Getting away with it

David Blunkett issued a warning to the BBC not to damage democracy by "daubing everyone with the same brush". But the daubing was entirely self-inflicted. The surprise is that there haven't been any violent attacks on Members of Parliament or their ill-gotten property. I can't remember a time when MPs - never top of the popularity stakes - have been held in greater public contempt.

It's hard not to be infected by expenses rage yourself. The sheer venal, arrogant, stupidity of MPs, their inability to appreciate how they have betrayed public trust, makes you want to go out on the streets, like the demonstrators in Iran, only with black armbands and blind-folds. Unfortunately, we don't have any tradition of spontaneous mass action. But what do the people who have become unemployed in the last quarter make of it all? What do the hundreds of thousands of young families who can't afford a home make of MPs using public money to build property empires for themselves and their ducks?

The police have belatedly woken up to the fraud that has taken place and are promising to investigate - but I wouldn't hold your breath. The "redacted" expense accounts - you can always tell when officialdom is trying to pull the wool over the public's eyes by the way it uses exotic language - were nothing to do with us, said MPs; it was the Fees Office wot done it. Rubbish. It was MPs who allowed officials to blank out their dodgy expenses on their behalf. They had this one final opportunity to come clean and disclose all. It beggars belief that they did not take it.

We were told that MPs had been warned that full disclosure might lead to their being prosecuted under the Data Protection Act. But MSPs in the Scottish parliament are subject to the laws of the land, and they have no difficulty publishing their expenses on-line on a quarterly basis. This was more diversionary waffle from Westminster politicians who seem to have lost the instinct for self-preservation.

The expenses story had been dying down last week, until this act of stratospheric stupidity. Now we are back to duck houses, cake stands, baking tins and all the squalid paraphernalia of parliamentary corruption. "But we've done nothing wrong" MPs whine, even as they incriminate themselves by paying back a total of £500,000 in "mis-claims".

Curiously, it is the little things that seem to cause the greatest public offence: the chancellor's toilet rolls; Shaun Woodward's £18 umbrella; Lembit Opik's wig; George Osborne's CDs of his own speeches. I think it's because these petty claims reveal how MPs were living in their own curious subsidised universe. But the really serious practices involve house flipping, and the capital gains made by Cabinet ministers like Geoff Hoon, who has a property portfolio worth £1.7m. MPs had turned into speculators. Now we learn that MPs were even over-charging council tax.

It's not even as if anyone in authority seems to know what to do about it. The government spends millions of taxpayer's money on consultants and public relations people, like the Queen's former communications man, Simon Lewis who has just been appointed to the Gordon Brown's office, and was probably behind the improbable suggestion that the Prime Minister really wants to be a teacher.

But they still fail to register, let alone respond to, the level of public anger. Back in May, as soon as they realised that the Daily Telegraph had possession of the leaked details of MPs' unredacted expenses, the MPs should have acted immediately and published the lot, warts and all. That at least would have drawn a line under the scandal and left the press with the problem of digesting a vast amount of material in a short time.

Instead, they allowed the Telegraph to maximise public anger by parcelling out the scandals day by day for six weeks - the longest running single exclusive story in the history of journalism. Then, when the row finally died down, MPs re-ignited it by publishing doctored expense accounts that looked like war-time intelligence documents. And worse, the Commons authorities are making clear that they will be publishing "redacted" expenses next time too. They have lost their marbles as well as their sense of values.

The party leaders clearly believed that by forcing a few backbenchers into early retirement, they had given sufficient blood sacrifice to public opinion. But this was almost as disreputable as the belated cover-up. The Labour "star chamber" has turned into a kangaroo court which has been bullying the weakest Labour backbenchers into giving up their careers. Why is it only small fry like Jim Devine, Ian Gibson and Margaret Moran have been forced to appear before the disciplinary panel while the bigger fish, like the former front benchers Hazel Blears, Geoff Hoon, James Purnell, Tony McNulty and the Chancellor, Alistair Darling, avoid the inquisition? This is not just bad PR but an offence against natural justice.

And others are getting off Scot free. Last week, Darling let the City off the hook, announcing that there would be no new regulation of the big banks to prevent another credit crisis. There can be no doubt that a major cause of this failure to take action against irresponsible lending, the bonus culture, derivative trading, and the rest has been the moral implosion of the political class. In short: how can they take action against people like Sir Fred Goodwin when they have been caught with their own fingers in the till?

This is now a constitutional issue because it becomes impossible for government to function when the country has lost confidence in the entire parliamentary system. Gordon Brown has said he would like to walk away from the trappings of power. Well, one way mght be to announce an election in October so that the country can begin the process of cleaning up parliament.