Time they started earning their salaries?

We taxpayers have been funding the Northern Ireland Assembly since it was suspended in 2002. That's quite a lot of salary for doing nothing.

While some MLAs may have been keeping busy, and might even have asked the odd difficult question of the government, they have not been doing the job we pay them for -- or the job we elected them to do, in most cases (I know some of the DUP feel it is their mandate to do nothing until... well that bit's not clear). Still, we have hardly had value for money from any of them!

But on Monday the Lords approved plans to recall the Assembly and give them a chance to elect an executive, or otherwise get on with governing.

It ought not to be too difficult to do a better job than the Blair administration... but I'm not going to make any rash predictions. Our underperforming politicians could fail to meet even this unchallenging target.

Time will tell.

At least this way, if they refuse to find a way to get on with the job, we'll stop paying for them in November.