Keir Starmer has joined a long list of MPs attacking the inflation-busting pay rise being handed to them, calling for the cash to go to key workers instead. Pay setting body IPSA has a structure deliberately designed by MPs after the 2009 expenses scandal to give them plausibly deniable cover for expense claims and pay hikes. “Nothing to do with us, it is independent” is the excuse MPs trot out. Well Parliament is sovereign and they can rule that a pay rise will not be awarded this year in solidarity with the people, as has happened in other legislatures around the world.

IPSA is set to authorise a 4.1% per cent increase – taking MPs’ salaries up by about £3,360 from £81,932 to over £85,000. Which means a newly elected MP, a couple of years out of university with no experience, immediately will be in the top 2% of earners. This is not a pay scale commensurate with the real world in normal times, it certainly is not commensurate with the current situation of the voters whom MPs represent. Unemployment is surging by thousands every day, millions of furloughed workers are facing a 33% cut in already low incomes, even if you have a job the prospect of a pay rise is small. MPs are not in this together with the rest of us…

IPSA is hiding behind a formula based on public sector average weekly earnings. There is no performance related aspect to MPs pay. Turn up, don’t turn up. Vote in person, drop in on Zoom. Whatever happens they get paid and they get pay rises. Unlike the rest of us.

In the real world workers get performance related pay – MPs should too. MPs are supposed to improve our lives by raising the standard of living for all. A measure of that is GDP per capita. Pegging MPs’ pay to GDP per capita would link their prosperity to the prosperity of all voters, not just the judges and generals that MPs want to be on a par with. The representatives of the people should prosper with the people. If we get richer as a whole, their pay goes up, if we get poorer, their pay goes down. This will incentivise politicians to enact policies that make the people prosper.

IPSA is running a public consultation and Guido’s friends at the Taxpayers’ Alliance have come up with a handy tool to convey co-conspirators thoughts on MPs’ pay to IPSA. If you want MPs pay to be aligned with performance, now is your chance to push for that to IPSA…