Barak Obama, Cincinnatus and the political career

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Sometimes - perhaps cynically - politicians really do say the right thing. So when Barak Obama says:

"You know, there is a tendency in Washington to believe our job description, of elected officials, is to get reelected. That's not our job description. Our job description is to solve problems and to help people."

..I want to applaud.

After all there's no point geting elected unless you intend to do something now, is there?

Sadly for most politicians the "doing something" means getting preferment - means climbing up the pole of political power and influence. Not so as to change anything - all that rhetoric to get elected is just that, rhetoric. Or rather what we really want to change is the wealth and status of the politician. And we don't have to get all Ramsey Mac to realise this or even to quote the plot line of Howard Spring's "Fame is the Spur".

Since us politicians will not behave like Cincinnatus, we have to be made to do so.

I've been a local councillor* now since 1995 - I like to think a passing fair one. Today I have the good prospect of being re-elected in 2011 and continuing to receive the benighted taxpayers' £13,000 stipend for a further four years. For my colleagues (and in my honest moments, me) there is the further prospect of chasing other preferments - places on joint bodies, chairmanships of panels and so on - each paying a few thousand more.

Indeed in Bradford, if you chair a planning committee, have an executive position on a joint authority (police, fire, PTE) and maybe an LGA Board you can clear £50,000 in earnings. All for about five or six meetings a week. Local politics has become a career costing ever more money(we even get to play in the public sector pensions game) and having less and less relevence or significance to the public who elect us.

Surely the time has come for us to stop this gravy train? And the only way to make us go back to our ploughs is to introduce term limits - no more than three terms (12 years) for Councillors and no more than two terms (10 years) for MPs.

Involvement in public life shouldn't be a career - that just corrupts. Involvement in public life should be an act of service done for the right reasons not for power, glory or, as seems the preference these days, the cash.


*Important note for local government bureaucrats and fellow travellers: the word is COUNCILLOR not ELECTED MEMBER.
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