Labour's justice spokeswoman, Pauline McNeill, has complained the lack of staff means she has to write all her own speeches.
Doesn't your heart just bleed for the poor woman?
Labour's justice spokeswoman, Pauline McNeill, has complained the lack of staff means she has to write all her own speeches.
8 comments:
What a pathetic post. If you take the time to go and read the submissions on the allowances review website you will find the vast bulk of it is about the chronic under-resourcing of a group of staff from all parties who support MSPs and provide a frontline service to the public. A job which is utterly essential to the health of our democracy but where many are currently paid less than retail or call centre workers.
Grow up.
Surprising that Labour only raise this after 8 years, now they are in Opposition. But hey, more money would enable them to employ even more family members - "Let me have a quick speech on carbon emissions, please, granny".
a) If you read Paul Hutcheon's dreadful Sunday Herald article you will find it is the SNP living in the big glass parliament/
b) The allowances review was established while Scottish Labour were in government at Holyrood and enjoys cross party support.
Anonymous misses the point. MSPs are paid a very good salary - £50,000 plus - at the taxpayers expense. Of course they all want more. But why should they get it? If they can't write the odd speech they shouldn't be there in the first place. Is Anonymous' job at stake?
Indeed it is Marathon Man and it is you who is missing the point of this whole round of allowances bartering. Nobody knows what the average figure for MSP staff pay is because an audit has never been conducted. But I take home £18,500 a year as a double graduate parliamentary researcher with 4 years service many caseworkers who have built up years of irreplaceable experience earn around 15,000. The arguement is not about how much McNeill and the rest want to pay for a meal or whether she has to type her own speeches and do her own filing, (although they are all things which the allowance scheme claims it can cover), rather it is about paying the staff decent wages. The reason they don't get them at the moment is because any time anyone mentions allowances sections of the press (who exist on far more handsome expenses budgets) turn the whole debate into the worst kind of populist hang em all nonsense.
To clarify the Members Support Allowance is a budget held be the Parliament's Allowance Office and spent on the Members behalf in the main on office and staff costs. It has nothing to do with the employers salary and isn't just some lump sum of cash which the MSP is given to do what they like with.
So I say again, if you're going to post on this subject, grow up and be clear you are talking about how accessible you want our representatives to be to the peple who put them there and how little you think the staff should be paid.
Anon - wind your neck in, for goodness' sakes.
I used to work for an MSP, and I can tell you that the allowance for a constituency MSP (£60,700) should, after office costs etc, be more than enough to employ a full-time researcher AND a full-time caseworker on reasonable salaries if the MSP concerned so chooses. If they choose to pool staff and share offices with MPs, as many do, the financial flexibility they have increases accordingly.
Sorry, pal, but if you wanted to get rich, you picked the wrong vocation. And if you work for Pauline McNeill, you picked the wrong MSP too by the sounds of things.
lol, good retort Richard, I'm a fan of your blog.
No I don't work for the hungry one but I am one of the staff who submitted a response to the allowances review and I am appalled by the misinformation out there and by the way the responses have been exploited for cheap and easy stories.
No doubt the Sundays will really go for it and bang goes any chance of sorting out the system.
Ah, well, flattery will get you everywhere :-)
I think you're 100% right about the way that these stories are reported. However, with this, I think Ms McNeill has just blown a huge hole through both feet.
AFAIK, there's no firm guidance at Holyrood on what members' staff should be paid, unlike at Westminster. You should take a look at the Westminster pay scales on the w4mp.org website [http://www.w4mp.org/html/library/salaries/general.asp]
If nothing else, it might give an idea of what your Westminster counterparts should be getting, and give you some basis for negotiation/equity comparison next time you have a salary review.
Cheers,
Richard
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