UK Politics
General Discussion for politics in the UK.
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!ukpolitics@lemm.ee appears to have vanished! We can still see cached content from this link, but goodbye I guess! :'(
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Jesus. That's like winning the lottery every damn year. Why should a politician make that much? Let him go into corporate private business if he wants to make more. I guarantee you there will be someone who cares more about your country who is perfectly fine with making 200k-300k per year.
Did you read the article at all? His salary as PM was like 10% of his income. The rest was from investments he made FROM his time in banking.
Why is your FROM capitalized? To you type a lot of SQL on your phone and it got auto-capitalized or what?
Normalize SQL formatting IN normal text conversations
To underscore the point that he already worked in banking. The op said "if someone wants to make that much they should work in the private sector"...Rishi Sunak very much did work in the private sector.
SQL on phone sounds like a nightmare
His PM salary is only about 7% of that total.
His job is to represent the people of his electoral riding and manage the day to day work of the PM's office. That he's making £2M on the side is grounds for an immediate recall if you ask me.
I don't think he's making active investment decisions. In fact I'm almost certain it will be some sort of blind trust which is the usual mechanism ministers use for their investments when they go into office.
I know that's common practice and sometimes even the law, but it doesn't matter if it's a blind trust. The decisions made by the person getting the money are more influenced by how much they stand to gain or lose, and less by what the people want and need.
The point is that the people cannot possibly trust a representative who has higher priorities than serving the people.
The idea is that it's one of, if not the most important job in the country and you want to be able to attract the best candidates.
If you were an extremely talented person and I offered you an MP role for £100K where you're under constant public scrutiny or a job on the board of a company for £1M which is arguably much easier than being an MP, which would you choose?
Inb4 "MP/PM roles are extremely prestigious so you should be happy to get paid so much less". You can't pay a mortgage with prestige.
I would actually go as far to say MPs should be paid more, but that they shouldn't be able to claim expenses or have second jobs etc etc
Unless the pm is a kleptomaniac. Hello from Malaysia - we give reduced jail terms and discounts on fines of more than 200million, if you embezzle over a billion dollars while in public office.
If you're an extremely talented person I would offer you the opportunity to bid on a contract to do a specific job.
If you cared about the country and had a vision you would apply to do it no matter the wage.
You don't want a politician to be the most talented person. You want a politician to be the person who has the ideas and hires the right people to get the job done.
The difference between ideals and reality.
The reality is that there is a class of people that can afford to be MPs, they're not doing it for the salary or their electorate, there doing it to bend the rules for themselves and their rich mates.
How many people do you know that do a job for the honour of it? Every now and again you might here a sportsman or someone like that say "I love my job so much I'd do it for free!", they still all take the money though.
Your last paragraph is somewhat of a paradox.