Marina Kim: If MPs are to be paid more, voters need a right of recall

Marina Kim is a journalist working in London. Her website is www.marinakim.co.uk. Follow Marina on Twitter.

The market is very fair. If you are a bad accountant – you get fired. If you are a bad manager – you get fired. If you are a bad photographer – nobody buys your pictures, and you will be forced to do something else. If you are a bad cleaner – you are replaced with a better one who is not going to brush the dust under the carpet.

Please forgive my naïve question but… how come that if you are a bad politician – you are allowed to keep your job and nobody can do anything about it until the next election? You are here to clean up the mess on a national level - and yet brushing the dust under the carpet is acceptable? Surely, with a job that important the demand to perform must be equally high?

It gets even more hilarious. According to IPSA, the body responsible for MPs’ salaries and pensions, MPs deserve a salary increase for all their unaccountable efforts.  Something between £10,000 and £20,000. Let’s rock-and-roll! You worked so hard – oh well, maybe you didn’t but the other guy over there did – and yet you will all receive the same salary increase. No matter that you might have worked half the amount that he or she did.

Marina Kim: Dangers of freedom

Marina Kim is a Kazakhstan-born journalist now living and working in London. Her website is www.marinakim.co.uk.  Follow Marina on Twitter.

“People who read books will always be in charge of people who only watch TV,” I’ve always found this phrase very reassuring. Clever people will be in charge, and the order will prevail. Even if these “clever people” do not always take good decisions, it has always seemed they will nonetheless do a better job than the rest of us.

But the more I watch TV, the more worried I become what might happen when those who only watch TV become a majority, a majority who will vote into Number 10 people they deem as “clever”. The new British generation brought up on “Big Brother” and “The Only Way is Essex”. Or brought up abroad, sometimes with values very different from the western ones. What is “right” for them?

It is not only TV to blame. There are books - and there are books. There are books that exist for killing time, and are even more malicious than low grade TV. They give you this aura of an intellectual in your own eyes but it’s a waste. It’s like eating supper from your garbage bin. Hopefully, at some point you will throw up. There are books, and there are also papers, shaping the views of young and old alike. Remind me, what are the most popular newspapers in Britain? Need I say any more?

Marina Kim: Zac Goldsmith – poet. Douglas Carswell – poet. The importance of poetry in politics.

Marina Kim is a Kazakhstan-born journalist now living and working in London. Her website is www.marinakim.co.uk.  Follow Marina on Twitter.

John Kennedy: “If more politicians knew poetry, and more poets knew politics, I am convinced the world would be a little better place in which to live...When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.” 

There are two types of politicians: actors and poets. To hell with Labour, Tory or LibDem labels. They are just different houses where actors and poets live. Actors vs. poets – that should be the ultimate division for modern day politics where parties have grown so identical we can only find their differences some time before Doomsday.

Actors are career politicians who play politics as a job and repeat a written script. Their theatre has an agenda with the ultimate goal of hearing you clap (think: next election). You are watching the play because you have no choice: you selected the cast and have to endure a seat in the front row (or a “welfare seat” at the back), and they are on stage for the next 5 years. Boris is popular with the audience because – albeit an actor – he is a funny one. And his genuine remarks are so inappropriate that it looks like he was casted by accident. Perhaps, he is a poet at heart after all.

Marina Kim: Called a hooker. Labelled a spy. My experience of Britain's hidden racism against Eastern Europeans

Marina Kim is Kazakhstan-born journalist now living and working in London. Her website is www.marinakim.co.uk and she is on Twitter as @MarinaKim_

Hello, I am Russian. Now, tell me honestly what is going through your mind when you hear that (apart from “why is she writing for ConHome”)? Would you introduce me to your mother? Would you invite me to your shooting weekend? Would you go for sushi with me?

There's a lot of focus on racism and anti-Muslim prejudice. But there is a new era of racism that is flourishing unnoticed because its victims look just like you. We are white.

Prejudice against Eastern Europeans is on all levels of British society - from taxi-drivers to members of elite clubs (I have been a victim of both). I’ve stopped counting the times I've been called a hooker. It used seriously to upset me when I was new to this city, and desperate to make friends. I suppose, a positive thing about it was that they always added: “A high-end one”.