Remote MPs' privileged lifestyle

WHILE LOW-PAID civil servants have to strike against a 0% 'pay rise' this year, MPs can claim up to Ł22,000 for kitting out their homes with luxury items.

Not content with 'earning' Ł67,000 a year, a backbench MP also claims, on average, Ł135,000 in allowances. They can claim Ł10,000 on a new kitchen, Ł6,000 for a bathroom and even Ł300 for a free-standing mirror - perhaps to reflect on their privileged lifestyle!

These latest revelations - coming on top of the recent exposé of MPs like Tory Derek Conway who claimed salaries for his two sons and a family friend, even though they did little or no work - is making an angry public even more outraged.

Socialists believe that being an MP should be an opportunity to represent people and not to feather their own nests. From 1983 to 1992 Dave Nellist, now leader of Coventry council's Socialist Party group, was a Labour MP.

He and two other MPs supporting Militant (the Socialist Party's predecessor) stood for parliament as a 'workers' MP on a worker's wage', receiving the average wage of the working-class people they represented and donating the rest to workers' campaigns and working-class appeals. All expenses were legitimate, reasonable and accountable to their constituents.

That meant these MPs were not insulated from the lives and hardships of other working-class families. Other MPs, in contrast, because they benefit financially from their position, are remote from their constituents' needs and problems.