What are MPs for?

What are MPs for? Easy. To represent their constituents, to scrutinise legislation, and to hold the government of the day to account. That's the theory, at least. And even the theory is complicated by the fact that some MPs are also ministers, and that far from holding the executive to account, they are the executive; and some MPs are whips, whose job is to hold not the government accountable to MPs, but MPs accountable to their party - which may actually be the government. For most MPs, most of the time, "scrutinising legislation" means voting in the way they are instructed to vote, usually without having read the bill, sometimes having only the very vaguest idea about what it contains. Such ignorance can extend even to ministers, who outside their own particular brief have will no time to consider the laws they pass, yet are bound by collective responsibility to vote for them on pain of resignation.

All this would be true even if the majority of new laws were still passed by Parliament, rather than agreed between ministers in closed meetings in Brussels and then foisted on the people of Europe, often with no democratic scrutiny at all. Ministers and civil servants love that, of course, since they get to implement things they hanker after yet would never get through a national parliament (even one that works as imperfectly as ours) and which they can blame on "Brussels bureaucrats" as though it were nothing to do with them.

It's hardly surprising, then, that in recent years the constituency aspect of the job has come to be stressed, almost to the exclusion of all else. An MP becomes a superior sort of social worker, better-paid and with a much higher position in society, but with no training and, in many cases, less actual power (no MP, after all, is empowered to take children away from their parents). To be a "good MP", it is widely believed - by the public as well as by most MPs themselves - is to be a good constituency MP, the man or woman who spends as much time as possible in the region that returned them, who acts as a conduit between the ordinary citizen and the government, who raises particular concerns with ministers and who spends a lot of time hosting surgeries, visiting local schools, and getting his or her name in the papers. Quite a lot of that, needless to say, involves sending press releases written for the MP by party communications officers, promoting this or that benefit of government policy, or campaigning against this or that aspect of government policy, as may be appropriate.

Such a view of an MP's role is essentially feudal, or perhaps might be compared to the Roman system of clientela (or, for that matter, the Roman Catholic doctrine of the intercession of saints). The MP is the powerful courtier who will have a word with the king on your behalf, thus demonstrating both his influence and prestige and the king's essential benevolence. The basic problem with the concept, from a democratic point of view, is that deference is directed upwards. The first loyalty of the courtier is to the king (the senator's to the emperor, the saint's to God). As well interceding with the mighty, the go-between's duty is to represent the mighty to the powerless. An MP is in theory a representative of the people who elected them, but in practice a representative of their party to their voters. It is thus an uneasy position, suffused with contradictions. To be an MP is to have a basic conflict of interest. And everyone knows it. I suggest that this is the main reason people no longer trust their elected representatives.

The "good constituency MP", however honest, loyal and hard-working, can never adequately represent their constituents, for the simple reason that it is impossible to serve two masters, unless they are the type of independent-minded "maverick" who will never get (or seek) preferment within the party or government. In the narrow sense they may represent individual constituents who come to them with problems. But they will not be representing their constituents "as a whole". They will not even be representing themselves. The classic formulation of the MP's duty was, of course, that delivered by Edmund Burke in his address to the electors of Bristol in 1774, a passage much quoted but often misinterpreted. Burke said:

Certainly, gentlemen, it ought to be the happiness and glory of a representative to live in the strictest union, the closest correspondence, and the most unreserved communication with his constituents. Their wishes ought to have great weight with him; their opinion, high respect; their business, unremitted attention. It is his duty to sacrifice his repose, his pleasures, his satisfactions, to theirs; and above all, ever, and in all cases, to prefer their interest to his own. But his unbiassed opinion, his mature judgment, his enlightened conscience, he ought not to sacrifice to you, to any man, or to any set of men living. These he does not derive from your pleasure; no, nor from the law and the constitution. They are a trust from Providence, for the abuse of which he is deeply answerable. 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.

Burke says that the MP's first duty is to his conscience, and that by properly exercising his conscience he will best serve the voters. He is not a deligate, mandated to exercise his vote a particular way, like a member of the US electoral college. He should not blindly follow his constituents - but nor should he blindly follow "the law and the constitution". And it's striking that Burke doesn't mention party at all. Political parties were, it is true, more shifting, informal affairs in the 18th century than they are today. They were not institutions. But they did exist, and they did make claims upon the loyalty of members of Parliament.

In support of his contention that the will of the MP should not be "subservient" to the electors, Burke placed great store by the proper scrutiny of legislation. "Government and legislation are matters of reason and judgment, and not of inclination," he said. "What sort of reason is that, in which the determination precedes the discussion; in which one set of men deliberate, and another decide?" He was dismissing the claim that the electorate who might be "three hundred miles distant" from the debate in Parliament should tie their member's hands in advance. But he might, equally, have been talking of the system we now have, in which MPs troop, like sheep, through the lobbies on the instruction of the party machines, usually without having participated in the debate.

Authoritative instructions; mandates issued, which the member is bound blindly and implicitly to obey, to vote, and to argue for, though contrary to the clearest conviction of his judgment and conscience, these are things utterly unknown to the laws of this land, and which arise from a fundamental mistake of the whole order and tenor of our constitution.

Well, it was a long time ago. A hundred years later, WS Gilbert was satirising the careerist MP who "always voted at my party's call/ and never thought of thinking for myself at all". The party system had insinuated itself into the body politic, but the ideal of the independent representative was still strong enough for the line to have bite.

The current expenses imbroglio is in many ways overdone. Yet this is not an affair that has been "got up by the press", as some people appear to believe. The anger out there in the country is real. It is anger at the particular abuses that have been exposed, but it is also anger at a system that is increasingly perceived as unaccountable. The power of any individual citizen, or even a group of individual citizens (a local community or an organisation) over the government is negligible; that has always been the case. What is new is that the claims of the state to pry into and regiment every aspect of life are increasingly absolute, and increasingly hard to avoid.

Everywhere, it seems, "the government" is doing something: passing a new law, issuing new regulations, hectoring, lecturing, wagging its finger, claiming to have the solution to any problem that might arise. The state and its agents increasingly seem omnipresent and all-knowing, rather as God was or is supposed to be, but at least as inefficient as the deity when it comes to fulfilling individual requests. Moreover, the state's instinct is to impose strict liability. Individuals know that if they (even accidentally) put the wrong figure in a tax return, fail to declare the smallest alteration in their personal circumstances, park in the wrong place, or for a minute too long, drop a chocolate wrapper, look askance at a police officer, hop on a train that is leaving the station before they've had a chance to buy a ticket, say something that someone else interprets as "offensive", or even do something entirely legal that a computer didn't predict, then they stand a good chance of being hammered by the system. Yet they see members of Parliament, most of whom come across as uninspiring party drones, merrily scamming the tax system and claiming giant TV screens as a "necessary" expense to do their job. Of course they're angry.

I suspect that if the system enjoyed greater popular legitimacy (which it would, if it worked properly, if it managed to stop bad laws in their tracks and rein in the overmighty executive, if MPs represented their constituents rather than the parasitical party machines) then there would be less anger over these expenses claims. Yes, some of what has been unearthed has been unacceptable, and several MPs should go. Why are Hazel Blears, Tony McNulty and Jacqui Smith, to name but three, still ministers? Some degree of anger is justified and healthy. But what we are seeing is not the anger of people who see a good system being abused by crooks, but of people who have lost faith in the system, because the system has failed.