Christopher Booker nails it - MPs are worthless!

I quote from the column in the Sunday Telegraph today:

It would be easy to point to scores of examples of how MPs no longer justify the money we pay them, because they have so lost touch with the basic realities of the job we elect them to do. During the 19 years I have been writing this column, I have in effect been reporting on an extraordinary revolution in the nature of our governance. As became apparent in the early Nineties, Parliament has become ever more excluded from its traditional role of making our laws and shaping the way we are governed.

By far the greater part of our legislation no longer has anything to do with Parliament. Much of it is decided in Brussels, most of it is imposed on us by way of statutory instruments, diktats drafted by anonymous officials and signed off by ministers who are no more than puppets. Our MPs, having progressively given away their powers, have become increasingly irrelevant, except to play walk-on parts in the soap opera to which our politics has been reduced.

Infantilised by their lack of a proper grown-up job to do, it is hardly surprising that, with honourable exceptions, the army of ciphers making up our political class speak almost entirely in clichés, bristle with moralistic self-righteousness, have little idea of how we are actually governed and resort to fiddling their expenses. (I was, incidentally, interested to see Mr Elliot Morley fingered for claiming his non-existent mortgage, since more than once he has gone out of his way to speak abusively about this column in Parliament.) Having given away their powers and lost their self-respect, they have now lost ours. This is the real message of the squalid spectacle to which we have all been treated in recent days.