Max McGee, Nuneaton Socialist Party
Speaking at the pro-business Institute for Government, Labour deputy leader Angela Rayner stated the party’s plans for cleaning up corruption and Tory sleaze – a new ‘watchdog’, the Ethics and Integrity Commission. But the only addition to the Tories’ current toothless ‘anti-corruption’ rules is to slightly increase the time before paid lobbying work can be done by politicians after leaving office.
MPs that break the current Tory rules can be fined. But this never happens. Labour has failed to say how it would be different when it’s in power.
Value for money?
Since 2010, MPs from all parties represented in Westminster have seen their pay swell by an eye-watering £20,000. The useless Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority defends this as “value for money”, while the wages of ordinary workers have gone down in real terms.
The Socialist Party – and our predecessor Militant – have put into practice, on a smaller scale where we could, ideas against corruption, and the conditions in which corruption thrives, the capitalism system and its pursuit of profit.
Our Militant MPs in the 1980s – Dave Nellist, Terry Fields and Pat Wall – didn’t take the full MP salary. Instead they only accepted the average wage of a skilled worker, to tie the representative to the represented. The rest was donated to the local trade union and workers’ movement.
The Socialist Party fights for all elected politicians to be subject to the right of recall. And Labour’s failure to fundamentally address another problem created by the Tories is more proof we need a new mass workers’ party to fight for us.
