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Members' Salaries, Pensions and Allowances

I would hope that we could get ourselves into a position where the Government would not feel obliged to intervene every time; but perhaps we cannot, in which case we are doomed to go on having these debates every four years for eternity. I want to make it clear that I am not wedded to any particular formula. To my pleasant surprise, I found myself in general agreement with my right hon. Friend the Member for Warley (Mr. Spellar), who is no longer in his place, when he suggested a number of different alternatives: indexing to the average increase in public service wages, for example, though he lost me on the Chicago grain index. Whatever formula we alight on has to be readily comprehensible to those outside this place. It also needs to be easily defensible so that we can look our constituents in the eye, which we have not always been able to do in the past.