HANDS up who wants an 11% pay rise.

How about you, teacher, or what about you, nurse?

Over there in the call centre, yes? How about you behind the till in the shop?

Thought you might, but sorry you're not an Member of Parliament so you can't have one.

The Scottish Parliament this week looked to break the link between MSPs' pay and MPs' pay in the light of the recommendation that Christmas should come early to Westminster with a whopping great pay rise to £74,000.

If that wasn't ridiculous enough, they are all saying they don't want, they didn't ask for it, but they'll get it anyway.

The deal, as proposed by the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority which sets the salary, is there will be changes to the pension arrangements.

How many workers have had pension changes imposed in recent years without an inflation- busting pay rise to compensate?

While the public sector has had a pay freeze and only now are modest 1% or 2% being approved our MPs get a deal that takes their pay to almost three times the average salary in Glasgow.

Some MPs are in favour and think they are worth it, while the party leaders say it shouldn't happen.

Andrew McDonald the chief executive of IPSA who made the recommendation earns £110,000 a year to come up with this stuff, so you can see while he thinks the current £66,400 is inadequate for MPs.

Some have said you can't expect a GP or business chief executive to take a pay cut to become an MP.

Well if they are in it for the money they shouldn't bother standing for election in the first place.

Now, MPs do a valuable and necessary job in a democracy and some of them are very good, but then the same can be said for many other professions

The average salary for a teacher in Scotland is £34,200, for a nurse it is £27,000. Even a head teacher with 10 years' experience is on two thirds of the proposed MP rate.

It seems the only thing rising faster than an MP's pay is the cost of living and gas and electricity bills while everyone else sees their income fall in real terms. In the last four years the rise in the minimum wage has been smaller than the MPs proposed package.

It was £5.89 in 2009 and is now £6.31 a rise of 8% over four years.

If you work full time on the NMW for a 40-hour week, that's £13,124 a year to take home. The MPs would pay that in top rate tax alone on their new salary. One of the arguments is that there needs to be a salary that is high enough to attract the right kind of person.

Does that include the kind of person who goes to jail for fiddling expenses and the kind of person who gets drunk and repeatedly assaults people in bars?