All In This Together

IPSA, the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority, is charged with the task of overseeing the pay and expenses of Westminster MPs - and the body was created, unsurprisingly, on the back of the great MPs' expenses scandal which threatened to destroy the reputation of the Mother of Parliaments.

Part of its remit is to look objectively, from time to time, about the pay of Westminster MPs - so that MPs no longer decide themselves what they are worth.

So far so good.

But IPSA has conducted a review of MPs salaries and is apparently due to recommend an increase from £66,000 to over £70,000 in 2015 - which is causing something of a stir.

Understandably, because any independent body looking objectively but in isolation at the pay of MPs - would be bound to conclude that they have lost out in recent years and 'deserve' a big pay increase to catch up.

Yet so what, since the very same argument could be made on behalf of just about any other group of workers you care to mention - particularly those in the public sector whose pay has been held down and/or frozen since the UK economy collapsed and pay restraint was imposed in 2010. 

The only difference is that these public sector workers (most of them much lower paid than MPs) do not have an independent body like IPSA looking at the problem solely from their point of view - regardless of the wider economic and political circumstances.

So it's for these reasons that a big pay increase for MPs cannot be allowed to proceed - not because MPs don't deserve to be paid better - but because it would be outrageous to treat MPs more favourably than low paid workers until 'normal business' has been restored. 

The same thing happened a few years ago when SLARC (Scottish Local Authorities Remuneration Committee) was asked by Scottish Ministers to review the salaries of Scotland's 1200 or so elected local councillors.

Now at the start of the review the UK's economic recession was not really a factor, but by the end of the review it was clearly impossible to implement pay increases for councillors - while the pay of Scotland's council workers was being held down.

And that's the advice that SLARC gave to Scottish Ministers, in effect - here's the objective case for a pay increase but the wider circumstances and political realities make it impossible to proceed. 

The politicians of course tried to paint themselves in a positive light by claiming that they were nobly refusing to accept a pay increase recommended by SLARC.

Although this was sheer nonsense, of course, especially given the fact that COSLA (the self-styled voice of Scottish local government) in its evidence to SLARC - argued that councillors should be awarded even greater pay increases and that their salaries should be linked to those of MSPs. 

All of which means that MPs have no option but to put their ambitions on hold for a while - because as everyone knows 'we're all in this together' and that's not really part of IPSA's brief.