Semi-Partisan Politics

Yikes. Guido Fawkes has done a wonderful job of listing all of the sitting Members of Parliament who currently employ one or more family members on their parliamentary staffs at the taxpayer expense. To my mind, the only acceptable scenario for doing so would be if your family member just happens to possess vast prior experience of working on a political staff, or is a renowned expert an a particular issue or cause championed by the MP. This would reduce the number of MPs employing family members to the comfortable single digits, I’m sure. Just look at the list – as Guido says, this is a personal family enrichment scheme being perpetrated by a long and alarming list of our nation’s elected representatives, to the tune of four million pounds a year. This needs to stop. No more employing your husband or wife to be your secretary. I don’t care to hear about individual cases where the husband and wife parliamentary team are wonderful – the risk for fraud and abuse is too great. Only when we introduce strict term limits and ban the practice of MPs hiring their own family to their political staffs can we begin to eradicate the scourge of the career politician, and that even worse phenomena – the career MP who sees their public duty as a free ticket to enrich his or her family at the taxpayer expense.