Alistair Darling has urged pay restraint, following the settlement of the Shell tanker dispute by the offer of a pay rise thought to be in excess of 7%.
On the day after consumer inflation leapt to a ten-year high, the Chancellor said: “We have got to be vigilant in relation to all pay settlements, public and private. If we get back into that spiral, it will take years to get out of it.”
Meanwhile, the Daily Express claims that senior backbench MPs are demanding a 21% pay increase in order to “catch up” with other professionals, according to a memo it attributes to Sir Stuart Bell, Tim Harvey and David Maclean. The increase would give MPs a £75,000 salary. The story was only slightly spoiled by the fact that there is no such MP as Tim Harvey.
“If you don’t pay MPs the same rates as, say, company directors, then people will choose to be company directors and not MPs,” said the fictitious Mr Harvey. “Of course, some ignorant people might think that you need skills and abilities to become a director, rather than simply pinning on a rosette once every few years, but this is a gross oversimplification. You certainly do need qualifications to join the board of a merchant bank, defence contractor, IT supplier or consultancy firm – and, in my experience, the best qualification you can possibly have is to be an MP. No MPs - no company directors. If we don’t get our pay rise, then every business in Britain will stumble swiftly into oblivion. Is that what you communists want?”
Mr Harvey later accepted that there may have been some minor flaws, contradictions, leaps of faith and bare-faced lies in his logic, but argued that he wasn’t doing badly for an imaginary character.
“Of course, I would probably have come up with a better argument if I was better paid,” he claimed.
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