In all the maelstrom leading up to Michael Martin’s resignation, the real issue was not MPs’ expenses, horrendous though some of them were, but rather the very rationale for Parliament itself. What is it for? It’s one thing that MPs made greedy claims, for which they should now be held fully to account; it’s quite another as to whether they were performing any function for which they deserved payment at all. Their fundamental role is to hold the Government to account. It is a task which they have manifestly failed to achieve for several years now, even a decade or two. What is now needed is not only very tight control over a moderate level of expenses explicitly specified as strictly necessary for the job, but a major redrawing of the role to give real substance to the job in order to justify payment by the electorate/taxpayer in the first place. How should that be done?

Politics is ultimately about the exercise of power. MPs have become increasingly irrelevant because they now have little or no power. They successfully challenged Tony Blair only once in 10 years – over detention without charge for 90 days. They succumbed, in a way they did not do so 30 years ago, to the triple pressures of patronage, intimidation from the Whips, and the centralisation of power within No.10. They went along with foundation hospitals, PFI, academies, neoliberal economics, kowtowing to Bush, and the persistent erosion of civil liberties, not because they believed in them, but because the party machine had cloned the PLP with Blairite sycophants. The Centre-Left, which regularly represented some 30-40% of the Parliamentary party in the 1970-80s, was reduced to a tiny rump of a mere 50-70. As a result, the PLP reduced itself to a praetorian guard to Blair, with neither the independence nor the inclination to exercise voting power on behalf of their constituents where the latter’s demands conflicted with the party line.
Two developments are necessary to escape from this slough of powerlessness. One is the resurrection of party democracy. MPs have become disconnected from their party members and activists, and the annual party Conference has been shorn of any decision-making significance. Only if internal democracy is restored, so that pressure from below can find a conduit of power via MPs to exert real influence over the party leadership, will MPs regain a meaningful role as instruments of representative democracy.
The second requirement is for MPs collectively within Parliament to get off their knees and to begin to demand power for themselves in order to hold the Executive to account. The mechanisms are clearly to hand – election of a House Business Committee to share control of the Parliamentary agenda with the Executive, ratification of Cabinet Ministers and chairmen of leading quangos as in US Congressional hearings, election of members and chairs of Select Committees, election of the Whips, enabling petitions from the electorate with a number of signatures above a high threshold to be debated on the floor of the Commons, and setting up Commissions of Inquiry with a remit to Parliament rather than No.10, to name but a few. All of these would steadily move the centre of gravity of power towards Parliament and away from an increasingly isolated and autocratic premiership.
The furore over MPs’ expenses provides the fire and the energy which just might light this fuse, and it is the role of the remaining democrats inside Parliament to try to harness the indignation in this direction. Otherwise perhaps only the anger and despair of electoral defeat can unleash the New Settlement that is so urgently needed if MPs are to regain their rightful role.

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