Public outrage over MPs’ expenses may make it difficult for this Government or its successor to tackle the budget deficit. Every attempt to cut public spending will be met with the retort: “Why, in the midst of a recession, should greedy and self-serving politicians demand that everyone else makes a sacrifice?”

Such is the mood that reforming the system of MPs’ allowances might no longer be enough. Honourable Members may have to learn from their forebears in 1931 when, for the only time in Westminster’s history, MPs agreed to take a pay cut.

What made their decision surprising was that they were already very badly paid. Their £400 annual salary had not risen since its introduction 20 years earlier. Yet, during 1930 and early 1931, as Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour administration grappled with a worsening financial situation, calls were made for Westminster to set an example for the country to follow.

Conservatives led the campaign. This particularly irritated those Labour MPs who lacked the alternative sources of income enjoyed by some of their opponents. MacDonald made no attempt to hide his annoyance when several Tory MPs pushed for a pay cut of 12.5 per cent, replying that if they — as individuals — wished “to forgo their salaries, the Paymaster-General undoubtedly would be very glad to receive them”.

However, during the summer of 1931, the May Committee demanded that public spending be slashed in order to restore confidence in Britain’s battered finances. The Labour Cabinet broke up on the issue and MacDonald found himself turning to the Conservative and Liberal parties to support his tough measures. Ten per cent public sector pay cuts were introduced and the decision was taken that MPs could hardly ring-fence their own earnings. Their £400 salary shrank to £360.

Given that they had to maintain two homes on this sum, it was a considerable sacrifice for those politicians without any other income. Bill Deedes, who then earned £1,000 a year as a young parliamentary reporter for the Morning Post, wondered why he saw so few Labour MPs in the Westminster dining rooms that were his own haunt. He discovered that they were reduced to having their nightly suppers in one of two nearby cheap cafés. As he recalled, “They ordered tea and two pieces of toast which were made into a step. By perching the egg on the top step, they could enjoy two slices of toast impregnated with egg. For this they paid a few pence.”

It was a level of austerity to which only the most self-righteous electors would wish to return our legislators now. Yet, the MPs’ self-sacrifice of 1931 was applauded across an otherwise politically divided nation — one that, almost alone in Europe, ended the decade with its strong belief in parliamentary democracy intact.

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