MPs are still under huge pressure. The Tory MP Julie Kirkbride looks likely to follow her husband and fellow Tory MP Andrew MacKay into political oblivion as a result of her very dodgy expenses claims. Yet another Conservative, John Butterfill, is trying to defend getting the taxpayer to pay for rebuilding his servants' quarters. How very 19th century.
We must pursue these odious characters and make sure they never play any part in public life again. But the Guardian is right to seize the moment to debate a new politics. It's a heady moment: the chance to change Britain's constitution and the way we're run.
Here's my own manifesto:
We must introduce fair voting. None of the candidates I've voted for in parliamentary elections since I came of age in 1981 have won. My votes have been utterly disregarded. How can we criticise Zimbabwe's voterigging when our democracy is so discredited?
We must remove the prime minister's right to call a general election, as I argued after Gordon Brown's election that wasn't in autumn 2007. I don't believe totally fixed term parliaments are the answer as there must be some safety valve to allow an empowered House of Commons to force out failing governments.
We must end the farce of an unelected House of Lords. This is unfinished business that reflected badly on Labour's muddled programme of constitutional reform.
We must honour the idea that power should sit as close to the people as possible: the parish and community councils, followed by districts and then counties and so on. I'm deeply cynical about people like David Cameron demanding power to the people when all the experience of the last 30 years is that his party and Labour constantly centralises control in Westminster and Whitehall. We need a rebirth of civic pride and power.
Westminster parties and voters alike must accept that politicians - especially those in London - don't have all the answers. We have to accept the 'something must be done' craze is deeply damaging. A greater honesty is essential from all of us.
We may need to pay our MPs more - but let them win our trust back first. MPs' salaries shoudn't cover the cost of providing parliamentary services. We must accept that MPs who represent constituencies away from London and the home counties will rightly incur greater costs.
MPs are not social workers and we must make sure they do not become case workers at the expense of holding the executive to account. I'd rather they spend their time on stopping the Iraq war, the poll tax, ID cards and Heathrow's third runway, though I recognise they do help vulnerable constituents.
Having said all that, we must make sure MPs have the resources to handle constituent enquiries, but within a House of Commons structure - there's no excuse for MPs to indulge in nepotism by employing their own families at taxpayers' expense.
Labour deserves great credit for devolution and freedom of information. (Take a bow Labour's Kerry McCarthy, MP for Bristol East, who understandably and humanly expressed her frustration that voters didn't give Labour credit for FoI.) But we need to create a written constitution for our country. The days of slippery informality and convention must be consigned to history.
We must consign the House of Commons' Victorian working hours to the history books. No sensible institution should rely on late night working for part of the year and then spend months on holiday. The idea that MPs should employ their spouses because their working hours are a recipe for divorce is just unbelievable.
All we need now is to make change inevitable.
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