Madam,
This is in response to Mark Garnier's column in the Shuttle 21st October 2021.
He is right that the more we treat our political class as different, with different rules for politicians than for their constituents the more we create a separate political class.
He goes on to say that politicians can be guilty of bringing the problem on themselves, I think he is guilty of stating the obvious.
Lets look at pensions, politicians did not like civil pensions being linked to RPI because they thought it was to generous and so changed the yearly rise to CPI because this was less generous and would save the government money but they did not alter their own pension link they left it tied to RPI, an example of treating politicians different from their constituents.
They closed school kitchens which provided nutritious hot meals for often underprivileged children because it saved money, as far as I know they still have hot meals in Westminster for politicians.
When you get a politician saying that £80000 a year is not enough to live on and their pay should rise to the same as doctors who has to train for years and anybody can be elected as MP no qualifications required, no wonder the general public are disillusioned with politicians.
I would like to know what Mark Garnier has done, for instance to bring MP's pensions in line with civil servants, to show that he actually believes what he has said in his column that he is the same as the community that he lives in.
Paul Dakin
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