The co-occurrence of the financial crisis and the exposure of a political class riddled with corruption reveals starkly the state we're in: a crisis of representation. Abuse of public trust would violate any representative relation between MPs and constituents, yet the roots of the political and economic crises run deeper, to a specifically British conception of representation that has failed to keep pace with a multicultural Britain in the information age. The only viable response to these crises is the birth of a dynamic new representation, one that breaks with bourgeois paternalism.
In 1774 Edmund Burke declared "Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion", defining the British representation of the times. Yet this ethos, institutionalised in a British establishment manned by a homogenous political class captivated by the idea of enlightened, gentlemanly rule is ill-suited to a 21st century society, 21st century challenges.
Burke's representative relation, by which one individual rules in the place of many and in the name of their interests is now so contorted that three million children in one of the world's richest democracies live in poverty; so corrupted that elected officials clean their moats with public money while over two million people look for work; so subverted that one hundred billion pounds has been pumped into banks saddling the British people with debt while bankers' wages resume their precipitous rise.
The expenses scandal has revealed the diligence with which some MPs have placed their own interests before those of their constituents. That representatives lack the integrity to eschew plainly unreasonable and immoral expense claims is a burning indictment on their "public service ethos". That their claims have been "within the rules", when MPs themselves are collectively the highest national rule making authority only shows the depth of our crisis of representation.
Burke no doubt would have been appalled at the abuses of current parliamentarians, yet such abuses are a direct consequent of the British model of representation. Paternalistic representation places the representative above the represented, there is no room for mechanisms by which constituents punish transgressions, no need for transparency when the gentlemen know best.
Yet a lack of transparency allowed a toxic culture of entitlement to grow up around parliamentary expenses, while the absurd system by which we must wait till those same corrupt MPs see fit to call an election to punish them at the ballot box, in an electoral system that itself places "governability" above effective representation, protects it! Watching another farcical "independent inquiry" can only add to the sense of public impotence that has enraged people into politicisation en masse for the first time in my lifetime.
In holding representatives to account we should take lessons from those with an established tradition of the abuse of power, and the fight against it. Venezuela's 1999 constitution(pdf) paved the way for constituents to directly audit the finances of all their public institutions, while the creation of a "recall referendum" provision enables the population to punish any transgressions unearthed. By this mechanism, which can be implemented in the second half of any public official's term, when 20% of an electorate petition the recall of the representative's mandate another election is immediately called. There can be no doubt that few MPs would not face such a test is the current climate, fewer still would pass it.
The failures of Burkean representation run deeper still. Lincoln famously defined democracy as "rule of the people, by the people, for the people". Yet in a society of informed and multicultural citizen rather than 18th century illiterate peasants, if "for the people" is to mean in their interests as determined by MPs, we face a stark appropriation of voice - the kind that leads to war in Iraq and bailing out the banks. A new representation would task the MP with no more than faithful interpretation of her constituents' interests and their skilful advocacy in parliament.
But paternalism is not so easily broken with, it is sewn into the fabric of the political class the homogeneity of which directly conflicts with the heterogeneity of modern Britain. If representatives are to be the voices of the represented the House of Commons should reflect the demography of the "commons". There is work to be done. Currently, according to the House of Commons, the UK population is only 19% female, only 2% non "white British", and 50% of its population earn over 64,000 pounds a year (plus expenses).
This discrepancy between represented and representatives lies at the heart of the banking crisis. MPs believed the myths their class brothers lived on and so failed to regulate at terrible cost to society, because they were ideologically susceptible to the same crude egoist/rationalist paradigm of man and were educated in the same systems drawn from such a paradigm: the neoliberalism that reigned as gospel in Oxbridge over the last 3 decades where over 60% of what is likely to be our next government was educated.
Individual MPs can make an effort to understand their constituents, overcoming their differences to work as effective representatives, but must abandon the paternalism to do so. MPs should follow civil society's lead in searching out opinion, the Independent Asylum Commission holding a multi platform consultation of public opinion that involved about 20,000 people. Venezuela again proves instructive, the 2008 police law came at the end of a 2 year participatory consultation in which over 75,000 Venezuelans took part, leading its director to proudly declare in the polarised Venezuelan context, "If there is one law based on social consensus, it is the police law. A law truly derived from popular participation."
Tony Curzon Price identifies the foundation of parliament's British political legitimacy, a cluster concept of "honour, trust, a devotion to public service and gentlemanly behaviour". This is the code of ethics of the British aristocracy, its disgrace at the hand of MPs' expenses provides us with an opportunity to do away with this unrepresentative ethical foundation of representative institutions, creating a dynamic legitimacy founded on 21st century representation. Resurrecting the representative relation could redeem British politics in the eyes of the British, and can be achieved via a set of common sense policies: introducing mechanisms like the recall referendum and participatory consultation, reforming the electoral system to allow a greater plurality of candidates and a more representative outcome, and calling an election within the next 4 months.