What do Anna Pascoe and Vince Cable have in common?

With nary a regard for the Working Time Directive, Anna Pascoe burns all kinds of candles to fulfil her role as a Prospective Parliamentary Candidate (for South West Devon, since you ask) – and that’s on top of her full-time job – but she still has time to match Vince Cable, have a week campaigning, get her unique tyres fixed… and write about it all for the PRSD. Take it away Anna…

Monday, February 1
The icy snap certainly isn’t over for the year and I delicately made my way over to Buddle Woods in Plymstock this morning to inspect damage caused by anti-social biking in the dell there. Was disappointed to see that an area once packed with bluebells was now a muddy mess of damaged trees, plants and lumped-together earth, dangerous for anyone to try to pass along walking normally, with a stick or a pushchair. Causing long-term damage to the environment and troubling local residents for the sake of some ‘fun’ biking is not acceptable, and I will be writing to local councillors and nature organisations to enlist their help in this matter.

Then it was over to Ivybridge for a full day of campaigning and meeting residents with our candidate Tony Barber and the Lib Dem team (we did squeeze in a spot of lunch in the rather fine Sportman’s Arms, conveniently in the Filham ward).

Tuesday, February 2
I woke today to discover that the latest algorithm/hackette had calculated me to be the 32nd most influential Lib Dem on Twitter. This is what I’ve been striving for all this time, I thought to myself as I wended my way to work (joking aside, I was equally-placed with Sir Vince Cable, which pleased me greatly!)

After work it was time to risk a netball match with my not-really-very-much-better little finger. Managed to play the whole match, but my finger didn’t thank me for it, and a further stockpile of ibuprofen was in order for the rest of the week.

Wednesday, February 3
Final preparations for Thursday’s A Debate About South West Devon with Lembit Opik were the order of the day today (along with cleaning the bathroom), sorting out the order of ceremony and chewing my fingernails wondering what questions would come up… Got the bus to work and put in some more work on our green tourism review, getting one of the newer staff members involved with some projects too. Ploughed through some more emails before bedtime, which was unpleasantly close to getting-up time today.

Thursday, February 4
The day of A Debate About South West Devon dawned and with the dawn a weary PPC crept to the station to get the train to Lostwithiel, to be reunited with her abandoned car and the earliest available appointment for the mobile mechanic arm of the hire company’s ‘preferred partner’. My run of luck continued as we discovered that my car has slightly different tyres to standard issue, so waited while a different replacement tyre had to be fetched. Finally I arrived in Plymouth though, to set up the venue at Fort Stamford with an array of Devonshire delights for the attendees. Lembit was good-natured and good value as ever, chatting to guests and putting everyone at ease. Special thanks to Richard Smith of the Chamber of Commerce for chairing the debate, we got the chance to have a good old chinwag about the problems facing the licensed trade before the debate started proper.

It was good to hear what local people were really concerned about, and a key theme of the debate was that Liberal Democrats want people to decide politicians’ priorities, not the other way round. The issue of MPs expenses came up, and both Lembit and I agreed that sundry allowances should be done away with, and simply travel costs paid for MPs who live outside of London. Lembit also raised the point that it is ridiculous that MPs decide their own pay at the moment, and of course it should be an independent body doing this.

Friday, February 5
Having planned a photo shoot for the next Ivybridge election leaflet, we were astounded when the day actually began bright and sunny and not the grey drizzle we had anticipated! We made the most of this by getting the photos out of the way first and then it was straight to knocking on doors, where the boon of signing up two new members boosted our spirits further. No time to sample any more of the Sportsman’s Arms tasty fodder today unfortunately, as it was off to work for me in the afternoon, to greet a busy new intake of guests at the hotel.

Saturday, February 6
A long day at work called for an early night in with a pile of campaign admin tonight. One thing I promised to give some thought to was a tweet from the amusingly-monikered Jannery Paxman, who has appeared on Twitter recently, to hold those who seek office in the Plymouth area to account. He asked what I (and other PPCs) thought was a fair salary for an MP. I’ve often thought that if I put in overtime at work to the tune of the amount of hours I spend working as a candidate, I’d probably be fairly well off, but with no time to spend the money – as opposed to the current situation of not being very well off and having lots of things that need spending money on, and no time to get a second paid job.

I’d like to dispel the myth that parliamentary candidates are in the first carriage of the gravy train in terms of pay – I don’t receive any money for being a PPC (and nor do I seek to). I did a few sums to work out a rough answer to Jannery’s question. At the moment, I work 45 hours a week at my paid job (five days a week) and depending on whether I do the day or the evening shift, two-three hours before work and five-six after (or vice versa) on the PPC role.

On my days off from my paid job I probably spend around 12 hours on the PPC role. Working on the presumption that as the next MP for South West Devon, I would devote all of these hours to the job, that’d be in the region of 100+ hours a week. Which would come in at somewhere between £30-35,000 based on the current adult minimum wage. £7 an hour would be up to £40k, £8 up to £45k and £9 up to £50k. The problem is, that hours are unregulated and decided on the motives of each individual MP. We need to come up with a system that takes into account the varied nature of an MP’s role, but ensures that an MP who rarely attends, speaks or votes at Parliament and doesn’t do much for the local people does not simply receive the same salary as an extremely hard-working and dedicated MP elsewhere.

Sunday, February 7
The week drew to a close with a day shift at work. I did manage to sneak an hour’s break to have a Swedish massage in the hotel’s therapy room to ease out all the aches and pains of another busy seven days. Treating myself to a takeway on the way home, I lit the fire and settled down to another evening of work on the Ivybridge by election literature and campaign roster – with one watchful eye on Dancing on Ice, of course.

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