Bill Bonnar, the Scottish Socialist Party candidate in the event of a Rutherglen & Hamilton West by-election, has issued a public challenge to the Labour and SNP candidates to match his pledge to live on no more than the average worker’s wage, if elected as an MP.
Bill is campaigning to become ‘a socialist MP on a worker’s wage’.
MPs are currently on a basic salary of £86,584, which is almost three times the average worker’s wage in Scotland.
Last week, former Tory chancellor, Sajid Javid, called for MPs’ salaries to be doubled to £173,000, because in his words “it might attract a better quality of MPs”!
This is outrageous, even by the low standards of the Tories. Javid is one of the Tories who presided over the worst cost-of-living crisis for millions of people in 40 years. Yet he has the brass neck to claim MPs are not well enough paid and should have their salaries doubled. It’s obscene.
Bill Bonnar said:
“More than half of local authority workers are on less than £25,000-a-year. The average worker in this country has suffered a pay cut of £5,000 in real terms compared to what they got before the bankers crashed the economy in 2008.
“We have civil service workers forced to live on the in-work benefits which they themselves administer, because of the poverty pay they suffer at the hands of the government.
“We have hospital staff resorting to use of food banks, and retail workers who often can’t afford the food they sell.
“And yet we have a political class totally remote from the conditions of working-class families.
“That’s why every SSP candidate will always reject the full salary of an MP or MSP and live on the average Scottish worker’s wage, which recent figures put at around £30,000.
“That’s part of the SSP’s constitution – for socialist MPs and MSPs living on a worker’s wage, to keep them in touch and uncorrupted by money.
“My challenge to the Labour and SNP candidates is quite simple: will you also publicly promise to live on a Scottish worker’s wage, rather than nearly £90,000-a-year plus generous expenses?
“And if not, how could you claim to be representative of the people of Rutherglen, Cambuslang, Blantyre, or Hamilton, who struggle to survive, as profits and prices let rip but wages and benefits fall?
“Local people deserve to know whether Labour and SNP candidates have the principles and dedication to match what an SSP MP would do – live on the typical wage of the people they represent.”
