If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys

**Well, if nothing else, you’ve got to give them a solid ten out of ten for boldness. In the vast arid wasteland of pay freezes and spending cuts, the denizens of Westminster have out and decided they want more money.**

A recent survey by the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (IPSA for those of you who enjoy acronyms) has revealed that two in three MPs believe that they are underpaid on £65,738 a year and in fact deem a salary of £86,250 a more appropriate sum. Now, whilst a 32% rise in pay for some of our least favourite people on the planet may seem unpalatable to many, I say let them have it.

It’s not necessarily about rewarding our MPs, or making them all rich, so much as creating a fair and intelligent future government which is attractive to folk from all walks of life.
By electing to drive MPs, whose only source of income is their salary into financial martyrdom, we in fact only make it harder for less well-off political candidates to apply for governmental positions. The threat here is that soon, only individuals with external sources of funding, ex-businessmen of those from rich families fro example, will be able to stand for parliament. Our goal should be to encourage anyone to put themselves forward for consideration; not just those with the means.

The trick is to think about it more as a way of ameliorating our future government than rewarding our current one. A higher pay would make the job more attractive to graduates who would otherwise be snapped up by law firms or banking corporations (what can I say, free drinks nights at Evolve do wonders for your PR!)

It’s bad enough that the glamourless life of being hated and trying not to ruin your career by calling people ‘plebs’ has to compete with club nights bankrolled by JP Morgan, but the fact that you can’t even expect financial perks in the future seems a little unfair to me. Besides, if fresh minds are being turned away from civil service due to low pay, it’s us as a country who lose out on the additional ingenuity. And let’s be honest, our country needs all the additional ingenuity we can get at this stage.

The biggest counterargument to increasing the pay of our MPs seems to be the threat of ‘career politicians’: the shady, white cat toting silhouettes that embark upon politics for the money, not the cause, and seek to use our political system to further nought but their own ends.

While I acknowledge that drawing in new MPs with money instead of an innate desire to protect and serve and can certainly envision a couple of history’s politicians interrogating James Bond with awful German accents (a certain Labour spin doctor leaps readily to mind), I raise an eyebrow at the suggestion that throwing the occupants of Westminster a few thousand pounds more will usher in a new generation of Dr. Nos.