“IT is not remuneration, it is not a recompense, it is not even a salary; it is purely an allowance to enable us to open the door to great and honourable public service,” said the Chancellor of the Exchequer, David Lloyd George, in 1911.

He was introducing the concept of paying MPs to represent their constituents in Parliament.

It was a controversial concept back then. His wealthy Conservative opponents screamed that it would end the idea of voluntary public service, that it would end the rightful rule of the rich, and that it would create a new class of professional politicians who were not independent enough to speak their own minds.

It is a controversial concept today. This week, the Tory grandee Sir Malcolm Rifkind has been caught saying it is “unrealistic” to expect an MP to survive on their £67,000 salary, and the voiceover on the BBC’s fascinating documentary Inside the Commons said matter-of-factly: “People resent paying MPs.”

Throughout the 19th Century, there was a working class move to pay MPs. One of the Chartists’ six points in 1838 was for a salary of £500-a-year (probably the equivalent of half-a-million pounds today) and for an MP’s attendance records to be published.

During the 1890s, trades unions and the fledgling Labour Party began paying affiliated MPs £200-a-year. The House of Lords voted to ban this payment, so the Liberal Lloyd George introduced pay for all MPs.

He set the salary at £400, which was said to be equal to a junior clerk in the civil service. It is very difficult to compare values across the decades due to varying changes in inflation, house prices, wages and priorities, but £400 is worth approaching £200,000 today – certainly it was a lot more than the average man was earning in 1911 and certainly it is a lot more than the average MP is earning in 2015.

MPs were given free rail travel between London and their constituencies in 1924, but when the Great Depression struck in the 1930s, their pay was cut to £360 so they shared the country’s economic pain. By contrast, during the 21st Century age of austerity, average wages have dropped five per cent yet after the election, MPs’ wages will rise ten per cent to £74,000.

The BBC voiceover is right. People do resent paying their MPs. But no one would return to the 19th Century and have a Parliament stuffed with only independently wealthy MPs who could afford to sit around all day on green benches shouting obscenities.

Yet the opponents in 1911 who claimed paid MPs would lose their independence and become “caucus-fed professional politicians” were correct, and the door that Lloyd George wanted to open “to great and honourable public service” has led to a dead end because politicians like Sir Malcolm and Jack Straw have rushed down a different corridor to line their own pockets.

And the idea stretching back to the Chartists that paying MPs would encourage ordinary people into the Commons has also not borne fruit as today we are ruled over by more top private school pupils than ever before.

There is one quote, though, in all this that does still ring true. In the 1880s, Liberal leader WE Gladstone changed his mind and backed payment for MPs, and said: “An MP who does his duty to his constituents has very little time for anything else.” Certainly not for a second job or consultancy.