IPSA is anything but 'Independent'

Pedants refrained from pointing out that yesterday’s post was technically inaccurate; they could have commented that technically, it’s not MPs who are awarding themselves an 11% increase but a completely independent detached body called the IPSA. That no-one did so probably means that mercifully few if any of you are fooled by this fiction. 

There’s nothing in the least independent about Ian Kennedy’s IPSA. At the heart of the Whitehall Big State, it is a body thoroughly committed to maintaining the status quo of the dying big three parties at any cost, committed to turning them into the permanent Parties of State using tax funding in the absence of popular support, committed to resisting any change in Parliament and to keeping outsiders out, and committed to keeping MPs well fed, boozed, fat and contented, with a cornucopia of junior ministerial posts, fat wedge, exclusive privileges and above all a sense of innate greatness. IPSA is committed to the cancer at the heart of the Rotten Parliament – that MPs are ‘special’; a fiction that MPs are all too ready themselves to believe.    

So before they settled on 11% they asked MPs how much they really wanted. You can imagine the result. MPs, deluded by the nonsense of their ‘specialness’, demanded three-figure percentage increases. Kennedy could have asked the public instead if his committee were truly independent, but people such as Kennedy are completely uninterested in public opinion. Good God, if his committee actually paid attention to what the public were saying (splutter!) it may actually be independent.

You’ve only got to look at the Whitehall club of membership of Kennedy’s ‘Independent’ body to see the fiction. It’s a million miles away from the QT audience who jeered and ridiculed Pickles when he tried to suggest that MPs were ‘special’. And as the Mail reports, the pay commission members have never had to balance a household budget between one payday and the next.

So thank you for your common sense. And if the Commons is stupid enough to take more than 1% than every MP who votes for it deserves the tumbrils coming for them.