From the BBC
Business Secretary Vince Cable will announce plans on Wednesday to force parliament to have binding votes on MPs pay every three years. Parliament will then have to stick to their pay plans for the next three years or have another popular vote.
They will also have to publish a simple figure every year showing how much MPs have been paid. And they will have to say how much pension an MP will be paid if they are sacked or quit.
Currently, MPs vote for their own pay, typically soon after getting elected, so they get a better salary, and because they're in for 4 or 5 years, there's nothing the people can do about it.
Wednesday, 20 June 2012
Cable to force three year binding votes on MP's pay
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10 comments:
How many times have shareholder votes been ignored?
A cardinal value less than one is my guess.
Sarton Bander,
Worst case scenario for shareholders is that you dump your shares and put the money elsewhere. There's at least a couple of thousand companies on the stock market. You can do it in minutes, 5 days a week.
This is more of a thing of people who aren't shareholders (politicians, BBC, Guardian writers and other scum) wanting to stick their nose in, and making an issue out of something that doesn't exist. It's about envy, that these people don't "deserve" the money (cue comparisons with the salaries of hallowed nurses).
Prospective MPs should write their desired salary on their voting forms...
You win, you get that wage.
TS, in other words, when you buy shares you get them cheap because the price is depressed by inflated director salaries, so you can't complain when you have to sell them cheap as well. Fair enough, but you can justify a lot of things with that sort of logic, and shareholders are perfectly entitled to earn themselves a windfall gain by chucking out the greediest directors and getting more of the spoils for themselves.
SB, that works for me.
Sarton,
Pretty much, but the whole amount to run the office, in salary, pension, staff, travel costs and so forth. If a candidate already has a house in Westminster and is prepared to use it to serve the local people at no cost, he'll be able to do the job for £20K less than the next guy.
Also, the local people pay the bill directly. There has to be a value incentive in there, or everyone will just stick £1m on the ballot.
And if they run out of money, they have to call a by-election or quit. If they happen to end up with a surplus, well done, pay the corp tax on it and it's yours.
Mark,
But shareholders can get rid of directors anyway, can't they? Vote at an AGM, gets passed, director walks. Or am I missing something?
TS, yes of course they "can", they always "could". The problem is that most shares are owned indirectly via pension funds etc, so the votes are exercised by the fund managers, who just happen to be best mates with the directors and so nod everything through, so the small shareholders (and indirect shareholders, i.e. pensions savers, unit trust investors) get trampled on.
"It's about envy, that these people don't "deserve" the money (cue comparisons with the salaries of hallowed nurses)."
I don't think anyone can make the case that a non-executive director of a building society "deserves" £300K a year, or an executive one "deserves" £2M or just shy of it, even if you don't involve any nurses. It's really a case of they can do it so they do do it, like dogs licking their balls, but it's not anyone's business except the shareholders', it's their money. So what if small shareholders are getting stuffed: quite apart from the fact that they aren't, unless the rapaciousness of the directors increases dramatically in a short time, if you don't like the heat, get out of the kitchen.
This is just another example of a downside to the great government backed private pension scam.
The problem isn't 'excessive pay'. The problem is cronyism. Take The failed FSA - it justifies eye watering 'remuneration packages' for its senior staff because it has to 'compete'. Compete with what FFS? It's a quango. It has no competition by definition. So it is part of the problem.
"The problem is cronyism"
AFAICS, it's a form of corruption. The FSA could have had its pay set by an outside body, or linked to civil service pay or some other form of control, but the MPs who were in charge of setting it up were more interested in creating a nice cushy number for their mates than controlling the expenditure of public money, so they let it set its own pay rates.
Having said that, this sort of thing has been part of "government" since history began, so it's unlikely to change any time soon.
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