There's a row going on at Westminster at the moment because the Prime Minister seems to be proposing that MPs second home allowance and other allowances that are getting much press coverage at the moment should be removed and replaced with a flat rate daily allowance for attendance at the House of Commons.
The system proposed (on which there are few details beyond what appeared in the PM's podcast over on the Downing Street website) appears to be based on the system used at the European Parliament. That'd be the system that journalists are constantly "uncovering" as scandalous with some MEPs turning up, signing in for the allowance and then going away again? Hmm.
I've just seen Nigel Farage on the news tonight talking about MEPs allowances. He claims that hardworking MEPs that spend time in their constituencies and their own countries rather than "sitting in useless committees" are discriminated against.
I think he's right. In part.
Now that's something you may never have expected to read on this blog.
I'm not sure that it's always completely vital for the most effective members of parliaments to be spending all of their time actually inside the parliament building. Representing your constituents' interests may actually be more effectively done by something other than being in the chamber listening to a debate on an issue that does not really affect them.
When the House of Commons was televised for the first time, there was a general complaint from the public and the press that the chamber always seemed to be nearly empty. What were allthe MPs doing when they should be there, easily visible on TV?
it's easy to try to judge your MPs performance by the amount of time spent in the chamber, but actually MPs got wise to the television age. Julie Kirkbride, a backbench Conservative MP (and rather amusing after dinner speaker I gather) speaks of being asked to be in the "donut", that's a knot of tightly packed MPs sitting around the main speakers in a debate to make it look on TV as if the whole chamber is filled without necessarily needing to speak or intervene- which of course is a valuable use of a backbencher's time, isn't it?
But there's a difference between being a donut in the chamber and being a member of a committee actually scrutinising legislation.
Scrutiny of legislative proposals is what being a parliamentarian is all about - "parliament" may come from the word "parler", to talk or debate, but parliament is the "legislative" part of the state set up (normally described as executive, legislative and judicial) and therefore time spent going through the detail of legislation in committee is not an optional extra, it's actually one of the major reasons for having a parliamentary representative, not just having a local celebrity of sorts.
So I think Nigel Farage is right that being at the parliament (whether it is the European Parliament or the Westminster parliament) is not necessarily the best way to be an effective representative.
But being an active committee member, scrutinising legislation, is not in itself useless. And particularly not in the European Parliament where - under the co-decision decision-making system - the Parliament holds 50% of the decision-making power and under the EP committee system an individual MEP with a particular interest can propose amendments, and give a justification for it (which is published online and readily accessible for interested constituents). There's no equivalent in Westminster for rapporteurs, that's normal MEPs that can draft the Parliament's response to a piece of draft legislation, reframing it as they wish, incorporating any elements that they feel would be beneficial to the EU as a whole, brokering the deals with the Council and the Commission as well as within the Parliament that enable a finished piece of legislation to be agreed and come into law across 27 Member States (and often other countries too such as the EEA members). That's one powerful role for someone that's just sitting on a "useless committee".
I think that there may well be "useless committees" in the EP, but I doubt that they're not the ones dealing with the technical, co-decided legislation.
It's more likely the ones that deal with areas in which the EP has little or no actual power which, for some reason, seem to be incredibly popular with MEPs, perhaps because they're seen to be big picture politics (the committees dealing with international relations issues in particular).
Assuming that I'm not going to accept the answer "all of them", which EP committees are the most useless ones?
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