With Parliament shutting down until the 12th of October, 38 Degrees is launching a new campaign, MP Holiday Watch, to find out how exactly MPs spend their time. The usual story is that MPs spend this time getting back to their constituents and catching up on case work, but though this might hold true for some, the truth is that we just don't know what our MPs are up to. How many take well paid second jobs or spend most of their time holidaying in the sun rather than dealing with their constituents' issues?
Some suggest that asking MPs to divulge details on how they spend the summer recess is intrusive and a needless violation of the privacy of our hard-working elected representatives. But, as David Babbs points out, these arguments sounds more than a little familiar when one considers the rationale for not investigating MPs' expenses for so long… While there might be a case to be made about protecting privacy if 38 Degrees were demanding detailed holiday plans and day to day movements of MPs, the short survey they suggest MPs take 10 minutes filling in seeks simply to build up a picture of how they will spend the recess – how many weeks on constituency work, how many weeks (if any) on a paid second job, and so forth. Requesting a breakdown of how our representatives spend the 82 days they do not have to be at Westminster is simple enough, and doesn't require the exact address your constituency MP will be staying at in the south of Spain, nor whether the kids will be going too.
There is of course a related debate, regarding how much constituency work MPs should be doing at all – can we really expect MPs to do a good job both scrutinising the executive and sorting out constituency matters? It might be argued that rather than focusing on whether MPs really are doing constituency work, it would be more productive to campaign for MPs to take shorter recesses and spend more time making sure legislation is of a higher quality. After all, do all constituency matters really require MPs to take a direct hand in it? It might seem that many problems that are taken to MPs are of a kind that would (or should) be more effectively dealt with by local councillors or social workers.
However important this related debate is though, we should not get distracted. 38 Degrees' MP Holiday Watch remains significant and a reasonable demand to take to representatives. We should expect a degree of transparency from our MPs and not just take their word for it that they will spend all of their time on constituency work. If they do spend their time on other matters, let MPs justify this openly and be accountable for it – if we have learnt anything from the recent scandals and crises, it is that self-regulation doesn't work.
Comments
Who cares. As long as they are not there passing any more useless and stupid laws it's all to the good. And as they have sod all interest - particularly on the Labour benches - of holding this miserable and incompetent Government to account they seem to me to be utterly pointless at present. Roll on a General Election and a new Government.
Because a General Election and a new Government will somehow result in a Government neither miserable or incompetent, held to account by parliament? I'd say it's unlikely given what we've seen so far...
One of the few things likely to make an MP act more responsibly and stand up for constituents' interests against the Government would be MPs being made more accountable for their actions, which is more likely to happen if their activities get reported on and made known to their constituents.
Clearly 38 Degrees' call to know what MPs are up to in the interests of transparency is not going to single-handedly usher in competent government that is effectively held to account, but it's a step in the right direction. Far more so than waiting for a Tory government to step in and save us.
Yes we do need a General Election and a Tory Government. Gordon the Moron has shown he is incompetent. Having destroyed the States finances the longer we have to put up with this shambolic government to greater will be the mess to clear up. As it is we will not see the mess sorted out for a generation at the very least. What we need are fewer MPs and we need them to have, and to have had, a life outside politics and being a professional pain in the a***. That gets rid of most on the Labour benches for a start. We need less 'professional politicians' and more politicians who are part-time and actually have a life outside politics because that is how they keep in touch with their constituents. What sort of idiot would abolish the 10p tax rate and then claim 'no one on low income would be worse off'. As I said Moron, and no one with an understanding of how people live would have made such a stupid decision. He needs to get out more, but he has basically always been a professional politician. That's the problem.
While I agree that professional politicians who've never done anything else are a damaging thing in our political system, I confess I find it hard to see the Tories (the frontbench especially) as in touch with their constituents or having a life outside politics that remotely resembles the life of most of the British public.
Edit: This is not to slag off Tories and say that Labour are better, or that you can't have conservative members of the public, I simply meant that the Conservative party MPs often come from a background of insulated and detached 'bubbles' of opinion in the same way as their peers in Labour.Or indeed in the same way as most of the political class.
What, in particular, will Scottish, Welsh and N. Irish MPs be doing over the holidays? They are presumably already in the position Adam Price recommends for [English] MPs of having minimal constituency case work to do, as most of their constituents' problems now come under the remit of MSPs, AMs and MLAs. Equally, they have no real business scrutinising UK-government legislation that doesn't affect their constituents, even though that's one of the things they do in fact do when Parliament is sitting.
So that just leaves reserved matters. But even the constitutional reform agenda mainly affects England only. E.g. the Constitutional Reform Bill is not proposing that the House of Lords starts scrutinising the legislation and decisions made by the devolved administrations: only reserved and England-only matters are affected. This means that, under a mainly or wholly elected House of Lords, we'll presumably have a doubling up of the West Lothian Question, with elected Scottish, Welsh and N. Irish Lords / Senators scrutinising England-only bills but not those produced by the parliament / assemblies in their own countries.
Let's just keep track of the English MPs, then, as we can expect the others to have very little to do, and most of what they do, they shouldn't anyway.
Good points. You don't think that we should find something productive for non-English MPs to do during that break then? Enforced community service, perhaps, or something to get them out of the Westminster bubble of opinion and into contact with voters they might not usually encounter?
Regardless of what there would be for them to do productively, the first step towards getting them to do it is to find out what they're up to at the moment...
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