I thought I’d just heard a sneak preview of an April Fool’s joke. Someone on the radio reckons MPs are getting a basic pay hike of nearly £1,000 from the first of next month, taking their salary to £65,737 a year. Yeah, right. Pull the other one, was my immediate reaction. But no – this was the mainstream BBC news, not a revenge prank by some grieving 6 Music disk jockette, and remarkably true.  

This is the economics of the madhouse. MPs do an important job and in an ideal world would earn more. But in such a world so would the millions of hard working private-sector employees who haven’t had a pay rise since the start of the recession, not to mention public-sector employees in less high-status jobs who are looking forward to zilch in the next couple of years. The trouble is we are currently living in far less than ideal times and should all recognise that the name of the game at present ought to be pay restraint, including for bankers, barristers, and backbenchers in the House of Commons.

Not surprisingly, the public-sector unions are up in arms, though they deploy the less than convincing argument that all their members deserve the same percentage pay rise as MPs. Thankfully, both the government and the opposition – with an eye to the general election – say ministers and shadow ministers will forgo the rise. However, this is surely not enough.

As the coming months will show, there is no shortage of candidates for seats in Parliament. Cash reward is clearly only part of the motivation to seek election, and anyway the basic salary of an MP is getting on for three times what their average constituents earn. After a year of revelations about parliamentary expenses and constant talk of the need to cut the structural fiscal deficit, this is surely one of those moments when all our political representatives should show some genuine civic leadership and either say "no" to this pay rise or donate it to charity (though perhaps not to the Homeless Duck Foundation).