The unemployable Ms Doughty - so would you elect her?????

The unemployables: How our former MPs struggle to find work
By STEVE DOUGHTY - Daily Mail

Politicians who lose their seats struggle to make a living in the real world, research has found. The study said employers have little use for former MPs - and some take more than a year to find a job. And those who do manage to find work often complain that they do not earn as much as they did in
Westminster. Others sulk about losing the perks of the Commons.

A careers advice company cited in the report warned that a high percentage of former MPs 'were commercially unemployable at senior management level'.

Only a handful of them could command salaries in the business world that matched their Westminster wages, it added. A high proportion of those who do find work get places on quangos.

One in three of the 180 MPs polled for the report, called Life After Losing Or Leaving, were given public jobs after leaving the Commons.

"Some former MPs struggled to find work and many earned less after leaving the House of
Commons," said the report by Professor Kevin Theakston and his team at Leeds University.
"Around half of those who did not retire voluntarily from the Commons said it had taken three to six months to find a new job.
"Just one fifth said they were able to find work immediately or almost immediately. One in seven took a year to find employment.
"Many had difficulty adapting to life in the outside world, and felt isolated from the political party to which they had devoted much of their lives."

One former MP told researchers: "New jobs are not easy to come by. Some expertise in another area than politics is usually necessary."

Another said: "Many MPs do not appreciate that their skills on entering Parliament will not be
relevant when they leave."

And a third warned: "You are effectively unemployable and trained for nothing in the outside
world."

Sue Doughty, a LibDem MP who was defeated in Guildford in the 2005 election, registered as unemployed, the report said. She was "ordered to report for a suitability-to-work interview by the benefits office she had opened
only the year before."

The careers company which examined the CVs of 127 rejected Tory MPs after the 1997 election
said: "Anyone hoping to reach the higher levels of business and the City who then spends time in an environment such as Parliament puts their chances of getting a top management job in serious jeopardy."

Only four had any chance of getting a job paying £100,000 a year or more - the kind of salary
necessary to match an MP's package of £60,277 pay and hugely generous perks.

Some former MPs were disenchanted after leaving the Commons, the university study found.
One called working outside politics "demeaning". Another said: "It's a hard, cold, unforgiving world outside Westminster." And one commented: "No expenses for motor driving, no secretary, no parking space." But for one in three of the former MPs consulted for the report, life after Westminster included election to councils, the European Parliament, devolved assemblies, or jobs in the public sector or with quangos. Nine took jobs with NHS boards. Other organisations which employed former politicians included the Historic Buildings Council, the UN, the Home Office, the Police Complaints Authority, the Heritage Lottery Fund, the EU, Sport England, the Affordable Rural Housing Commission, and the Committee on Standards in Public Life. Some complained that they were forced to leave their Commons offices too quickly after election defeat. Former MPs are given a week to quit the Commons.

Others said they should get publicly-subsidised job retraining on top of their redundancy and pension packages.

The report said that some rejected MPs had to deal with "nervous breakdown, divorce, heart disease, alcoholism, depression, serious debt and even suicide."