SALARIES

 

DOES MY MOUTH LOOK BIG IN THIS?

Ishmaelites have been complaining for decades about the custom which has developed amongst parliamentarians in which, during the four-yearly festival of competitive promising, they plead and cajole and prostrate themselves before grimy nobodies –as Mr Matthew Dreary of The Times calls us - the electorate, promising them that they will work day and night to deliver their new by-pass, their hip replacement operation, new jobs, new schools, whatever pops into the head of a grimy nobody at hustings time the candidate will work his or her bollocks off to deliver it, this is a serious responsibility I am asking you all to entrust me with. And that is why as soon as I am elected I will go and find as many other jobs as my parliamentary position makes available to me and I will call this moonlighting Keeping A Foot In The Real World. I will, in effec, be neglecting my primary duty, the one I begged to be allowed to do, and trousering all this money on your behalf.

The Tories are the worst offenders, many of them are lawyers who only turn up at the House when nothing more lucrative beckons in the House, Gove and BoJo are clear examples of senior politicians working primarily and most rewardingly for press barons, Gove for Murdoch and the Mayor of London tiresomely gosh-gollying for the Bizarro Twins at the Telegraph, both, of course, in any proper democracy, would be thrown in jail and banned from holding public office.

But NewLabour benches are awash with directors of all sorts of dodgy enterprises, nuclear energy, PharmaCorp, bookmakers, whatever pays for the totty or the rentboys. Laughing Boy Hague, for some reason, despite having the responsibility of being shadow foreign secretary to the boy Milliband, spends much of his time being handsomely rewarded for entertaining the sort of business folk who, inexplicably, like to get close to gobby political failures such as he.

It is interesting, therefore, that Gordon the Ruiner plans to publish, or hopes to publish, details of honourables’ and right honourables’ parallel careers.

He might start with the Scotch Question. Scotland, the best part of England, sends many MPs to Westminster, where they promptly get drunk for decades, only showing their faces at foregone conclusion re-election time or on Jock Newsnight, squabbling like ferrets in a sack. One Jock MP, however, has a portfolio of other jobs which would make the eyes water. It is not the dwarf thug, John Reid, chairman of the Catholic Footballers Sectarian Movement and former shirt-sleeved home secretary, although, coining it at Celtic FC and in aspects of the so-called security industry he is rarely seen at his parliamentary job. The constituency of Bannf and Buchan has elected an MP who never visits Westminster because he moonlights as prime minister of Scotland, surely, one would have thought, a full-time job in it’s own right.

Fat and getting fatter Alec Salmond, as well as his ministerial duties, is the MSP for Gordon, a Holyrood constituency; it is nigh on impossible to see how one fat little bloke like Salmond can do justice to all three posts – Scottish MSP and first minister are clearly acceptable but an MP’s role is surely not merely titular, and if it were, would it attract the same salary and expenses and pension entitlement which our diminutive premier reluctantly enjoys ?

Given that Salmond also works for Mr Donald Trump, the great Hibernian social engineer, can it be right that he continues to draw three salaries and pensions from the UK taxpayer?

Salmond’s former career was as an economist in a Scottish bank; so distinguished was he that, like all politicians, he could not see the nose-on-your-face inevitability of the collapse of RBS but even one as myopically self-satisfied as the wee lardball cannot fail but see the unemployment which his banking chums and his own lack of foresight and his long-standing public sector cuts are spreading across Scotland. The decent thing to do would be to give up one of his so-called jobs and let somebody else do it, but then were Decency alive in Scotland, Salmond would be in Barlinnie, as would the Alexander Siblings, Lord Jim Wallace and most of Scotland’s lawyers, judges and cops.

Salmond's greedy narcissism is rich territory for Brown but to raise it would be to step outside the thieves’ compact which, rather than a Bill of Rights, governs us so ruinously. Mewl and bleat as they may for the cameras, they all have more in common with each other than they do with us. Many, grateful to see the back of JockLabour would still cavil at Salmond's grandiose, unfundable projects and the ghastly bigotry of the tribesmen he leads but none within the charmed circle of political celebrity would question his right to milk the system for every last taxpayer penny, that, after all, is why they are all there.