Labour has been raising much hue and cry over the Owen Paterson debacle. The party’s MPs have lined up to attack the Tories for taking second jobs, with some pointing to the last Labour manifesto, which declared that ‘we will stop MPs from taking second paid jobs, with limited exemptions to maintain professional registrations like nursing.’
Cantabrigian Corbynista Richard Burgon is meanwhile using the debacle to push his private members’ bill to ban second jobs for those in the Commons, a practice he decries as ‘MPs cash grabbing from corporate interests and short changing the public.’
Strong stuff. But Mr S would suggest that the flatulating anti-Zionist might want to get his own side’s house in party before launching another attack on the establishment’s ‘rigged system.’ For just today, his own leader Sir Keir Starmer has had to declare more than 100 hours of work, totalling some £25,934 of payments for ‘legal advice given before 2020,’ having previously jugged legal work alongside his MPs duties earlier in his parliamentary career.
David Lammy, another Labour frontbencher who normally leads the Twitter charge, is another second jobber – he has earned more than £66,000 since November 2020 through speaking gigs and radio appearances, speaking at proud bastions of capitalism like Blackstone, Deloitte and Facebook.
Mr S has totted up the figures, with the Shadow Justice Secretary earning £33,000 from his LBC shows alongside speaking arrangements like a nice £2,469 from Trainline in June for taking part in a two-and-a-half hour long session on diversity inclusion and race. Kerching!
Lammy’s frontbench colleague Jess Phillips meanwhile earned more than £15,500 outside parliament through columns and speeches. Sadly for Phillips, the £13,160 she has earned for her 47 Independent columns last November would amount to less than three of Boris Johnson’s Telegraph pieces – going rates aren’t what they were. Luckily however the shadow minister for safeguarding rounded her earnings off with £2,350 in speaking fees including £1,500 for 60 minutes of speaking at HSBC.
Other earners on the Labour side include Khalid Mahmood earning £25,000 a year as a Policy Exchange consultant and Florence Eshalomi got to claim an annual allowance of £19,514 until May for her role as a London Assembly Member. Margaret Hodge meanwhile gets £20,000 annually as Chair of Royal Holloway’s College Council – a role which involves only three hours of work a week on average for between 38 to 40 weeks a year. Even Burgon himself has previously had to declare taking time out of his main job to complete an Ipsos Mori survey he did on the side, according to his own entry back in 2018.
Let’s hope the former shadow Business Secretary has a word with his colleagues before counting on their support for his bill.
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