Nothing illegal, say lawmakers who benefit from not changing the law
Just when you think things couldn’t get any more surreal, the government whips out a canvas and paintbrush to challenge all of our preconceived notions.
Just when you think you’ve heard it all, the prime minister’s chief of staff admits he is afraid of incriminating himself by testifying in libel proceedings he himself instituted. Meanwhile, three government ministers are similarly fearful and under actual criminal investigation.
What is of far greater concern, however, is the behaviour of a government keen to placate its MPs and keep them on a leash made of euros.
That can easily be achieved by granting every single backbencher a state job – regardless of merit. That’s right: every one of the government’s MPs moonlights at another job handed to them by the central government, ostensibly to supplement their meagre parliamentary allowance.
Commissioner for Standards in Public Life George Hyzler, in one of his first orders of business, unleashed a hailstorm of a report scrutinising the work of MPs outside of the House.
This state of affairs, where government MPs are handed jobs by their own administration, has been going on for so long that hardly anyone bats an eyelid anymore.
The standards commissioner describes these jobs as ‘fundamentally wrong’ not only on the grounds of meritocracy – or a lack thereof – but, worse still, because such a practice creates unnecassary jobs, which, incidentally, tend to command well-aboveaverage second wages.
Months following the report’s publication, the government replied on Monday with a long-winded explanation of how, after “careful analysis”, it had concluded that there was nothing technically illegal about the practice.
That may be so, but the government has clearly missed the point of the entire exercise.
That the practice is legal was never in any doubt. Instead, most of the criticism stems from the fact that this government had pledged to tackle cronyism, not embrace it with open arms. This makes its tedious analysis largely irrelevant.
What the government is really doing is hiding behind a law it was meant to have changed – among many other things – exploiting it to line the pockets of its MPs at the nation’s expense. At the end of the day, it is the taxpayer who loses out when the central administration is more interested in finding jobs for the boys than employing the right people for those jobs.
Someone clearly needs to put an end to this foolishness but the only ones that can do this are the lawmakers benefitting from the situation, and, judging by the government's reaction to the commissioner’s report, there is very little chance of this happening in the forseeable future. We may just as well write the whole thing off as yet another electoral pledge turned on its head.
Just when you think things couldn’t possibly get any more abysmal, there is the government to prove you wrong – a government on a seemingly perpetual quest to plumb new depths.