Holyrood/Westminster (03/07/13)
I suspect that by thinking things over and writing down my thoughts - I'll come to the right choice for me about how to vote in next year's referendum on Scottish independence.
So here's another issue which I feel very strongly about - whether the position of a member of parliament should be regarded as a full-time job.
I spent several years on SLARC - which advised the Scottish Government on the pay and expenses of local councillors - and I wish I had a pound for every time an elected member tried to persuade me that every local councillor in Scotland was doing a full-time job.
Not surprisingly that was the view of the Scottish councils umbrella body - COSLA - which argued vehemently that every councillor in Scotland, even a basic or backbench councillor, was worth a big increase in their salaries to £25,000 a year (senior councillors get paid more than that of course)
So it follows that if MPs and MSPs are receiving full-time salaries, then they should not be entitled - as a matter of course - to take on extra outside work as they see fit, which is what some of them do at the moment - without a special dispensation or the need for permission of any kind.
So people like Gordon Brown (the former Labour leader) and Nadine Dorries (star of I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of here) - can basically take on whatever extra parliamentary work they like and don't have to answer to anyone for such behaviour - even if that means being out of the country for long periods.
Now I don't think that's fair or reasonable behaviour - and these are our lawmakers we're talking about - but where else in jobs that are paid for by public money would you find people just making up the rules to suit themselves as they went along?
Gordon Brown and Nadine Dorries are not the only offenders of course - there are lots of other MPs of all parties who are up to the same thing - some of them up to their necks in outside directorships.
Strangely enough this problem seems only to bedevil the Westminster Parliament these days - the Scottish Parliament in Holyrood had a bit of a bust up in the early days when a certain Labour MSP continued to act as a high-profile barrister or advocate - at the same time as doing his day job as an MSP.
But that stopped and I can't think of single issue or example now - of Moonlighting MSPs.
To my mind the answer is to prevent MPs from taking on additional, outside remunerated work - if they want to to unpaid voluntary work on top of their day job, that's fine - but it seems to me that there is a clear conflict of interest when siignificant amounts of money and/or time off from work are involved.
What do you think elected councillors would say if one of their senior officers announced s/he was off to Australia for a month - to take part in I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here?'
So, yet again the Scottish Parliament has got it right - while the Westminster Parliament is way behind the times - by allowing lots of MPs to play fast and loose with public money.
