I am not an angry person, most would call me calm and placid, but I’m angry today. It is generally accepted, I believe, that those suffering the most financial hardship in the current crisis are the lower paid of our society. Those on zero hours contracts and minimum wage doing jobs they probably don’t enjoy but need to because it puts food on the table for their families.
We know that, we see it around us. But some MPs seem to think that the parents of poorly fed children are at fault. They are accused of not working hard enough to feed their kids, which is amazing as there are a diminishing number of jobs.
To add to that insult, and it is an insult, 322 conservative MPs turned down the opportunity to give free school meals to children during the holidays. If it was a case of not having the money I might understand it, but we do have money to support museums, galleries and theatres, we do have money to spend on ‘consultants’ for the government and MPs, we have the money to increase MP’s salaries.
Yes, with thousands of people being put out of work, businesses not having the money to pay their staff let alone give them a raise, our MPs got an extra £2500 a year from April. That puts their basic salary up to £81,932. So if we hadn’t paid the MPs more we would immediately have had £1.6 million to chip in towards school meals.
And, as if that wasn’t bad enough, we subsidise the meals of those MPs in the House of Commons. In my journalistic days I got to sample the Commons ‘canteen’ and it was pretty good, far better than I enjoyed in the Post Office when I worked there. But perhaps canteen is a misnomer, the PO canteen, and no other canteen I have ever frequented, served sirloin steak, haddock kedgeree or salmon tagliatelle. And in what other plush surroundings would you get beer battered cod, chips, mushy peas and tartare sauce for £6.41?
Someone said that if we paid MPs more money, then we would get better MPs. Wrong, we’d get more people applying for the sinecure that it seems being an MP has become in some quarters. The point of an MP is to serve your constituency. Cut their salaries in half, attract people that believe in the community rather than the career and we immediately save £24 million a year. That will feed a few kids in the holidays.