MPs’ pay

Jim from Tunbridge Wells, a public sector worker was none too impressed with the idea of MPs getting a whacking pay rise. Nick agrees:

We’re trying to keep everybody together if you like and I just don’t think it helps at all in doing that by taking one very, very small but very prominent part of the public, people on the public sector payroll, MPs, and say, look you’re going to be treated completely differently to nurses, doctors, fireman, firewomen, everybody working in the public sector.  I really do think if we’re going to have an approach towards the public sector that everybody has got to be treated as fairly and equally as possible

While Nick won’t take the pay rise himself, he wouldn’t commit to telling our MPs not to do it. I guess to do so would be counter-productive. He did, though, urge us all to respond to IPSA’s consultation, which you can do here.

So, why wasn’t Nick at Centre Court watching Andy Murray on Sunday?

I was slumped on my sofa in my shorts and t-shirt with my kids watching the final so I wasn’t in the box.

Nick Ferrari asked if he couldn’t get a ticket. Nick replied:

No, they very, very kindly offered me one and I’m incredibly grateful to them.  I just sort of thought for a minute, this is a big historic occasion and I actually just wanted to see it with my oldest boy in particular who’s quite a tennis fan.  So I was very keen to watch it with him.  And that’s exactly what I did and then I had the huge honour by the way Nick of meeting Andy Murray and his mum and entourage in number 10 Downing Street just the following day.

And then he went to play tennis:

But you know when you watch tennis and you think that by osmosis somehow you’re going to be better by just having watched this great game.  And you go out thinking you’re suddenly going to be whacking the ball.  In fact you realise you are as rubbish as you were before you watched it.

On Trade Unions

I think trade unions play an incredibly important role in society. In any society, it’s quite rightly the trade unions who represent working me and women and play a big role in all of that. I just actually don’t think it’s healthy for trade unions, never mind our democracy and the Labour party. It’s just not healthy for the trade unions to be seen to basically be the puppet master of one political party.

He reckons Ed’s speech isn’t worth much either

I offered him this. If he really wants to be serious, he should legislate to move from this so-called ‘opt out’ to the so-called ‘opt in.’ So people actually have to make a decision about giving money to the political levy, the affiliation levy, and frankly, to give as John has implied, a trade union the right to give money to other parties if they want to. But if you look in the fine print of Ed Miliband’s great speech, the political fund, which is actually the money that the trade union Barons; and they’re almost all Barons these days, or Baronesses. These men who run the trade union movement; they’ve got this political fund which they can do with what they will. They can give it to the Labour party and there’s actually some analysis which suggests that with the mild non-legislative opt in approach that Ed Miliband is advocating, that fund will get bigger rather than smaller, and more trade union money will flow into the Labour party, rather than less. It’s one of the many, many reasons why I wish we could get a cross-party deal on party funding. We tried. I spent a year and a half sponsoring cross-party talks.

The Tories don’t want it either, but it needs sorting:

The Conservatives don’t want a donation cap and the Labour party don’t want meaningful change to the way in which the trade unions fund the Labour party. So we get this endless standoff. You saw it on display at the Prime Minister’s questions yesterday and I just thinkwe’ve got to get over this endless kind of finger pointing  because all political parties, and I speak on behalf of my own as well; all political parties get damaged at some point in some way by the way in which big money sloshes around in British politics.

On parliamentary bad behaviour

The way in which parliament is organised, the way it looks, the language we use, the way people address each other, it’s just totally off-putting. I think it’s particularly off-putting to young people who think, ‘Hang on a minute. This looks like a sort of different species yelling at each other.’ And I think that where possible, we’ve had some success in recent years and other areas, we’ve haven’t gone as far as I would like. We need to constantly make Parliament look and feel more modern than it can often appear.

On rehabilitation in prison

So what is the sensible thing for us to do as a society? Should we not at the same time, as well as punishing, you’re quite right; also make sure that when they come out of prison, they are unlikely to leave a trail of victims behind them. And I think it’s actually in the interest of victims; it’s a really important point this, Philip; it is in the interest of victims that we make sure that we cannot just put someone away but also change their behaviour.

That’s just some of the best bits. You can watch the rest, including finding out about his favourite shop and which politician he thinks is the most civilised, here.

* Caron Lindsay is Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron's Musings