Gerald Warner: Replace the Commons with a very British revolution

THE House of Commons – who needs it? That is no longer an academic question.

The Mother of Parliaments is mortally sick and its demise is being viewed with deservedly callous indifference by most of the electors in the United Kingdom. On Friday, three MPs and one life peer learned they were to face criminal charges for alleged abuse of expenses. The public reaction was: too little, too late.

For generations, British schoolchildren were educated – or brainwashed – into an exaggerated respect for parliament and its associated institutions. Even as the British Empire went into receivership, imitation chambers emerged in former colonies, with Speakers and clerks decked out in the horsehair wigs that replicated the supposed gravitas of the circus on the Thames. Reinforcing this spurious deference was the Whig interpretation of history, which attempted to imbue an infamous gang of self-serving bandits and tyrants with a "democratic" veneer and an invented romance.

The reality is that the House of Commons, during the Middle Ages, was an undistinguished assembly, slavishly eager to implement whatever abuse of the public interest its royal and baronial masters dictated. Henry VIII then hauled the Commons out of well-deserved obscurity to rubber-stamp the despoliation of the Church – and, by extension, the poor – by approving the legislation that enacted the Reformation. By the reign of Elizabeth these upstarts were building their part and aspiring to real power.

By the reign of Charles I – at which point they were also leeching on Scotland – the Commons had become so inflated with their own importance that they were emboldened to murder the King. In 1688, they presumed to overthrow the King and import a foreign usurper. So it went on: in every generation the House of Commons remained single-mindedly self-serving, at the expense of the nation.

Now it has over-reached itself and any historically literate commentator can see that it is irretrievably destined for the dustbin of history. Until recently, when one suggested that Parliament was pass, the reaction was: what do you want – fascism? That was part of the defence mechanism of the effete institution that squatted obscenely upon the public purse and abused our liberties. Now people see things in a different light. Feudalism, absolute monarchy, limited monarchy passed into obsolescence in their day. Now it is the turn of parliament. History is inexorable.

So, what should succeed the House of Commons? The answer is that this will be, as always, a very British revolution. That means bloodless, bland, but effective. "Honourable" members have enjoyed extravagant authority for too long. The day before one of the three MPs learned he was to face criminal charges in connection with his expenses, he insouciantly promoted the second reading of a private member's bill through the chamber. Those days are surely over.

We need a new Bill of Rights to restrict the activities of the House of Commons. It must restrain the chamber from initiating legislation that interferes with citizens' lives or aspires to social engineering by diktat. In other words, no more bans on hunting or any other activity; no more politically correct legislation conferring privileged status on ethnic, sexual or other minorities. Instead, the remit of the Commons must be to get its collective head down and concentrate on the issues that really concern the country: repairing the economy, restoring law and order, ending unrestricted immigration.

Even some of these tasks can eventually be undertaken by other bodies. The MPs' expenses scandal has exploded the myth that being elected means being devoted to the public interest. The scoundrels on the slime-green benches have demonstrated that deceiving the electorate is not rocket science. So we need unelected institutions to reinstate democracy. That is not a contradiction: in 1965 the Commons discovered that, by creating a front-bench, cross-party "consensus" it was possible to frustrate the public will on capital punishment. Intoxicated by that revelation, they went on to repeat the exercise on many aspects of penal policy and the total reconfiguration of the demography of Britain.

Now, the challenge is to explore all our existing resources, as is the British way, to replace this failed legislature. We must be the only tribe in the world to have a council of elders that we relegate to ceremonial duties: time to make more use of the Privy Council. An executive monarch, too, curbing the power of a prime minister, was until recently unthinkable; but, considering the record of recent prime ministers, it now seems a positive alternative. Undemocratic? Technically, yes – but how far have our pseudo-democratic institutions recently reflected the public will, whether on war in Iraq or any other topic? Think about it.