Looking at the spectacle of our elected representatives with their greedy little snouts firmly in the trough, grabbing everything they can, it is obvous that something has to be done to bring this whole thing back under control.
I think I have a solution, while it is true that there have always been self centred, self serving members of parliament the real rot set in with the rise of the career politician. We now have a large number of MP's who have never experienced the real world, they have gone straight from education into politics and are weaker as a result.
I suggest we adopt a procedure that works well in the British military where regardless of how good or bad you are at your job the longest you can stay in post is 3 years. Remember even the President of the USA can only do 2 terms.
We should limit the tenure of MP's to a maximum of 2 terms and then out into the real world with no possibility of return.
This would work for a number of reasons, it would be self policing because there is the certainty of an end date where their grubby little secrets and deals would be revealed, they could not view it as a career, just a service to society and it kills of the complacency of the sitting member in a safe seat.
I have a good example locally where the MP is one John Bercow. The reality is that if the Conservative put up an orange jelly as its local candidate it would be elected. Bercow has a job for life and boy does he know it, he does arrogance and complacency for Britain. The result is that even though my natural tendency is to support the right of centre, I am disenfranchised because Bercow only ever does what is good for Bercow, not what is good for the electorate. A socialist voter in this area may as well be stripped of their vote for all the good it does them and thats not healthy in the long term because they just lose interest.
In addition to the simple restriction of the maximum term, if we only allow MP's who already live, or are prepared to move at their expense, in their constituency we don't have to buy them a house. We could buy a serviced apartment block close to Westminster and when in the House of Commons they could book a room. Funnily enough this is how it used to be with Dolphin Court in Pimlico.
Finally to complete the tidying up process we need to recognise that the number of electors making up a constituency is way out of date.
In a world of instant communications, internet, email and blogs an MP is perfectly able to look after twice as many voters. So instead of an average of 67,000 voters per constituency lets make it 130,000 which with an electorate of some 44,500,000 makes 341 MP's.
Thats a reduction of 318 of the greedy bastards, saving us all at least £160,000,000 per year and approaching a billion per parliamentary term.
Lets take our democracy back.