Performance anxiety
Poor lambs. Don’t you feel for them, the subject of so much scorn for so little money. Unpopular at the best of times, MPs have spent much of the last month under personal attack. The average member of the public playing word association would currently link MPs with sleaze. And now both main party leaderships are proposing limiting MPs’ earning potential still further.
You can put away your tiny violins. I am not going to be offering much consolation for them in this piece.
At the heart of the problem is this: most MPs think they’re hard-working and the public think that most MPs are not very good at their jobs. In this, both MPs and the public are correct. By and large, MPs are busy fools.
What is wrong with MPs? What do we think MPs should do? And what do MPs in practice do?
In old-fashioned constitutional theory, MPs are members of the United Kingdom’s legislature. They are there to represent their constituents, to examine legislation and to hold the executive to account.
That is not, however, what candidates are selected for in practice. Both main parties have central control, a central control that by and large individual constituency parties are fully on board with and fully complicit in. The aim of the main parties is not to have the executive held to account or to examine legislation but to form the executive and to enable that executive, once formed, to do whatever the party leadership then pleases.
I’m not going to let voters off the hook either. Relatively few voters choose their MP at a general election for their independence of mind. Many more are looking for their preferred government and see voting for the MP as the means for achieving this. Some will vote tactically to block a particular party, but then again the merits or otherwise of the candidate that they vote for are incidental.
The elected MPs recognise this. They spend much of their time on constituency business, courting their voter base and seeking to expand it. This does not entail them taking a lonely stand on legislation. Nor does it entail them, if they are in the party of government, holding the executive to account. Obviously they want to look active in Parliament, so they join committees and Parliamentary groups. A large part of their work, however, is acting as a form of untrained Citizen’s Advice Bureau and acting as Dyno-Rod to bureaucracy.
The consequences of this are apparent. The entire UK-EU trade agreement, all 1,200 pages of it, was given from 9.53am to 2.30pm on 30 December 2020. MPs nodded it through (it is now, entirely predictably, coming under strain). The Health & Social Care Levy Bill, which raised National Insurance in breach of a manifesto promise, was passed in a single day. As a matter of fact, MPs are not giving meaningful scrutiny to legislation.
From the viewpoint of individual MPs, this is entirely rational. They will get no thanks from their party leadership for showing independent thought. They will get no thanks from their local party hierarchy for impeding their party leadership. And voters, as we have already seen, do not cast their votes on this basis. Why would MPs act differently? It would be like serving Michelin-starred food in a Little Chef. It wouldn’t be appreciated and no one would be prepared to pay the price.
I’m not going to lament this. That’s pointless. None of this is going to change because no one has any incentive to change it. Party leaders want loyal MPs. Local parties want their parties to have a smooth ride in government. Voters don’t value independence in their own MP. MPs themselves have no reason to be required to change their approach. So nothing is going to change in the way MPs do their jobs in the foreseeable future. We do need, however, to be clear-eyed about what we might do next.
The prompt for action has come from a brouhaha about members’ outside interests. Owen Paterson had been caught effectively acting as a paid lobbyist. Parliament initially, under heavy pressure from the government, declined to sanction him, then backtracked when the government lost its nerve. The whole affair showed yet again just how much Conservative MPs are just counting chips for their party leadership.
It also, however, focused attention on what else MPs do for money. And it turns out that some of them do rather a lot. Public opinion was outraged that Sir Geoffrey Cox had been practising law from the Caribbean while acting as MP. It was further outraged that this seemed by and large to be within the rules for MPs.
Running ahead of the bear of public opinion, Labour is proposing to curtail sharply the outside work that MPs can take on. Having paused only to tie his shoelaces, Boris Johnson has crested past them with similar proposals. Given the immediate reaction from many of his MPs with outside interests, it seems as though he might have tied his shoelaces together. MPs such as Andrew Rosindell, who was happy recently to remove £20 a week from universal credit recipients, are very concerned that their colleagues may be unable to cope on the MPs’ wage alone (which is roughly three times national average earnings). Discontent is bubbling.
What would be the best solution? Others have made suggestions. Tom Chivers bravely suggested tripling MPs’ wages in return from banning them from taking outside jobs. When David Gauke argued that banning second jobs would reduce the quality of MPs and ministers, Dominic Cummings fumed that the quality could “hardly be crapper” and that what was needed was to learn from Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore and “hire MUCH more serious ppl as MPs & officials, pay far more, AND be FAR more demanding vis performance/firing, & demand they focus on their job no moonlighting”.
All three are profoundly misguided. Tripling MPs’ pay would not by itself improve the quality of the current MPs. It would simply give them more money. Would it attract MPs who perform to a higher standard? It’s hard to see why. In practice the recruitment of MPs is carried on by party hierarchies and local constituencies, neither of which has shown any interest in securing MPs who think or act independently. We might get a higher calibre of slavishly loyal MP. This would suit the parties but would also mean that the general public got told that horseballs were oranges with more panache. It is hard to see how this would improve the performance of MPs from the perspective of end users.
Voters really don’t get much say in this. Voting is a very low information form of communication. With one X, you get to express a preference between a small number of choices put before you. In practice, those choices are further limited by the known preferences of your fellow constituency voters. It’s all very well for Sir Geoffrey Cox to boom that voters can express dissatisfaction with external work through the ballot box. If they want a Conservative government then they’re still going to have to vote for the braying donkey in a blue rosette, no matter how weak an MP they might consider him. No doubt Sir Geoffrey would encourage wavering voters to make exactly that calculation.
For essentially the same reason, David Gauke is wrong. If MPs are to be busy fools, they may as well do so without distraction.
Dominic Cummings, as so often, is the most interestingly wrong. He correctly notes that the quality of MPs is terrible. He then leaps from that to seeking to improve that quality, without considering anything about the structures within which they are selected. Who is to be far more demanding about performance and firing? If, as he seems to imagine, it is for the Prime Minister, that shows a one party state mentality that is unnerving in a democracy. If it is to be the voters, he will need to performance manage them too. Good luck with that endeavour.
No, the solution is pretty simple, which is to accept the low quality that we are getting is all that we are going to get, get them to work exclusively for us and then to treat MPs like any other job, assess the role they actually perform and pay them for it. Since in practice they are performing the role of a busy country solicitor, they can expect to be paid accordingly. The current pay looks on the generous side, but let them keep that for now. Let the busy fools at least be contented.