The Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (IPSA) looks set to bung troughing MPs a 15% / £10,000-a-year pay rise, even though both Labour and Tory MPs support policies restraining public sector pay rises to 1%. As Ed Balls says: “There is no way we should be arguing for higher pay when the choice is between higher pay and bringing unemployment down.” Last week Osborne attacked “some public sector employees” who “see annual pay rises of seven per cent”. MPs are about to get double that. A large group of MPs are in favour of the people that clean their offices suffering a 1% pay freeze, yet want 15 times that for themselves…

Their argument is that they need higher pay to attract the best people to the job, despite there being no evidence that there is a lack of applicants for a job offering triple the average wage plus housing and travel allowances. As things stand MPs are already in a different world; their expenses alone are around the median wage, with everything included they take home more than £1,100-a-week:

Bringing in people who see being an MP as a vocation not a profession is the only change to the system that we need; real people who have done something with their lives rather than ex-SpAds climbing the greasy pole. Under the current system “powerless” ministers bleat that MPs will be able to voluntarily choose not to take the extra cash. The CV of a typical ex-MP is expense fiddling, lying, dissembling, spinning and smiling in pictures. We are fools if we think they won’t line their pockets again…