EMBARRASSED MPs are appealing to Downing Street to make a new appeal to the IPSA body that sets MPs’ pay to abandon plans for a 10.3% increase in their salaries that is a £7,000-a-year rise. This pay rise comes at a time when UK living standards for tens of millions of workers have been shattered and wages and benefits have been slashed!
Yesterday, just a day after Cameron had let it be known that he would not intervene on the issue, Number 10 said that it would be sending a letter to the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority as part of its final review.
IPSA has said unless there is ‘new and compelling evidence,’ MPs’ pay will rise by 10%, from £67,060 to £74,000. Its chief executive Marcial Boo said: ‘Clearly, everybody is entitled to their view, but overall MPs are not going to be benefitting any more than they were before because the adjustment to their salary is compensated for by the cuts to their pension and the allowances.’
He told the BBC: ‘MPs, like all of us, are very welcome to choose to give their money to charity when they receive their salary.’ Labour’s leadership contenders Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall have already said they will reject the extra money and give it to charity.
Tory Education Secretary Nicky Morgan, SNP leader Angus Robertson and LibDem leadership hopeful Tim Farron have all joined the chorus that they will give the money to charity. Cameron has previously refused to urge IPSA to scrap the above-inflation increase, which was initially proposed to address complaints that pay had fallen behind public sector executives in the NHS.
However, needy MPs need not worry, Cameron says that he cannot overrule the IPSA award.
He will not follow in the footsteps of Health Secretary Hunt who vetoed the decision of the NHS Independent Pay Review Body that all NHS workers should get a 1% pay rise. Hunt stipulated that only some NHS workers would be allowed to get the puny 1% ‘rise’ which was in fact a huge pay cut.
Strike action by hundreds of thousands of NHS workers could not budge Hunt to pay out the Pay Review Body award. However, MPs’ pay is ‘sacred’! The truth is that the ‘embarrassed MPs’ are frightened that the working class will hit back with great force if they cannot get 1% while MPs are getting over 10%.
Workers’ living standards have been slashed since the 2007-2008 crash, when the working class was robbed to prop up the banks to the tune of over £1 trillion. Since then, workers have been victimised by vicious austerity measures that have brought millions of families to the edge of the abyss and tipped them into the growing ranks of the destitute. In the July 8 ‘second budget’ the masses face more robbery with extreme violence.
The sight of MPs getting 10%, and £74,000, when NHS workers could not get 1%, amounts to incitement on a massive scale, bordering on an act of supreme contempt worthy of the Bourbons in the period before the French revolution. It is the fear of revolution that has stirred the tender consciences of some MPs to give the 10% to charity.
In fact, all trade unions must put in for a 10% rise, since the working class has lost much more than that in the last ten years. Already in Ireland, the trade unions have decided to seek to re-establish the wage and job levels that were in place before the crash, with some initial success. A 10% wage rise for all is the minimum. Those union leaders that are unwilling to follow the lead of IPSA must be removed and be replaced by leaders who are willing to fight.
If the bosses and their MPs respond that the country cannot afford 10% to give back some of the wealth that has been stolen from workers by the austerity measures, they must be told by the trade unions that they will be expropriated and that their Cameron government will be replaced by a workers government and socialism. It is at this point that a general strike must be called to bring down the Cameron regime and bring in a workers government and socialism.
This is not just a struggle for British workers. The struggle to replace bankrupt capitalism whose world market is collapsing is international.
Forward with the British revolution and victory to the world socialist revolution!
