Why shouldn’t MPs have second jobs?
We’re going through one of our chronic spasms of outrage about MPs working in the private sector. The trigger, this time, was the revelation that Labour’s Chuka Umunna is being paid £5,420 a month to work 12 hours as chairman of Progressive Centre UK, a Blairite think tank. Regional journalists, as is now traditional, followed up the story by checking the MPs’ register of interests for evidence that their local members were “moonlighting”. Thus, for example, the amiable Suffolk MP Dan Poulter was forced to justify holding a “second job” working shifts in a hospital.
The coverage here is back to front. Instead of seeing Dr Poulter as an MP with a “second job”, we should see him as a doctor who has also offered himself up for election. In a perfect world, all MPs would have second jobs. Or, rather, being an MP would be their second job. Instead of having professional politicians, we’d have citizen legislators, rooted in their communities.
I have never understood why people become exercised about the part of an MP’s income that they don’t pay rather than the part that, as taxpayers, they do. Audiences on Any Questions?, for example, often demand that MPs “work full-time for their constituents”, but their demand is curiously selective. It is never directed, for example, at government ministers, who work a full week while serving in Parliament. Yet, if you think about it, being a salaried minister genuinely is a conflict of interest, since it requires an MP to vote for the Government even when he judges it to be against the interests of his constituents. Some countries ban parliamentarians from holding executive office on precisely these grounds. How strange that we should instead bristle with resentment when a backbencher carries on practising as, say, a barrister, at no cost to the public purse.
Still, if we really do feel that doing another job prevents MPs from being effective constituency representatives, there is a solution. Instead of banning outside work, we should devolve power from Westminster to local councils, cut MPs’ hours, reduce their pay, and expect them to carry on with whatever they were doing before they were elected. That, broadly speaking, is what happens in Texas, whose state legislature meets for only 140 days every two years. Its members are paid $600 (£470) a month plus an allowance during the sessions. They are, in other words, compensated for the time they have to take off work, but presumed to have proper jobs. I can’t help noticing that Texas has one of the fastest-growing economies in the United States, and is sucking in people from every other state in the union.
We can’t have this both ways. If we complain that MPs are remote from the people they represent, we can’t simultaneously demand that they be made wholly dependent on the state for their income. A part-time legislature, combined with stronger local authorities, would make government leaner, cheaper and more human.
As a case study in how we are making a hash of the Brexit talks, consider the issue of voting entitlements. Since Maastricht, EU citizens have had the right to vote in one another’s regional and local elections. Brexit, in any form, means that we cease to be EU citizens.
Yet, from the moment the negotiations began, our side has been pushing for the extension of the current franchise rules. It is a strange demand for a Conservative government to be making. There are three million EU nationals in Britain and, though there are exceptions, few of them now support the party that is delivering Brexit.
Devolved elections, as well as council elections, are covered. In Scotland, Brexit has pushed most EU nationals to the SNP. In Northern Ireland, the main beneficiaries are the nationalist parties – witness the unprecedented drop in the combined Unionist vote in the 2017 assembly poll. Britain, to be clear, is not reluctantly conceding reciprocal voting in return for wins elsewhere. Incredibly, our negotiators have been the ones demanding such a deal. I’m afraid it tells you everything you need to know about the mindset of our officials in the talks. FOLLOW Daniel Hannan on Twitter @DanielJHannan; at telegraph.co.uk/opinion