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Wednesday, 27 May 2009

Doug Henderson MP: good work if you can get it




It has emerged today that Doug Henderson, Labour MP for Newcastle North, is earning £25,000 a year for just 2 weeks' work as some kind of non-executive director for McDonalds. He has apparently earned a whopping £100,000 over the last 4 years for this meagre amount of work. Gordon Brown has been in North Shields and Durham today - one of our local MPs has certainly done a good job of upstaging him.

Of all the recent revelations about our elected representatives' finances, this is one of the most extraordinary and audacious. It is so totally out of proportion to anything that can possibly be justified. It just makes it worse that the business in question is one of the most disgraced and despised of multinational corporations. Perhaps the hapless Henderson has taken Mandelson's famous line "we are intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich" to heart.

I feel a campaign demanding Henderson's deselection brewing. Or perhaps something more direct than deselection! With today's news reporting a veritable roll call of celebrity figures declaring they may stand as independents, in various constituencies hit by the expenses scandal, it's essential the left sizes the initiative here and instigates a principled campaign against pampered and compromised MPs.

2 comments:

  1. I never cease to be amazed at how much MPs can get for this type of work. Any idea exactly what they get for their money?

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  2. Yeah, I never realised that flipping burgers and filling cartons with french fries was quite so lucrative! Or perhaps that's not quite the kind of work this Honourable Member was doing.

    I guess the big corporations get political influence - however indirectly - while the MP gets a fat wad of cash for doing almost nothing. It's a cosy little relationship that reflects how utterly New Labour has prostituted itself to big business and the worship of free markets.

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