BEFORE the 20th century, Members of Parliament received no salaries. Politicians were gentlemen amateurs pursuing a hobby, giving Westminster an air – which it never entirely lost – of a boys’ public school gym locker room. For a 19th-century aristocrat, the idea of salaried politician was the height of vulgarity; it risked taking politics away from the "well-bred". So when Parliament introduced MPs’ salaries, which started at £400 in 1911, it was a victory for the left and a defeat for old money.

The result, however, is that politics has become a career, and it has in turn produced its own class: the political careerist. Increasingly it’s a lucrative career, and a moneyed class. An ordinary MSP now belongs among the richest five per cent of Scottish people; a cabinet minister is in and among the richest one per cent. Add in various perks, from pensions beyond any ordinary person’s wildest dreams to a lavish expenses account, and political debate becomes so far removed from average life that we might as well stand on the moon and holler at people through a megaphone.

The challenge for the left today is to restrain the salaries they helped introduce. That’s why socialists in Scotland have always insisted on taking only an average salary, which is much less than half the starting pay of an MSP. I’m certainly not saying a huge salary automatically turns you into a remote android. Nor am I saying that an “ordinary” salary will turn a politician,

Scrooge-like, from a money- grubbing capitalist into a humble servant of the poor. But a £60,000 politician is living the lifestyle of a senior manager or a university professor, not a nurse. We’d be naïve to ignore that.

As a candidate for Rise, I have been thinking about this a lot. I back the policy 100 percent, because I think politicians make a mockery of democracy by aspiring to earn more than double the salary of their average voter. Plush lifestyles, as exposed by the MPs' expenses scandal, helped destroy Scottish Labour, one of the most secure centre-left parties in European history. We’d be foolish to ignore that lesson from our own recent history.

I don’t want politicians to live in penury. But they should experience a small token of average everyday life so they don’t forget the people they’re supposed to represent.

However, we want politicians to experience real life, but what exactly does “real life” mean? And what is an average person? I’m still troubled by these questions.

Real life means different things to different people. Perhaps most importantly, gender has a huge role in shaping “average” expectations. Median gross pay for a man is £29,934, while for women the figure is £24,202. More than four decades since the Equal Pay Act, a man’s “average” is still considerably larger than a woman’s one.

You’ll often hear “the gender pay gap is dead”, as the libertarian online magazine Spiked recently claimed. Such claims are really just trolling, since the average working woman is undeniably still valued much less than the average working man in 2016. Over the course of a career, a woman still earns about £200,000 less than she should.

When politicians of the left take an average salary, the idea is simple: we want to rise with our class, not out of it. Given the problems of capitalism today, we can’t fix everything immediately, as Syriza have discovered. But we can promise that we’ll endure the same hardships and the same rewards together. That gives us an incentive to fix things collectively for working people, not for our pals in the boardrooms.

However, let’s not forget that pay inequality is only part of the problem. Household chores, care work and raising the kids are tasks that still largely fall on women. To experience real life, a politician doesn’t just need to earn the average salary; they need to experience the daily grind of society’s majority, the 52 percent of us who happen to be women. Unless most politicians are women, they aren’t experiencing real life at all, regardless of their salary.

Despite all the progress we’ve seen, most Scottish parties – Rise and the Women’s Equality Party excluded – are still presenting male majorities on the regional lists. That’s a real missed opportunity to create a representative parliament. Sure, we’re better than Westminster – but, whisper it: we can afford to be a tad more aspirational than the House of Commons’ locker room.

During the referendum campaign I was asked how I would replace the House of Lords if Scotland became independent. I replied, half in jest, that we needed an independent women’s parliament. This made some men on my own side furious; many of them told me I clearly understood nothing about politics. I countered that, sadly, politicians knew nothing about life.

Here’s the point about my half-serious suggestion for a women’s parliament. Politics suffers when the people affected by decisions aren’t the people making them. For example, the Con-Dem cuts programme was introduced by a mostly male, millionaire Cabinet; the burden of them fell on poor people and, overwhelmingly, women.

Many people defend big salaries for politicians because they want the best expertise for the job. But politicians should not be, and in fact are not, civil servants. They are the closest thing we have to a public voice in a society run overwhelmingly by the wealthiest 1 percent. When they start to belong to that wealthiest one per cent, that’s a problem; because eventually they identify with that class and its aims, and forget the voters that put them where they are.

Politicians should experience the average life of real people. Step 1 is for politicians in mainstream parties to follow George Kerevan’s great example and take an average salary. Step 2 is to make sure that women make up at least 50 per cent of MSPs in five years’ time. Only then can we restore the good name of self-rule and public power.