Miliband matches Clegg’s pledge not to accept a pay rise. Will Cameron?

The Labour leader's promise not to accept the £7,604 pay rise to £74,000 leaves the PM as the odd one out.

After IPSA recommended that MPs’ pay be increased by £7,604 to £74,000 in 2015, Ed Miliband has joined Nick Clegg in pledging not to accept the rise.

I don’t think MPs should be getting a 10% pay rise when nurses and teachers are facing either pay freezes or very low increases and people in the private sector are facing similar circumstances. I’m very clear – I don’t think this package of proposals should go ahead in the current economic circumstances.

If this was to go ahead I wouldn’t be accepting this pay rise but I don’t think it is going to go ahead in the current circumstances because I think that when Ipsa consult the public, the public will be pretty clear that while the difficulties we have in the economy persist we can’t have MPs getting a 10% pay rise.

At the first of his regular press conferences earlier this month, Clegg said: “Speaking for myself I would certainly seek to do whatever I can to make sure that either this decision is not taken in the first place – but that’s out of my hands – but, secondly, if were to be taken, not to take that pay increase.”

This leaves David Cameron as the only of the three main leaders not to have promised to decline the increase. Downing Street made it clear this morning that Cameron opposes the rise, but stopped short of saying that he would not accept it. The likelihood, however, that he will be forced to revise his position, possibly as early as today. As I noted earlier, the public, unsurprisingly, oppose the increase by 68 per cent to 17 per cent, with 50 per cent believing that MPs are already paid too much (their current salary of £66,396 puts them comfortably in the top 5 per cent of earners. )

Should MPs receive the rise, and only in a change in the law will prevent them from doing so, it will also become even harder for Cameron to oppose Miliband’s call for new limits on MPs’ outside earnings and a ban on them accepting paid directorships and consultancies. As the Labour leader knows, Cameron is vulnerable to the charge that he is defending the interests of his own side. In the 2012-13 parliamentary session, Tory MPs declared more than £4.3m in outside earnings, compared to £2.4m by their Labour counterparts, £1.37m of which was accounted for by Gordon Brown, who did not personally benefit from any of the money.