Galloway is Not Good Value

It's not so long ago that George Galloway railed against the secrecy surrounding the expenses of MPs. "Time for openness" it says on his website (scroll down a little- it's on the home page). There's a letter addressed to the House of Commons authorities too, which reads: "I have told the House authorities that I have no objection to the disclosure of the information pertaining to me. I don’t claim for a second home; I don’t have family members on the payroll and I don’t claim for travel." All of this, however, appears to have come back to stab Mr Galloway in the back. Two years ago, he was the most costly backbencher in parliament (costliness is measured in terms of how much money each MP claims and how many parliamentary votes they attend). Today it has emerged that Galloway is still, to put it mildly, scrounging. On top of his exorbitant £60,277 salary, he is also claiming in excess of over £100,000 while spending an absolute minority of time in parliament, just 12% of divisions in fact.

For a long time now, it's been clear that Galloway isn't a massive fan of showing up to vote, particularly when something a bit controversial is on the cards (IVF for lesbians, abortion time limit, hybrid embryos etc.) But 100,000 is really taking the piss. What is the man doing? Eating fois gras and caviar, and downing Bollinger by the bucket? How many staff is he employing? And if he is merely employing plenty of staff - and staying well away from the champagne and pay-per-view adult films - why hasn't he got the bloody time to represent his constituency in parliament? Elected representatives should be on the same wage as the average skilled worker. Socialists shouldn't be pretending to be Socialists if they can't abide by this. There's a good article by Dave Vincent (PCS) in the Weekly Worker about this here. Dave reminds us that bureaucrat sponger Mark Serwotka was elected on a manifesto of promising to take a wage in line with that earned by PCS members, but ditched this ethos when confronted with the £109,000/year salary and numerous freebies.