It wasn’t supposed to be like this.
With every day bringing new revelations about politicians abusing their entitlements, it’s easy to forget that the remuneration of MPs was a goal achieved only after a long social struggle: a leftwing demand intended to make democracy more accessible to the people.
In the middle ages, representatives in Britain’s parliament were funded by their constituents. That support wasn’t always monetary – in 1463, Dunwich compensated an MP entirely in herrings – but the obligation still proved sufficiently unpopular as to give rich candidates who promised to pay their own way a distinct advantage over impecunious rivals.
By the early modern period, parliamentarians no longer received any recompense at all, ostensibly so that politicians were motived by disinterested ideals of public service. In reality, the arrangement barred all but men of independent means from standing for election.
In 1838, the Chartists – Britain’s first mass working class movement – formulated a list of demands to broaden parliamentary democracy. Their so-called People’s Charter advocated the extension of suffrage to all adult males, the abolition of the property requirement for candidates, the fair equal distribution of electorates, secret ballots and annual elections.
Significantly, the Charter also demanded the payment of MPs. Working men, the Chartists argued, required financial support to prevent them starving when they entered parliament.
This was not hypothetical problem.
In 1859, the Chartist Charles Jardine Don (described by one journalist as “a cross between a poet and a pirate”) became the first worker elected to any legislature anywhere in the British Empire by winning the seat of Collingwood in Melbourne. But without any salary, Don was forced to continue labouring as a stonemason: working by day to build the parliament house in which he sat as a legislator by night.
Nonetheless, respectable opposition to the payment of MPs persisted, with the philosopher John Stuart Mill explaining in 1861 that, if politicians were paid, “the business of a member of parliament … would become an object of desire to adventurers of a low class.”
As Marian Sawer explains in her history of elections in Australia, reform was won here long before in Britain: “Victoria led the way by introducing a salary of 300 pounds in 1870 … In the other Australian colonies, conservative upper houses blocked similar measures for more than a decade. Even progressive South Australia did not introduced payment until 1887, after it had become the main issue of that year’s election and pledged had been demanded of the candidates.”
In Britain, parliamentary payments weren’t adopted until 1911 – and conservative opposition was still so great that the chancellor the exchequer, David Lloyd George, hastened to clarify that the sum being offered was not remuneration, recompense or a salary.
“It is just an allowance,” he said, intended to allow a man to “maintain himself comfortably and honourably but not luxuriously during the time he is rendering service to the state”.
In his 1952 book In Place of Fear, the Welsh Labour leader Aneurin Bevan defends parliamentary entitlements (“the small expenditure required to equip the elected representatives”) as a particular necessity if, as he puts it, “the membership of the House of Commons is to be composed of men and women of moderate means”.
Bevan notes how the “atmosphere of parliament, its physical arrangements, its procedure, its semi-ecclesiastical ritual” was “profoundly intimidating” for working class candidates. For him, that’s another reason why they need financial support – but in that description we can also see a hint as to why entitlements are now so out of control.
The Chartists imagined that the election of workers would transform parliament. In reality, parliament usually transformed the workers who found their way inside it. Ralph Miliband, in his classic Parliamentary Socialism, discussed the importance of “the climate of the House of Representatives” and what he calls “the aristocratic embrace” in “taming so many Labour members”. He describes the erstwhile radical David Kirkwood arriving in Westminster in 1922 and discovering it to be “a place full of wonder … I had to shake myself occasionally as I found myself moving about and talking with men whose names were household words. More strange was it to find them all so simple and unaffected and friendly.”
Rather than inoculating would-be reformers against the blandishments of power, the trappings of office became one of the mechanisms by which outsiders transitioned into insiderdom, as ostensible rebels bonded with the establishment they’d pledged to challenge.
In a fascinating chapter in Nathan Hollier’s collection Ruling Australia, Mike Donaldson and Scott Poynting provide a useful framework to understand the grotesque sums being spent by today’s parliamentarians on holidays, sporting events, travel and the rest. They point out that, for business magnates and the super rich, “work” and “leisure” can’t easily be separated since:
the hours of the working day are not as clearly delineated as those whose livelihood is earned in wage labour. The boundary between their work and leisure is quite blurred, and the leisure activities of ruling-class men tend to be those culture processes which resemble their life’s “work”.
Something similar might be said about parliamentarians.
The lurks and perks, the taxpayer-funded trips to the polo and helicopter rides and Grand Final tickets, help MPs consolidate themselves as a distinctive caste with interests quite different from the bulk of the population – which is why they’re so unwilling to abandon them, even in the face of mass outrage.
As Donaldson and Poynting say:
Class power is not a conspiracy. It is more a matter of living; it is about how these men live, whom they meet, what they say, what they can do. But it also organised and routine and it happens in ruling class men’s spaces and in networks such as gentlemen’s clubs and boardrooms. It is part and parcel of the work of being a ruling-class man.
(And, we might add, it’s also increasingly part of being a ruling class woman).
If the labour movement of the 19th century argued for the payment of MPs, the Old Left of the 20th century often posed a slightly different demand: namely, that parliamentarians receive only the wage of a skilled worker, in order to narrow the gulf between politicians and those they supposedly represented.
What would that mean in today’s terms? MPs could, perhaps, be granted the same wages as a mid-level public servant. That would be, in anyone’s reckoning, a salary sufficient to ensure they didn’t need to work another job – the original purpose of parliamentary remuneration.
Not only could their salaries be indexed to that of ordinary Australians, they could also face the same scrutiny when it came to claims for travel and entertainment and other expenses – and the same punishments when they were caught cheating.
It’s an eminently egalitarian and democratic proposal – and, for that reason, it will never be seriously considered.
