Saturday 25 April 2009

Employee Liability

It is an extremely bad idea to make MPs' staff direct employees of the House of Commons.

There are all sorts of reasons for this, but not the least is that such jobs would then effectively be restricted to people straight out of the super-posh universities to which they had been sent by their super-posh schools (by no means necessarily private, at least officially).

This is already very largely the case. But it is still possible for an individual MP to make exceptions. For anything like the foreseeable future, the House as an institution would never do so.

2 comments:

  1. There is a bigger reason why it is a bad idea.
    Certain employments cannot be covered by the excellent employee rights.
    It is natural and indeed desirable that persons recruited to work for individual MPs should have a degree of commitment that an employee of the Commons would not be expected.
    Therefore totally proper that an employee of a Labour, Liberal, Tory, SNP, SDLP, UUP, DUP,Sinn Féin, or Plaid Cymru MP should have a staff that reflect his/her politics and not prone to leak or spy.

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