Today MPs will vote on their own pay and conditions. Who else gets to decide how much someone else has to pay them? It is not like we have competing parliaments to choose from, they set the taxes, and they set their own personal rake off. Like any criminal protection racket, if we don’t pay they will use force to take the money off us.

MPs currently are paid a basic salary of £61,820, almost triple the average UK earnings at £23,244. All but a few dozen also claim the Additional Costs Allowance of £22,110 – equivalent to £36,850 before tax. So the existing basic package is actually worth £98,670. They don’t like to admit this, but that is the existing reality.

They can also claim £20 per diem food allowance, they want this to rise to £30 per diem. Why can’t someone earning more than four times the average wage pay for their own lunchtime sandwiches? Front line soldiers, with pay and conditions determined by MPs, are given the equivalent of £2.30 per diem for rations. School children from low income families get the equivalent of 50p per diem. Why do they think they deserve so much more than soldiers risking their lives and impoverished children?

*This is not including the opportunity to boost household income, as many of them do, by paying their wife, mistress, husband, lover and children. Don’t forget they also claim for all transport, have a gold plated pension, subsidised bars and restaurants on top of the daily food allowance. In total they can claim up to £159,720 in expenses, in 1997 the total maximum expenses claimable by an MP was only £50,213 so that is a rise of 213%. Millionairess Barbara Follett gets her windows cleaned at the taxpayers expense, Margaret Beckett has her gardening done at the taxpayers expense. We buy them new kitchens, dishwashers, washing machines and widescreen plasma TVs. We bought lunch for Prescott to vomit up, and we paid to clean it up as well. We paid Caroline Spelman’s nanny, the Speaker’s wife’s taxi bills, Nick Clegg’s household renovation, enough mileage allowance for Janet Anderson MP to drive twice around the world. We even paid for first class tickets for Blunkett’s dirty weekends away with someone else’s wife. We also paid £7m for a refit of the parliamentary wine cellar. Cheers!