Nadine Dorries, a smug git

Nadine Dorries the conservative MP for Mid Bedfordshire has some rather illuminating comments about MP’s pay and expenses on her blog. Lets fisk it.

Expenses and Register of Members Interests

The media make much of what an MP earns and the ‘associated’ expenses. One of the first emails I received as a new MP was from a constituent asking how I was going to spend all the money I was now going to earn! I realised at that point what a good job the media does; in order to fill their news pages and airwaves on the day the expense accounts are published, they left the public with a very warped impression of what an MP both earns and does to earn it. The constituent who thought I had just entered financial hyperspace said that he had heard it on the Jeremy Vine show!

Irrelevant, the public pay your wages and therefore have a legitimate interest about how much it is and what use their money is being put to. Quite frankly, considering that you earn 3 times the national average then yes you are, much better off then most people. The media taking delight in the hypocritical corrupt greedyness of MPs is probably one of the few things they get right, especially when they can prove MPs are deliberately fethering their own nests, lets have more public scrutiny please.

I have in fact taken a cut in salary in order to become an MP and, having left the business swim, have limited my future earning potential.

If you don’t like the public scrutiny then bloody well fuck off and resign. There is no shortage of people who want to be MPs so you can easily be replaced.

An MP’s package is available for all to view on parliament athttp://www.parliament.uk/site_information/allowances.cfm

As it should be, public scrutiny ensures that you can’t get away with corruption.

Members’ Allowance Expenditure is calculated from April, to the March of the following year. In the following October the figures are published in the public domain.

As a new Member, this means the expenditure incurred since I was elected in May 2005, through to March 2006 was published in October 2006 – a breakdown of which is at the top of this page.

Members’ Expenditure is basically broken down into three components;

Staffing allowance up to £84,081.00

This enables me to pay for a parliamentary researcher, a parliamentary assistant, administrative help in the constituency and temporary help on specific projects such as in a major debate or when I use temp admin cover for the holidays.

My staff are not elected members and what they earn and how that allowance is divided up between them is entirely their own business. The allowance is only used to pay for staff employed by myself. This allowance also includes my employers National Insurance contribution.

Civil servants are not elected either and their pay scales are made public. If your staff don’t want anyone else to know what they earn they should get a private sector job.

Would I employ my family or friends? If I needed to yes, absolutely. Politics is a tough environment and almost everything I deal with is confidential. Many MP’s use spouses, partners, people they can trust 100%, it’s about trust not money.

So you admit that you are prepared to pay a family member up to £84,000 a year for reasearching/secretarial help. Do most secretaries earn £84,000 a year? This is clearly an area that the public should know about to stop corruption.

My daughter covered the staff holidays in London during the summer. I have her permission to state that for this she was paid the minimum wage.

Exactly, you could have got away with paying her £84,000 a year if it where not for public scrutiny.

Additional Costs Allowance up to £21,634.00

This allowance pays for a flat in Westminster. Sounds good? Well as a mother of three and a husband I have been married to for over twenty years the only place I want to be at night is at home. However, that just isn’t possible when I don’t finish until very late in the evening and start early the next morning. The ideal for me would be if the House of Commons could be at the bottom of my garden, but it’s not…

Firstly, if you don’t like the conditions of the job then you can quite easily resign. Secondly £21,000 is more than enough to be able to rent somewhere in central London. Stop moaning.

Incidental Expenses Provision up to £20,000.00

This pays for the entire office in London and my office in the constituency. It includes absolutely everything you need to run an office from the paper clip to the printer ink, stamps etc.

This allowance also funds my annual Westminster report which is delivered across Mid Beds and gives my constituents a breakdown as to some of the things I have been doing over the last year for the salary I earn.

Again more than enough to pay for office expenses. You clearly don’t need any more money here.

Travel expenses are from a different pot, this covers my travel around the constituency and my petrol and train fares backwards and forwards to London depending on whether I commute or drive. I anticipate that my mileage around the constituency and backwards and forwards from home to London will between 20,000 - 30,000 miles per year.

The mileage allowance is paid at 40p - 50p per mile. If I wanted to use a bike I would receive 20p per mile for the bike - don’t ask, it’s beyond me too!!

Again, more than enough, assuming you do 25,000 miles a year and get expensed 40pence per mile works out as £10,000 a year. Easily enough to run a car for a year, stop bellyaching.

My salary £59,095.00

Perks, whatever you may read, there are none! Straight salary and that’s it. No frills, no overtime, no bonus. Great holidays, but they just compensate for the 80 hour 7/7 weeks during ‘term time’. And frankly, with school age children, if the holidays didn’t make up for the gruelling weeks I couldn’t do it. Having said that, even during the holidays I have been contacted with work related issues almost every day.

A salary 3 times the national average, more than generous. You don’t have to work 80 hours a week, you choose to do so. You could always resign if you don’t like it.

I have just noticed on another MP’s website that I am allowed to claim for all sorts of things including getting my dry cleaning done, news to me! Sounds more hassle than it’s worth.

Register of member’s benefits and interests

There is an office which is known as parliamentary standards office and there lives a registrar who is fearsome.

If I receive any payment or benefit which amounts to more than 1% of my salary, £590, as a direct result of my being a member of parliament I must declare it to the registrar.

Good, so you should too, this is designed to stop corruption and a bloody good thing it is too.

I am afraid donations are how politics works in this country. Until we have the debate on whether we move over to state funding via taxation we are stuck with it.

Why on earth can’t you rely on donations. After all, this would mean that you would always have to pay notice of what the electorate wants. If you say/do what the electorate wants then donations won’t be a problem. Of course I fully understand that you would rather dip your fingers into the taxes of ordinary people without having to take any notice of them but we live in a democracy thank you and thats the way we like it.

To any journalist reading this - I will be happy to discuss my salary and allowances with you, but let’s have yours on the table at the same time!

Why should journos revel their pay, they are not employed by the public, you are. The public pay your wages and have a legitimate in terest in them. How dare you try to stiffle debate.

On a final note, I must say that Dorries comes across as a slimey unprincipled nasty little individual. The sort of person who should be under the most exact scrutiny, purely to keep them on the straight and narrow.

What a smug and self satisfied git she is.