Thanks to ‘Poor Dear’ on the dazzlingly revamped Bristol Indymedia for this one.
With spectacularly bad timing, Bristol West MP, Stephen Williams has used his weekly web-based ‘Westminster Yawnfest’ (surely diary? ed.) to complain about his pay.
You see, the former corporate accountant has to struggle by on just £61,000 a year. Although this is topped up with expenses of just £18,000 a year to keep him in style when in London and another further £250 a week cash to buy his lunch so that mummy doesn’t have to make his sandwiches when she packs him off to parliament every morning.
“For weeks I’ve been irritated by newspaper headlines about MPs’ “snouts in the trough” or “‘gravy trains,'” he huffs to his readers just as the press reveal that many MPs do indeed have their snouts, their wives’ snouts, their kids’ snouts and, er, their mistresses snouts in a particularly expansive and unaccountable parliamentary trough.
Not a big enough trough for Williams’ snout though. He whines: “For the first time in my career it looked as though I was going to be able to vote on whether I got a particular percentage pay rise.”
As if it’s perfectly normal for public sector employees to choose how much of a pay rise they get. Does Williams live in the real world?
The quote actually reads:
“For the first time in my career it looked as though I was going to be able to vote on whether I got a particular percentage pay rise. You might think that’s a great thing to do, but I would have found it an embarrassing spectacle. The choice was between the 2.56% recommended by the SSRB and the 1.9% Brown gave the police, not much of a difference considering the huge fuss in the media. I was prepared to vote for the lower rise, provided that in future years the pay is genuinely settled by an independent report to Parliament, not to the government.”
Now, that’s a bit naughty, isn’t it, Blogger? You’ve missed off the rest of the quote to try and misrepresent what Mr Williams has said!
I was just about to make the same comment, but anonymous beat me. And you still haven’t e-mailed me your address. Is that because you’re opinions aren’t strong enough to take regular criticism?
Is this blog called “The Bristol Blogger’s Email Debating Society”?
I think not. Just post yer crap views in the comments if you want.
The email address for TBB is still where it was last time you brought this up…
One might wonder why you would need to email TBB at all, when you have plenty of scope for posting comments, but no matter! You are, of course, entitled to choose ‘you’re’ chosen method of communication 🙂
Anonymous: I don’t see how it misrepresents Williams. Whether he considers it ‘an embarrassing spectacle’ or not is here nor there. The point is, MPs are considerably more privileged than many of those constituents they purport to represent, in salary and employment conditions as in other areas.
Of course, if misrepresentation is the issue under discussion, then how about Williams’ own conflation of MPs’ salaries with expenses? After all, it has been the latter with which much of the recent coverage of Parliamentary pay has been concerned – nepotistic, unaccounted for and shadily distributed. To express such irritation at the scrutiny currently being paid to expenses whilst focusing himself on the specific issue of salary seems a little churlish to me.
But then Williams (as anyone) has the right to feel “irritated” by newspaper reports which he feels tell only one side of the story. He may, however, discover that it is wiser not to try playing that card too many times with his constituents.
Williams calls his £1,200 pay rise ‘Paltry’ its a shame that anonymous forgot to quote that bit
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