it) that parliament is there to do work. According to this view the place is a sort of manufactory, where laws are made, where the market (the electorate) is researched and tested, and where the legislative product is quality-checked and repaired as necessary. There is also a secondary function: that of offering a turbo-charged Citizens’ Advice Bureau to constituents, and help with their problems.
The more old-fashioned view of parliament’s place does not exclude any of these roles. But at its core is an almost mystical idea that should arch across them. It is that the differing sentiments, affections, irritations, desires and vested interests which form the parts that make up the British whole are represented there. And by ‘represented’ I don’t mean weighed and measured by polling research and interview, and compiled into reports — as though politicians were entomologists studying electoral insect life; I mean these things are felt there, made flesh there, in the human shape of men and women who live and breathe these interests and affections. According to this view, the Commons is enriched if it contains people who feel as farmers do, as shopkeepers do, as boilermakers, doctors, financiers, teachers or landowners do.
In a nutshell, the argument is between those who think parliament is there to undertake diligent and professional research into the needs and wants of the nation; and those who think it’s there to be the heartbeat of the nation.
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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