Communication’s allowance

     

Today MPs are set to vote themselves and another expense’s allowance, it is described as a ‘communications allowance’ which Jack Straw, Leader of The House said, “The purpose of this allowance is to contribute to better public understanding of what this Parliament is about and what it does”. It is going to be a staggering £10,000 per annum! It is quite frankly an unbelievable sum.

As Tony Wright a Labour MP said, it is going to be spent on ‘shameless self promotion’. The reason Labour want to bring it in, argued by many is that it allows MPs in marginal seats £10,000 pounds a year to promote themselves to their constituents, this is a huge advantage against parliamentary candidates standing against them.

In an age now of the internet, where blogs like this are run for next to nothing, why do MPs need all this money? When they could use lots of new forms of communications such as myspace and even text messaging. For example, Iain Dale who is not even an MP yet registers over 10,000 hits a day on his website. I know that the elderly cannot use the technology as easily, but instead of giving them all this money to churn out huge numbers of leaflets, they should be encouraged to use new cheap forms of communications, as they are far more likely to engage young voters, the most apathetic voters of any age.

Perhaps, it backs up my first post a few days ago though, that Jack Straw is like the current Chancellor, and is extremely good at bringing at using stealth whether this be for taxes or allowances.