MPs' expenses 2: honourable members hanging from lamp posts

Second homes, moats, swimming pools, the Telegraph's day-by-day revelations have become a seismic political event. However, the issue of how Parliament fails to represent the vital interests of the British people is more important than expenses. Also people should be looking at how new parliamentary candidates get foisted on constituencies by central party machines.

Personal morality or systemic failure? It is easier than people recognise to fall in to the trap of abusing expense accounts. But they are meant to be honourable members; and people are thinking, if they can't get their own house in order, how can they represent the country? When individual MPs are profiting from second homes, people are aggrieved because housing has been one of the major scandals of the past decade, and it is still with us. Easy credit, immigration and changing employment structures (rise of finance, decline of manufacturing) led to inflated prices and also priced people out of the market. MP's have done nothing about it.

For once Question Time was interesting. It was obviously going to be difficult for whichever unfortunate MPs had to face the crowds, but the audience were jeering, hooting, completely furious. They had lost all respect for the political system, if they had any before. People were prepared to clap when one of the panel talked about the good work MP's did, but for the most part “it was like a lynch mob”, as Andrew Neil said. There were people heckling even Menzies Campbell - “ you've been found out” - as well as Government Housing Minister, Margaret Beckett. They stood up for themselves quite well.

In terms of creating maximum effect, the Telegraph played a blinder, I'll give them that. Each day with clockwork regularity, the artillery guns moved serenely on to another nest of miscreants. And we knew that the next day, there would be more. Each new scandal-clad dawn condemned another bunch, looking like prisoners in the Palace of Westminster rather then honourable members of the Mother of Parliaments, to be taken out and shot, metaphorically speaking – or at least to sit in the stocks and get pelted with muck in the laughing, scowling court of public contempt.

But people are furious because it shows what the elites can get away with. But how does fury help make the situation better?. You still need MP's in a democracy, as Hannan states. You could sack all the MP's and replace them with a new bunch, appointed by their central party machines, so they will be inexperienced and even more like ciphers than the ones that went before them. The new cohort will be diverse in sex, sexuality, religion, accent and ethnicity, but homogenous and hygenic in their opinions, selected because they have the same views as the party leadership. After Question Time, Neil and Co mocked the idea that it was the system; which is fair enough, given some of the abuses. But if you just concentrate on the MP's and make them sacrificial lambs, then you might forget to consider 1) how they are selected, 2) the power of patronage and 3) the PC Consensus, which together lead to them voting with the party machines (nearly) everytime. From selling Rover to the Chinese to immigration to the EU to deaths in Afghanistan, the list goes on.

Tony Benn said on Newsnight (Tuesday, I think) that of course this is “muckraking”, which isn't the same as saying that Expenses abuses don't matter, just an old-fashioned view that digging the dirt just for the sake of it is disreputable. Benn's integrity as a grand old man of politics is unassailable. The interviewer ignored him because it went against the political corruption story they want to hype up while ignoring the inconvenient fact that the parties consistently fail to represent their electorate on the issues. On Channel 4 news (Thursday), Khrishna Guru-Murthy seemed to want a whole new political order. Matthew Taylor was arguing for restraint.

Rather than hang them up on lamp-posts, the British people should remember there is a general election coming and examine how their MP's get selected in the first place. Will they be selected on merit or because they have the right views?

The solution is to vote them out - and maybe people are so angry, they'll break the 3-party system. That could be the impact of having the revelations before the election, not after. They'll say a large protest vote in June is due to the extraordinary circumstances of the MPs' expenses scandal, rather than admit it is a judgement on the political failures over the last 10 or 20 years - but so what?

A possible and regrettable dead end for all this fury is that - and on one level this is unfair because, tactically, he had to do something after moatgate - we get a "dynamic leader", like Cameron, playing to the media, in the process centralising party power, and denigrating MP's further, because they are seen as too venal to be trusted.