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ID:
119963
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ID:
138889
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article is the retirement reflections of an MP of thirty-eight year's standing. The story is mainly one of the decline of the Commons, a decline in the number of ‘big beasts’ and in the calibre of members and the quality of debates to the level of five-minute harangues and the custard pie-throwing of Prime Minister's Question Time. The House has lost its functions of staging the national debate and checking the executive to the media but has gained a new role as a national audit of government's performance and policies through the select committee system. MPs are working harder. Fewer now have outside jobs. They are more focused on their constituencies and though they have fewer powers there, and nationally more and better staff, they also have less respect and less influence. Personally, the end of what has been a long-fighting national retreat from social democracy has been a rear-guard action against the emergence of a colder, harder, neoliberal world. Retirement means relegation to watching that from the sidelines, not ringside.
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| 3 |
ID:
093205
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| Publication |
2009.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Many recent studies show that firms profit from connections to influential politicians, but less is known about how much politicians financially benefit from wielding political influence. We estimate the returns to serving in Parliament, using original data on the estates of recently deceased British politicians. Applying both matching and a regression discontinuity design to compare Members of Parliament (MPs) with parliamentary candidates who narrowly lost, we find that serving in office almost doubled the wealth of Conservative MPs, but had no discernible financial benefits for Labour MPs. Conservative MPs profited from office largely through lucrative outside employment they acquired as a result of their political positions; we show that gaining a seat in Parliament more than tripled the probability that a Conservative politician would later serve as a director of a publicly traded firm-enough to account for a sizable portion of the wealth differential. We suggest that Labour MPs did not profit from office largely because trade unions collectively exerted sufficient control over the party and its MPs to prevent members from selling their services to other clients.
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| 4 |
ID:
118046
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