At the crux of this failure is our electoral system. Safe seats generate complacency. They give many MPs the opportunity to sit back, knowing they’ll get re-elected again and again. This was captured crudely by a Labour MP recently: even if “a raving alcoholic paedophile” were selected as a candidate, he said, his seat would still be kept.
And it is often in safe seats where some MPs find they have enough time to take on two jobs. Suddenly they believe they don’t need to respond to casework or do the work in parliament. They are above all that – and why shouldn’t they earn £5,000 a day at the end of their careers?
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The problem is far starker when we have MPs working for private interests. We just can’t allow members to work part time for a consultancy, part time in parliament. That’s plain wrong. The inevitable result is that organisations will exert unacceptable influence on parliament.
Besides the obvious requirement of electoral reform, his solution is to ban MPs from holding second jobs except in exceptional circumstances (he uses the example of medical doctors needing to stay current), preventing them from laundering cash-for-access deals through outside employment. Its a good idea. Sadly, I can't imagine Britain's corrupt MPs ever voting for it. Too many of them have their noses in the trough, or hope to. Until there is electoral reform, the only way Britain's democracy can be reformed is to bulldoze Westminster and all its corrupt little pigs into the Thames.