What the fuck did you just ask me? *

Gordon Brown decrees that MPs should receive a per diem payment just for turning up. He is outraged that the other parties disagree. He shouts angrily about them having no conscience or some such insulting, Righteous nonsense.

He cannot see how warped is his political vision nor how much it conflicts with the principles of good governance in a parliamentary democracy. He has led the Labour Party so far from the standards of integrity observed by ordinary people in their daily lives, and so far from the observance of the common principles which citizens consider both proper and normal for themselves and their elected governors, as to make him and his party both preposterous and inimical to the public good.

The corruption of Labour and of its political soul is now almost total and everyone can see it for themselves.

This disagreement between Brown and the rest is a definitive dividing line between the Labour party’s view of what an MP should be – and do – and that of the electorate who live in the real world and take an utterly different view of Parliamentary governance.

For Brown to imagine that the public would approve a daily bung of hundreds of pounds on top of your pay cheque just for turning up for work provides the best possible proof of that.

The electors expect MPs to present themselves for their salaried work, do their work conscientiously and present receipts when claiming essential out-of-pocket expenses, just as most citizens do. Anything else is considered impertinent or abusive.

There is a fundamental split between the Labour Party's view of membership of Parliament and mine. And possibly yours.

The Labour Party thinks that MPs should have no other job than sitting in the House of Commons or, when in their constituencies, acting as über social workers. They roundly abuse anyone who has the effrontery to bring to the House of Commons any professional expertise or broader perspective which would challenge their blinkered, puritan, statist ideal of control – by themselves – of everyone outside it.

The Conservatives and Liberals oppose Brown's version of parliamentary representation and are therefore to be condemned.

Unlike Labour MPs who move seamlessly from University to wonk to MP without ever contacting Planet Earth and therefore learn nothing about anything outside politics and as a result cock up everything they touch out of deep ignorance, most Conservative MPs (and some others) have experience as fee-earning professionals or in the wealth-producing commercial/industrial sector where righteous blather does not trump realism. They are, ipso facto, contaminated by the non-socialist, non-statist world and hence unworthy to represent the people in parliament. Their experience and knowledge of how normal people conduct their lives is not regarded as useful in the service of the electors - it is suspect. Suspicious. The words vested interest are murmured. But of course, only in connection with non-Labour Members, whereas vested interest in the agenda of trades unions or the extension of the quangocracy and the welfare state are discounted, not to be compared -- because these things are socialist and ipso facto virtuous.

Non-socialists, Conservatives from the commercial world, may only take a place in the House of Commons, according to Labour's political theology, if they forego any connection with their background and give themselves up totally to the business of sitting, quiescent, on their arses in the Palace of Westminster, being dictated to by someone more virtuous. Someone like Gordon Brown, perhaps.

In contrast with Labour's urge to feather the nests of professional politicians, the Tory party proposes a reimbursement system which will be very familiar to the inhabitants of the real world: a list of a few reasonable expenses to be reimbursed upon the production, within 28 days, of receipts.

Such a scheme is wholly incomprehensible to someone like Gordon Brown, and to his comrades and clients in Labour’s spiritual homeland, the public and welfare sectors, where money is not actually real and therefore does not have to be created or earned, but anyway is always mysteriously available from God knows where or whom, just for the asking.

I have written before that in my perfect world the elected representatives of the people would receive no pay whatsoever for the honour of representing their fellow countrymen. The butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker, along with the tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, rich man, poor man and beggarman – but not the thief – should be able to take a place in the House of Commons at the behest of a majority of their neighbours (constituents).

Their employer or their business should give them paid leave to attend, as with the Territorial Army.

They should be reimbursed, on the prompt submission of receipts, for reasonable personal expenses incurred in the course of doing what their neighbours (constituents) ask of them, namely to represent them in the legislature and to do their best on their electors’ behalf to ensure that a few just men and woman of integrity are given limited powers, under a minimum of just laws devised by all of those elected, sufficient only to keep the peace, feed and shelter the poorest among us, protect us from our enemies and enable us to flourish with the help of the invisible hand.

That’s it. Nothing more. Minimum pay for minimum lawmaking.

Unfortunately, we must move from my Utopia to the ghastly reality of the European Union which now seeks to control everything from the ‘sexual health’ of its hundreds of millions of citizens (including the 'sexual education' of kindergarten children) to the defence of its outer borders; from how and when one may climb a ladder to the dimensions of a fish which a trawlerman may catch off his own coastline (which is no longer his coastline); from whether or not a people may observe their chosen moral laws to who may live where and at whose expense.

The greater part by far of all the laws enacted in the Houses of Parliament is European law which the British Parliament may not reject but which it merely needs to interpret for British conditions. Our Parliament has agreed to this state of affairs by various Treaties with our neighbours and in so doing has passed its law-making authority to them, retaining one twenty-seventh of its former national lawmaking authority.

It would seem to follow that the House of Commons has one twenty-seventh of its former workload.

Yet MPs still 'work' for most of the year. Doing what? Passing unnecessary domestic laws for two purposes: (a) to fill their time in order to justify their pay, by (b) extending their own enormous powers and patronage, and increasing their control over, and their power to interfere with and invade, our persons, homes and lives.

Other than that, procedure in the Commons under this Labour government has become mere shadow-play. Only the House of Lords performs any useful function despite the fact that Labour's 'reforms' (don't get me started) have ensured that its red benches are populated by former agitproppers and corrupt, rich men who have bought their seats from Blair-Brown. The House of Lords is, nevertheless, powerless to give the Executive even the briefest pause in its onward march to state control of everything.

• Since 1997, Prime Ministers and other ministers have disdained to answer in person to the House in any substantive sense. They either absent themselves or become angry when questioned.
• Written questions to ministers from MPs are refused on the grounds that they would be too much trouble to answer.
• Most discussion by our elected representatives’ is guillotined – the government shuts it down at whim.
• The government forbids completely any discussions which it finds threatening to its purposes.
• Extra-Parliamentary legislation is constantly made up by individual ministers at whim, ruling our lives ex cathedra with nothing more than a Note lodged in the Parliamentary record.

Not only should the British people complain ever more loudly that we no longer make our own laws and that a thousand years' heritage has been destroyed in a few decades. We should complain that our MPs are spending too much time in Parliament, filling up their time by empowering themselves to dictate the minutiae of our lives.

But, you say, they already take several months’ paid vacation every year. Yes, and if we are doomed to remain a vassal state of the EU then let them stop making up laws we do not need just in the pretence that they are doing something useful, which they are not, but let them take even more holiday. They can then pay themselves (out of our pockets) less, pro rata. Then let them go out and get themselves proper jobs, if anyone will employ them, while remaining Members of the Parliament of the little vassal state of Britain whose laws are mostly made by some foreigners in the Land of Far-far-away..

Or else let our MPs reclaim the governance of this country from foreign powers, as the people wish (and they know it) and let them restore the House of Commons to its former honoured position as the British people’s place of meeting and of law-making, and let ministers be required absolutely to answer for their actions, in person, to the people’s representatives.

'Member of Parliament' should not be a job title. It should not be a source of adequate income for any but the members of a very small Cabinet. For them, we can talk about pay. For the rest of them, we can talk about reasonable expenses. But let’s see some receipts. Plasma TVs and gazebos will not be reimbursed.

For a slightly different take on this discussion, read the Mash report.

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* I am indebted to the Daily Mash for the title of this post. Where would we be without it?