What Dixon actually tweeted was: “I didn’t know the Scientologists had a church on Tottenham Court Road. Just hurried past in case the stupid rubs off.”

Harmless, one would think, albeit not especially amusing. But this kind of thing is really very mild compared to the polemic which has done Richard Dawkins very nicely in his books, and far less hurtful than the daily knockabout on the subject of religion that takes place on countless websites across the net.

Lest we forget, Scientology is not an officially recognised religion in the UK. But even if it were, most faith groups take a certain amount of ribald criticism within their stride. Dixon was not putting up satirical cartoons of the Prophet, nor was he running an ad campaign mocking the crucifixion. Sacred symbols were not being abused, sacred texts were not being criticised: no deities, real or imagined, were hurt during the making of his tweet.

If he is indeed censured for this (though, if they have any sense, the ethics committee will recognise this as a legitimate comment and let it go, before they themselves become a laughing stock) then we have gone far too far down a path of political correctness over freedom of speech. Was John Dixon inciting religious hatred? Hardly, since Scientology is not officially a recognised religion under UK law. But even if it were, would he be inciting it? I doubt that the term would constitute incitement.

During the General Election, the leader of Stratford on Avon’s ruling Conservative group labelled me and my views ‘stupid’ four times in less than thirty seconds, live on BBC Radio. I thought it was a bit rude. But why, as a recognised British citizen, should I enjoy less protection than an imported American organisation which is not even recognised for what it claims to be?

In a world where our every off-hand comment is now tabulated and Googled, we need to come to a new understanding of what is acceptable and what is not. There has to be an understanding that there is a hierarchy of off-handedness. A statement published in a book for which money is paid is of a different level from a remark in live interview broadcast on local radio, and this is again different from a brief Tweet or a FaceBook one-liner.

Dixon would not have faced this kind of censure if he had written an opinion piece in a published newspaper attacking Scientology.

He should not face it for a Tweet.

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On Labour and the Tories, she was less kind: “The Labour and Conservative manifestos are very different. Labour’s was big on words – and detailed promises and commitments which we had heard before. It put government at the centre. The Conservative version is longer, but lighter. About a third of its 118 pages actually contains written text – the rest is made up of pictures, fun facts, and (yes) blank pages to give readers a rest. Their focus is on the private sector – and on individuals.

“But the two documents have one important thing in common: neither of them makes any further contribution to public understanding on how Britain’s £167bn budget deficit is going to be cut. And they both leave plenty out.”

The Lib Dem manifesto is about four key policies —

• Fair taxes that put money back in your pocket.
• A fair chance for every child.
• A fair future, creating jobs by making Britain greener.
• A fair deal for you from politicians.

In the words of Nick Clegg, leader of the Liberal Democrats: “We’ve had 65 years of Labour and the Conservatives: the same parties taking turns and making the same mistakes, letting you down. It is time for something different. It is time for something better.”

The manifesto itself is a pretty hefty document — strengthened, as Stephanie Flanders points out, by pages and pages of detailed costings. This is not pie in the sky, these are workable plans which — if the situation did transpire that we were in government with members of other parties willing to work with us — would form the blueprint for economic recovery. Sustainable economic recovery that is, because, despite the promises of the last four chancellors (Lawson, Clarke, Brown, Darling) the Labour/Conservative or Labservative economics has done nothing but cycle us through boom and bust.

If the full document is more than you want to read right now, here are the key points in a bit more detail:
fair taxes
that put money back in your pocket
• The first £10,000 you earn tax-free: a tax cut of £700 for most people
• 3.6 million low earners and pensioners freed from income tax completely
• Paid for in full by closing loopholes that unfairly benefit the wealthy and polluters

a fair chance
for every child
• Ensure children get the individual attention they need by cutting class sizes
• Made possible by investing £2.5 billion in schools targeted to help struggling pupils
• Give schools the freedom to make the right choices for their pupils

a fair future
creating jobs by making Britain greener
• Break up the banks and get them lending again to protect real businesses
• Honesty about the tough choices needed to cut the deficit • Green growth and jobs that last by investing in infrastructure

a fair deal
by cleaning up politics
• Put trust back into politics by giving you the right to sack corrupt MPs
• Restore and protect hard-won British civil liberties with a Freedom Bill
• Overhaul Westminster completely: fair votes, an elected House of Lords, all politicians to pay full British taxes

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The three key issues which the online world raises are:

1 Citizen journalists
Ten years ago, there were online magazines, campaign or issue sites, and bulletin boards. This site began as one of them. Five years ago these were all converging sharply into the world of blogging. Blogging isn’t so much about the technology, as being about citizen-journalist created content, published on the web. Some blogs are anonymous, others are very clearly the property of the writers. Already a number of people have very publicly lost their jobs because their blogs (allegedly) broke the terms and conditions of their employment. More worryingly, a number of people have lost their jobs because their anonymous blogs or online aliases were tracked down, and their employers took exception. Kimberly Swann was sacked for moaning on her Facebook page about her ‘totally boring job’, even though this was essentially a private section of the web which only a few people could see.
Are bloggers citizen journalists, or are they just bored people making trouble online? What protections should they receive against snooping by their employers if they have taken the trouble to keep their thoughts anonymous? Equally, what recourse should there be for people who have been misrepresented on a blog, short of taking the blogger to court — if they can find them?

These questions are inextricably linked with the next issue.

2 Intrusion on privacy
Traditional news is governed by the Press Complaints Commission Code. The code is sometimes considered very one-sided, giving journalists and editors the right to say almost whatever they want about you as long as they call it opinion, and giving you no more recourse than a tiny retraction on page 16 if the PCC rules in your favour. On the other hand, it is infinitely preferable to taking a newspaper to court which does little more than blazon whatever they have printed about you across the front page of every newspaper and magazine, assuming you are a celebrity. Newspapers accept the strictures of the PCC because they also recognise it as hugely preferable than the alternative — primary legislation limiting what they can write.
But there is also an implicit assumption in traditional print which is based on the commercial considerations of how much it costs to produce the newspaper: private citizens do not generally get pursued, or, if they do, not for long. On the internet, if someone decides to have a go at you, unless you really are willing to take them to court, they can pursue you for as long as they want. We might assume that the rantings of a single blogger without backing will not do you much harm, and that a lash from the Daily Mail (for example) will sting much more. But the way the global internet community works is based not on status but on interest. An internet activist who can write interesting text — and vituperation can be especially interesting to many people — can get linked by all and sundry, and, as a story in itself, their campaign can make its way into mainstream media. A Robin Hood figure attacking the rich and powerful may well gain our sympathy, and we may wish to assure their protection. But what about someone who runs a vicious (but highly entertaining) online campaign against a local shop-keeper, whose business eventually fails as a result?

3 Making a profit
Newspapers will argue that their content is much more expensive to produce than blogs. They are almost certainly right. A number of my friends who are photographers or journalists have lost their jobs over the last two years as a result of the downsizing of the industry. This began long before the recession. Newspapers are finding it hard to compete, as their advertising revenues are going online, and the ‘pence per click’ is just as likely to go to a popular blogger as to their own authoritative and expensive pages. The Newspaper Licensing Agency — not, despite the name, an official body — is now trying to charge for the right to link content, on the rather specious ground that this is a breach of copyright. But the NLA was created by the newspaper industry initially to maximise the profits, but increasingly to shore up the losses, of the content they generate by collecting revenues on copyright materials.

If we abandon newspapers to market forces, then we will head rapidly towards a world in which unreferenced and poorly sourced gossip is our one alternative to publicly funded news such as the BBC. I’m a big fan of the BBC website, and want it to continue. I regard it as more or less the best site on the internet. But we place ourselves in a parlous position if the only source of news which can pay its way is owned by the government, even at arms-length, through the license-fee payer.

There are some very easy answers to all of these questions, and they’ve been around for some time. The trouble is, that all of the very easy answers, in their implementation, create much more complex situations and many unintended consequences. However, these matters will not wait long. To leave the questions unanswered is to provide an answer, of a sort. But it is unlikely to be an answer with consequences which we will like.

The work of the next parliament must absolutely address these issues, albeit quietly, and without trumpets and drums.

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Within four months of the consultation document being released, county councillors in the ruling Conservative party had done an about face and put the proposals on indefinite hold. Three days later, Conservative party leader David Cameron was despatched to Leamington Spa to suggest that the proposals should wait until after the public enquiry into the deaths of firefighters at the Atherstone-on-Stour tragedy. Whatever his intention, this fuelled speculation, in the Stratford Herald as well as in other places, that the decision to suspend (not scrap) the fire cuts was made in order to defend an increasingly shaky electoral position in Warwickshire, and that councillors were responding not to the will of the people, but to the dictat from Conservative Central Office.

One of the officers involved with putting the proposals forward told me that consultation documents were supposed to put one side of the story, and that this was standard practice up and down the country. When I suggested that this was not, or should not be, the case, he asked me how else the changes could be pushed through. It had clearly not occurred to him that, if it was impossible to persuade an informed public who had been given all the facts, perhaps they should not be pushed through at all.

I don’t think there was ever a time when anyone in Warwickshire would have been taken in by the consultation document which was put before us. But I do believe the extreme spin which was put on it reflected the fear of the people putting it forward, and that fear was fuelled by three things.

First, it was fuelled by the knowledge that, just a few months before, the man who was to front it had been promising that there would be no fire cuts. Whether this made a difference to his electoral prospects or not it’s hard to say, but, clearly, Warwickshire Conservatives believed that no word of fire cuts could or should be breathed before the County elections, which saw them take Warwickshire from no overall control into Conservative administration. Councillors were clearly afraid that they would be accused (which they in the event were) of concealing swingeing cuts, and they tried to hide this by presenting the cuts not as cuts at all, but as an increase.

Second, it was fuelled by the knowledge that Warwickshire would shortly be sharply criticised in a national review.
This information was not made available to the public until the day after the consultation finished, but the Comprehensive Area Assessment known as OnePlace reported: “The Fire and Rescue Authority know they have to improve their fire prevention service. They also know that they have to change the way they work to improve the service as a whole. This is a difficult task and part of the challenge will be to explain the plans to residents so they understand the reasons for the need to modernise the way the service is provided.” In the fuller text, the assessment added: “They have been slow to make the changes needed to provide a more efficient, modern fire service that balances emergency response with good prevention and protection work and gives taxpayers good value for money. The pace of change is picking up.”

The extreme haste with which the proposals were developed and put to public consultation between the end of the council elections and the announcement of this assessment reflects the real fear that people would be even less open to change if they knew what was driving it. In fact, almost certainly the opposite would have been true — if the authorities had admitted early on that they were in serious trouble and needed help, they would have gained a more sympathetic hearing. I doubt it would have changed the outcome, but it would definitely have changed the tone.

Third, it was fuelled by the fear that, after all, the proposals did not stack up. Councillors and officers initially refused to release the full document setting out the risk assessment for the changes, and only did so when Liberal Democrats Hazel Wright and Peter Moorse on Stratford District Council put in a Freedom of Information request. This was the first official, public document that admitted that fire stations would close and that the total number of fire-fighters would be reduced by 51 (the consultation document gave the impression that they would be increased by 25). When a subsequent Freedom of Information request asked for the costings, the answer was that costings had not been calculated.

All these fears that the public would mistrust the reasons behind the proposals — in the bizarre world of half-baked decisions and incomplete logic — led those putting the document forward to produce not something which was so transparently transparent that people would be forced to say “we disagree with your proposals, but we admire the honesty and clarity with which you put them”, but which in every sense failed to fulfil its obligations to the public trust.

After all the revelations of MP expenses during the summer, for people to be given something in the guise of a consultation which was little more than a trick, was more than anyone was willing to stand.

I have yet to meet one person from the Warwickshire public who supported or trusted the proposals. I doubt that I ever will. In a year when public trust in politicians has fallen to its lowest in recorded history, the Warwickshire Fire Consultation did us the gravest disservice.

It is customary, when a major public consultation, on which an organisation is betting its future, fails, for someone to offer their resignation. As yet, no-one has. I think it is probably too much to hope that, in the next few months, in order to restore damaged public trust, someone will.

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The story so far: before the June County Council elections, the portfolio holder promised voters that there were no plans to cut the Warwickshire fire services. Almost immediately after the elections, a consultation was announced on ‘improvements’ to the services. People who read the document were bemused, because it was evidently paving the way for cuts, but it only talked explicitly about increasing numbers. Shortly afterwards, it became clear that the plan was essentially to dispense with retained fire-fighters and a number of fire stations, and to attempt to fill the gap created by taking on a much smaller number of full-time firefighters. Under questioning, through Freedom of Information requests by the Liberal Democrats, and in public meetings by residents from, among others, Bidford on Avon and Studley, it became clear that there would be a net reduction of more than fifty firefighters.

I reviewed the consultation document on behalf of local residents — you can read my original report Analysis of the Warwickshire Fire Consultation Documents — and discovered that it completely failed to reach the bare minimum standard for a public consultation.

Shortly afterwards, an FOI ((Freedom of Information requests must be answered within 21 days and give the public the power to demand documents produced by publicly funded bodies)) request from Councillors Peter Moorse and Hazel Wright, forced the release of the hitherto secret management review by Det Norske Veritas. You can read that here: Det Norske Veritas Risk Review. The questioning, balanced view of the Norwegian company which provided the work contrasted very, very sharply with the confident, essentially patronising language of the consultation document. I wrote a second report on this, which you can read here: Comparison between Consultation documents and Det Norske Veritas risk report.

Since then, in a series of public meetings and protests, it has become clear that nobody except the Conservative cabinet of Warwickshire County Council, and those who report to them, is in favour of the plans put forward. Even Conservative district councillors (mindful no doubt that they are up for election next year) and Conservative MPs (mindful almost certainly of the same unpleasant truth) and prospective parliamentary candidates are distancing themselves — at least in public. We should remember that, no matter how much county councillors, district councillors and MPs like to present themselves as different from each other, a political party must stand or fall together. If they really cannot agree, they should leave the party. That is how politics works.

There are three fundamental reasons why this consultation process and the plans behind it cannot stand. Any one of them should be enough to persuade the Warwickshire cabinet that it is time to call time on these plans.

First, the consultation document is in a very real sense a false prospectus. We are told that if we don’t agree with it, we can put our own views forward. That is how consultation is supposed to work. But this relies on an accurate, complete and comprehensible presentation of the plans. The consultation documents put forward are none of these. A number of people, including a number of lawyers, have suggested that the process will fail at Judicial Review. But this is simply madness. Are we really going to drag each other through the courts? Is that worth wasting the tax-payer’s money on? If the issue were some complex and contentious point of law, then that perhaps would be the right solution. But there is no need to test these documents in the courts. There is a national standard (and a county standard), and the proposal document completely fails to satisfy it. It should therefore be withdrawn, without any recourse to the courts.

It is not enough (as the Cabinet portfolio holder has suggested) to accept that the documents are poor but to count on the public meetings to provide legitimate consultation. Where the written documents are inadequate, there can be no confidence that the two sides in a public meeting are even talking about the same thing. How can Cabinet determine the difference between responses based on a sound understanding of the real proposals and their consequences from those based on the original consultation document? Again, they have suggested that, since they have published additional documents, the public can reasonably be expected to have read the subsequent documents. Once more, not so! This would effectively invalidate early responses. Furthermore, it would require the collators of the responses to be able to track which version of the information the public was responding to.

Secondly, and more importantly, even if we take the original consultation document at face value, no compelling case has been made for why change should take place. The documents do not identify any particular inadequacies of the existing service. To be sure, they offer some suggestions of things which it would be nice to have — a boat, more money for smoke alarms, specialist units for road accidents, more training — but they do not make any case whatsoever for what is wrong with our current arrangements. If there is nothing wrong with them, why should we even entertain (let alone accept) a set of changes which will have dire consequences for at least fifty fire-fighters, will damage the lives of the communities from which the stations are taken and, potentially (since we never really know the consequences of our decisions until it is too late) will result in the loss of life and property across the county.

Of course, it could be the case that a prospective Conservative government is about to substantially reduce the budget available for fire-fighting. Perhaps the County Council cabinet knows this, and perhaps so do the MPs and district councillors. But, if that is the case, they owe it to us to tell us. It is not enough to say “we’re doing this for your own good — we just can’t tell you why”. If change is in the wind, then we need to know this.

We imagined that all would be clear when we got the (then) secret management report. But this is not the case. The management report comments on the haste with which they were asked to analyse the risks. In their conclusions, they state explicitly that a full risk analysis should be undertaken. I put this to one of the leaders of the consultation process, after the Bidford public meeting. He told me that ‘consultants always try to get more work for themselves’, and explained that it was always certain that the consultants would recommend a further report. Ok. Fair enough. But, if you didn’t want the answer, why did you ask the question? If consultants were certain to say that the timescales were too tight, and more work was needed, what was the point of asking them at all? But, having asked them, the Warwickshire Cabinet is honour-bound (and, by the standards of the National Audit Office, duty bound) to take their report seriously.

Thirdly, and most importantly, we know that the police, and also the Health and Safety Executive, are still investigating the tragic Atherstone on Stour fire of two years ago. The Det Norske Veritas references this fire more than once. Well sourced, but strictly anonymous, insiders tell us that one of the main drivers of the proposed changes to the fire service are a way of dodging criticism which the county council is expecting when the results of those investigations are published. They will be able to argue (we are informed) that the service has changed radically, and therefore the criticisms will relate to the past, not to the present.

All of Warwickshire mourned the deaths of the firefighters on that day. All of us, of course, want changes to the way things are done to minimise the risks that people who risk their lives for us should run. But. Absolutely crucially, until the results of those investigations are published, we will not know in what ways things should change. How does county council cabinet know that it won’t be making things worse with its changes? Certainly not based on the results of the risk report, which suggests that reducing the total number of firefighters will increase the risks. Certainly not based on the work of other fire-services. The Atherstone investigation has already cost £4million. If the police could simply have looked up best practice and compared it with what actually happened, the investigation could have been finished within weeks of the fire. It is absolutely right that the police and the Health and Safety Executive take their job seriously. We owe that to those who gave their lives, and to their families and friends. It is also right that they work exhaustively if that is what is needed to discover the truth. But the greater their investment of time and money, the more foolish it is to second-guess it.

The public has already put £4 million on the table to find out how things should change. Warwickshire’s fire service proposals are a cheap attempt to second guess that investigation. There is no worthwhile evidence that the current proposals will make things better. Many frontline firefighters believe passionately that they will make things dramatically worse.

But the madness is that we do not need to sit around arguing about it. We only need to wait until the investigation is done.

Which is why this consultation, and the proposals behind it, are utterly, utterly wrong.

They are the wrong proposals, at the wrong time, put forward in a way which is so poor that no real information can be gathered from consulting the public at all.

Farce. Fiasco. All the usual words are simply inadequate.

County Councillors, if you are reading this, pull the plug on the Warwickshire fire services consultation. You owe it to yourselves. More importantly, you owe it to us.

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Originally put forward in a Wired Magazine article, and subsequently in a book by Jeff Howe, crowdsourcing harnasses the skills of the many (as opposed to — dare we say it in this context? — the lust for blood of the mob) to analyse data or to chew over a problem. In this particular case, Guardian readers, and, we can assume, other bloggers and webites, have been combing through the now-published MP expenses data. Despite the blanking out of crucial data, crowdsourcers have already begun to build up powerful profiles of who is spending how much on what.

More important than the actual method used — although it is important — is the fact that all this user-researched data means that finally we, the people, have access to our MPs’ expenses claims, not in driblets issued by the Daily Telegraph to further its own ill-concealed political agenda, nor in the avalanche of mind-numbing detail on which civil servants and politicians have been counting to put us off looking, but in clear, concise analysis, which can be checked by anyone who wants to.

This is what Freedom of the Press is all about — the freedom for any newspaper, or, in this blogging age, any citizen-journalist, to look at the facts for themselves, come to a conclusion, and put forward their own interpretation. Suddenly we are no longer in the hands of a journalistic-elite, themselves under the thumb of a right-wing editor.

This freedom has come too little too late. Too late for Cameron’s ‘old-guard’, who are set to be swept away in sweeping purges. And certainly too late for us collectively to have any faith in the financial probity of our politicians. And too little to set our minds at ease that now everything is in the open and nothing is being hidden. If you haven’t looked at the MP expenses yourself yet, then do. There is something uniquely terrifying about the way in which whole sections have been blacked out, with (crucially, in my mind) no annotations to indicate the reason for the black out nor the text minus the offending details. Nothing is more compelling in telling us that our interests are deemed as less important than those of an MP. Even though any private detective could dig up the real information (or just buy it from the Telegraph) without a great deal of difficulty.

Guardian readers have so far crawled through 700,000 heavily edited documents. The degree of scrutiny they have brought to it is vastly more than the Telegraph’s — in fact, we now wonder if the Telegraph was not tipped off to go straight for the juicier items, since they, in passing, overlooked so many other interesting things.

More to the point, though, is that the Guardian readers are enabling information to be aggregated. We know now that the Tories claim the most for food. But the aggregations also allow us to compare MP total costs for various things with their actual performance in the House of Commons, thanks to a little additional cross-referencing with TheyWorkForYou.Com.

Once MP second job information is published at the start of July, we will be in a position to see a league table of MP value for money. It will not placate the public. But it may give some old, recalcitrant and now entirely embittered MPs the push they need to, in the time honoured phrase, ‘pursue career interests elsewhere’.

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Nick Clegg has taken the historic step of demanding — as a party leader — that the speaker of the House should go. William Hague declined to be as forthright, in his capacity as de facto Tory deputy, but he made it clear that he believes the same thing.

Michael Martin’s conduct has been the poorest of all those not directly implicated in the scandal itself. As a figure independent of government, he should have led the calls for Freedom of Information, and should have led the House (not the government) to deal with people who have made potentially fraudulent claims, or who have arranged their affairs in order to make a profit from the public purse.

Instead, he silenced the voices of dissent.

Martin should go, and he should actually go — not sit around as a back bencher collecting his salary, but leave parliament altogether and make his way in the world.

And then others should go. Not everyone. Certainly not everyone ‘fingered’ by the Daily Telegraph, which seems to have set itself up as an arbiter of what is acceptable and what is not acceptable.

For me, three groups of MPs should leave right now:

.

Others can stay — as far as the General Election. Though I’m sure that many, especially older MPs, will choose to stand down rather than face the music. A landslide defeat, which is what many of them will face, will seem an unattractive prospect as the end of their political careers.

As far as I am concerned, suspending people from the government, or from the shadow cabinet, or from their parliamentary parties, is not enough. Those who failed in their duty as MPs must cease to be MPs.

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So, how much did you think the Telegraph paid for the information it’s been publishing for the last ten days? £10,000? £50,000? More?

According to the Times, the data CDs — which, no matter how much we have a right to see them, it appears may have been obtained through criminal activity — were being pedalled around for £250,000 for the disks and £50,000 for the analysis. An earlier price had been offered at £5,000 an MP, or £300,000 all in.

One man has already commented on the Times story, suggesting that the original source of the leak should be given a knighthood.

What?

I am absolutely adamant that those expenses should have come out. I supported Simon Hughes and Norman Baker in their fight last year to force MPs to release them under Freedom of Information. I am entirely behind Heather Brooke’s five year campaign to get them out.

But paying £300,000 for what was, in all probability, a crime?

The sheer irony of this story is almost baffling. What gives the Daily Telegraph the moral authority to make someone richer to that amount, despite real doubts about the individual’s right to sell the information, and then to accuse some poor bloke of getting his light bulbs changed for a hundred quid?

What’s more, by simple dint of being the bearer of news, the Telegraph has set itself up as the nation’s judge on what expenses should be deemed acceptable.

One MP was pilloried by the Telegraph because she submitted her claims only a few weeks before the closing date. What? Either the claims were valid, or they weren’t. If they weren’t valid, then she should face the consequences. But the Telegraph has cleverly not claimed they were invalid, merely that they were close to the deadline. But how can submitting a valid claim close to the deadline be wrong?

Make no mistake about it. Whether or not they ever face the nation in court, some MPs have feathered their own nest at our expense. They have betrayed the public trust. They do not deserve to remain in our employ, and they should go.

But others have not.

Who should decide which is which? A special commission, perhaps? Popular vote at the next election, almost certainly. But the Daily Telegraph? Never.

This morning, the News of the World has published a list of politicians who should be sacked. But their list is not the list of the culprits who can be shown to be the ones who played the property market at our expense, or claimed for mortgages that did not exist. The News of the World list is simply a list of everyone the Telegraph has fingered. With no chance to explain themselves.

We have come to a terrible, terrible time. On the one hand, at least a proportion of our MPs are shown to be liars and cheats. On the other, our free press is stirring up mob frenzy, with little or no regard for the most elementary form of justice — that no-one is guilty until proven so.

At this point, I almost despair of our public life. We are headed into the European elections with the most likely beneficiaries being the BNP and UKIP. UKIP, that is, who have already lost an MEP to criminal charges of benefit fraud.

I almost despair, but I do not despair.

Some how, we will find a way through this. We will, because we must.

It will probably involve saying a permanent good bye to Gordon Brown. In retrospect, it’s hard to point to anything he has done since becoming Prime Minister which is remotely memorable or worth while. His handling of this affair has been something like a cross between Mr Bean and the Mister Men.

It may involve saying good bye to a generation of MPs who saw expenses not as a reimbursement but as an entitlement — political dinosaurs who could not adjust to a more questioning, less deferential age.

It will probably involve welcoming into the House a tranche of MPs who will discover, in time, that they are nowhere near as morally superior to those they replace as they thought they were.

It is already involving national soul-searching, as we ask the question: who, then, can we trust?

We all smiled when Obama offered Americans hope and a new start. In our smug, confident British way, no matter how much we detested (or simply found mildly comic) Blair and Brown, we knew that our politics was vastly better than the George W Bush regime. But now we need a revival and reawakening of the body politic just as radical as that promised by Barak Obama.

It is our turn to face the music.

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There is more than one thing wrong with Britain’s public life. The Daily Telegraph’s glee at publishing a set of expenses which were going to be published shortly anyway, and its smugness at engineering ‘one of the biggest parliamentary scandals in British history’ (its own rather pompous words) is one of those things.

Our reactions to the MP expense story could be sorrow, or they could be anger. But smugness, delight, glee, self-righteousness, self-importance, and revelling in muddying the waters as much as possible should not.

The Telegraph’s story about itself reads more like the back cover of a John Le Carré novel (except, with a John Le Carré, you know that the prose inside the novel will be vastly more elegant than what someone made up for the back cover).

But the Telegraph did not ‘uncover’ this material. It merely pre-empted it. The uncovering was done by others. Most notably by Heather Brooke, the US journalist who first put in a Freedom of Information request on MP expenses, after questioning them unsuccessfully since 2004. In April 2007, Tory MP David Maclean tried to introduce a bill exempting MPs from disclosure under Freedom of Information. It was Liberal Democrats Simon Hughes and Norman Baker who used Maclean’s own favourite technique to talk out the bill. But it came back shortly thereafter, as both Brown and Cameron tacitly backed attempts to keep MP’s ways secret.

In June 2007, the Information Commissioner backed disclosure, but not of receipts, but in February 2008, the Information Tribunal ruled that the receipts, too, should be released. The House of Commons appealed, but, in May last year, Brooke won her High Court case, and the claims of 14 MPs, including receipts, were made public.

Following this, all MP claims, with receipts, were due for release this summer.

All that the Telegraph did was buy an illegal copy of the receipts and release them early, for their own purposes.

I cannot emphasise this point strongly enough. Brooke, not the Telegraph, deserves the full credit for the story ‘that changed British politics’. The Telegraph did nothing but breach an embargo. To be sure, it was a sharp piece of newspaper marketing. But the Telegraph contributed nothing to the actual process of disclosure — it merely took credit for it at the end.

Brooke’s response to this is rather less smug, as she outlines in this BBC article. To her, it is a point about democracy, not a prurient interest in which MPs buy champagne and which buy Scotch eggs.

Brooke’s intention was to re-energise democracy, not to boost sales through cheque-book journalism. And, equally, her intention was to show things for what they were, not to pour the maximum amount of scorn whether deserved or not.

As the public, we do not have to buy into the Telegraph’s version of events. Likewise, we do not have to buy into their judgements. Someone who spent money on having light bulbs replaced after an electrical fault is not ‘guilty’ merely because his actions appear comic. A couple who claimed vastly more than should be allowed by a complicated arrangement with second homes should not be allowed to get away with a simple resignation. MPs who claimed for mortgages that did not exist should face the full weight of the consequences.

All these distinctions, the Telegraph attempts to blur. It presents a picture of politicians as all more or less on a sliding scale of corruption.

This was not Brooke’s intention.

The Telegraph should own up: it wasn’t really their story.

As for the public, we must now do the most difficult thing in these circumstances. We must re-engage with politics, not casting away in protest to single-issue parties about which we know very little, but making it absolutely clear to the main parties what we require of them. More people should vote, not less.

Finally, I predict that a number of MPs, while protesting their innocence now, will choose not to stand at the next general election. We therefore need a new cohort of candidates to replace them. This is not a popular thought at the moment. Just by being a parliamentary candidate, one is at risk of being tarred with the same accusation ‘you’re only in it for the money’. But if no-one stands, then democracy dies.

Those who can, must.

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So what hasn’t happened? Neither Cameron nor Brown have really done anything which has at all restored the public’s confidence. Neither the Conservatives nor Labour have even attempted to explain why they opposed publication of expenses last year. MPs who have had second homes down the road from their main homes, or ‘flipped’ their second homes in order to speculate on the property market, are busy explaining to us that everything was within the rules, and so it wasn’t their fault.

Time is moving on. We have still seen no action which deserves the name. True, Cameron’s fast footwork made him look more regal than Gordon Brown (but, seriously, it’s not a hard act to follow). But not one single MP has announced that he or she is stepping down from the House of Commons, or even that they will not be standing again at the next election.

Clearly, the worst culprits still believe they will ride the storm.

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