For having the audacity to stand up for her beliefs and probably those of millions more then she has come under intense and personal criticism from the Left – and for this at least she deserves acknowledgement.

Yet, I do find her rather annoying. Despite her brave, if at times ignorant, stand on traditionalist issues such as abortion, at times she lacks a sense of credibility. Perhaps the attacks by the Left really are hitting home, or perhaps it is because when she gets things wrong it is arguably in spectacular fashion. Who knows?

On her blog last night, Ms Dorries did nothing at all to alleviate these concerns of mine. Quite openly she cited ‘rumours’ from a close yet unnamed source who suggested that the MPs expenses scandal may have been created and exploited by the apparently ‘fiercely eurosceptic’ Barclay Brothers, who have since 2004 been the multi-billionaire owners of the Telegraph newspaper group.

Nadine went on to declare that she agreed with her source who said the Barclay Brothers wish to destabilise Parliament and allow anti-EU parties to gain votes at the European elections because the Conservative Party are not ‘eurosceptic’ enough. Yet, if she really believed the Barclay Brothers were conspiring against MPs then she should have said so rather than using weasel words.

What’s more, the recent MP allowances scandal is collectively the responsibility of all Members of Parliament. Nobody forced MPs to claim their allowance in full. So when Labour MP, Stephen Pound, claimed that Parliamentary staff ‘used to ring people and say you’re under claiming this month’, and that, ‘in reality they were helping us over the cliff’, this was still absolutely no excuse.

Furthermore, of course the Conservative Party is not eurosceptic enough – but then, these days, euroscepticism doesn’t mean anything anymore anyway. You either leave the EU or remain in it and run by it – there is no in between. However, whether that is the view of the Barclay Brothers is debatable. They have never done much to give me the impression they favour EU withdrawal.

However, there is indeed deception at work, and like Ms Dorries I do not find it particularly unlikely that:

This is all a power game … the British public are being worked like puppets by two very powerful men. Whipped up into a frenzy to achieve exactly what they want.

As I did previously remark, something similar happened in 1997 when the media collectively grouped together to help remove the Conservative administration under John Major. Something similar is beginning to happen again, the result of which will mean that important political issues won’t be discussed (or even aired) and as a consequence no honest political choice will be given to the electorate come the General Election next year.

Despite Cameron and the Conservative Party being equally guilty and complicit in the recent expenses scandal (manufactured or otherwise), the media has sought to portray the Conservative Party as setting the agenda on Parliamentary expenses (which it has not done). This is so that the furore may be used as a mechanism to allow the Conservatives back into office without proper scrutiny of their policies or those of Government.

We are entering very dangerous territory and our entire British political system faces an enormous challenge. Under the cover of darkness that this scandal has cast across Westminster and engulfed the media, our Government, with the willing compliance of the opposition, are seeking to force through yet further radical constitutional reform. Melanie Phillips in the Spectator argues:

The last thing that should happen is for Parliament to be made even weaker. Yet MPs are apparently themselves doing just that by agreeing to have their financial arrangements removed from Parliamentary control and given to an outside body. But this undermines a key principle of our Parliamentary democracy that Parliament is sovereign and no-one tells it what to do.

As Dr Richard North had previously remarked – this scandal is a symptom, not the cause of our wider problem. That problem is the constitutional crisis we are now facing which has been mainly brought about by successive Governments and Parliaments who have helped to whittle away our democratic powers and right to self-government. The result has been a public left bewildered and angered by handsome perks for MPs who are not doing their job.

In this way, Nadine Dorries redeemed herself this morning when she rightly remarked that the real fault lies with successive Governments and their Prime Ministers, who have never had the courage publicly to address the issue of MPs’ salaries and their worth. The currently proposed reforms will go no way towards assessing that worth either. One or two MPs might ceremonially be thrown under the bus by their leaders to save the rest, but, fundamentally, nothing much will change at all.

We cannot continue to blithely ignore the overriding issue of sovereignty. Unless our Parliament as an institution is rebuilt and strengthened against the power of Government then it shall remain meaningless and verbose, and these types of financial and political scandal will only perpetuate.

The motion was passed, in the final division, by 205 votes to 17, with the majority of those opposing the measure being from the Conservative backbenches, although there were a few opponents from the other parties.

Unfortunately, leading only rather minor opposition to the motion, Christopher Chope MP reminded those assembled Members of Parliament that, before they voted, they should remember:

The fact is that we have never used this Chamber for anything other than parliamentary debate. We do not even use it for parliamentary meetings or party meetings.

We should not abandon or abandon lightly the traditions of this House, which have meant that this Chamber is the one for those who have the privilege of being elected as Members of the real Parliament, not members of a mock parliament, whether it be a youth parliament, a Muslim parliament or any other parliament.

As Christopher Chope rightly says, traditions should not be lightly abandoned, whether in Parliament or anywhere else. However, this is exactly what we as a nation have been doing, right across the board, for the past sixty years – and to our great cost.

It goes without saying that allowing the Youth Parliament to use the Commons chamber would set a precedent, and demeans the role of Parliament. Having said that, over numerous decades our MPs have been doing a good job of undermining Parliament anyway, so, I suppose, why would they suddenly stop now?

Perhaps, in a few years time, when the Commons have finished the process of passing over our powers of governance to the EU, we could turn the Houses of Parliament into a Museum for Democracy? For a small fee, visitors would be able visit what was once the Mother of all Parliaments, wander its luxuriously panelled corridors and wonder how exactly it came to pass that hundreds of years of freedom and democracy were frittered away so easily and in such a comparatively short period of time.

The FT article briefly notes that Cameron wishes to cut the size of the Commons by at least ten per cent, which in real terms would account for around sixty MPs and could lead to the axing of a number of safe Labour seats.

In spite of the supposed independence of the Boundaries and Electoral Commissions, as Zehra Zaidi rightly remarks, Labour has helped create a substantial imbalance within the system over the past ten years – which of course has been to their benefit.

Therefore, as all political parties that obtain power attempt, in some way or other, to use the system to garner electoral benefits, it’s not that surprising that the Conservatives have now said they will try to rebalance the system if elected.

However, these proposals also come after a notable increase in the number of reports over previous years highlighting the decreasing legislative workload of MPs. For example, The Daily Telegraph noted back in October 2007 that:

MPs may be given an extra 12 days holiday over the next year after the Government ran out of legislation to put before Parliament.

In the Financial Times, David Cameron is also quoted as having said that in his efforts to cut public spending he thought:

The House of Commons could do the job that it does with 10 per cent fewer MPs without any trouble at all.

Back in 2007, when The Telegraph originally covered the increase of holidays for MPs the Chief Executive of the Taxpayer’s Alliance, Matthew Elliott was quick to wade in and comment, saying:

A three-month holiday for MPs is a ridiculous luxury, especially since the politicians have also been awarding themselves larger pensions and higher pay. But having MPs sitting in Parliament for shorter periods may at least mean fewer new taxes and regulations.

The question we should really be asking ourselves though is why our MPs have so little to do, and why it is that David Cameron could possibly propose to do away with ten percent of them and still maintain the same level of output?

Well, you don’t have to look far to discover the answer. With approximately eighty percent of our legislation originating in Brussels, our Westminster Parliament has simply become a rubber stamping institute through which EU law passes without amendment or debate. Then there are EU Regulations which are decided on in Brussels and don’t even have to pass through our Parliament to be enacted.

This is why the comment by Matthew Elliott is so ridiculous. It doesn’t really matter for how long our own MPs sit in Parliament or how many of them there are these days, the volume of legislation coming from the EU, which we cannot prevent, will arrive and be passed into our law regardless.

There are alternatives of course. Back in June of last year, Conservative MP Peter Lilley proposed that all MPs should have their pay cut if they gave away powers to the European Union. Such a system might actually bring home to MPs the importance of the powers and responsibilities that have been entrusted to them by the British people.

Then there is our direct financial contribution to the European Union which amounts to roughly some £14bn an annum – far greater if you take into account the costs that EU legislation and regulations impose on us. Therefore, the costs saved from leaving the European Union would far outweigh the comparably insignificant sum of money Mr Cameron would supposedly like to save in reducing the number of Members of Parliament.

Sadly though, it appears that once again Mr Cameron has chosen to tackle the symptom rather than the cause of the problem in our Parliamentary system.

The Speaker’s Conference has been called by the House of Commons Speaker, Michael Martin, to address the growing problem of political disillusionment and distrust of most politicians in Britain, as well as declining electoral turnouts.

On a somewhat similar note, Quentin Letts, observing Prime Minister’s Questions from the gallery in Parliament, wrote that:

Looking down at the poor saps in the Commons yesterday, it was hard to be sure why anyone normal would want to be a Member of Parliament.

He then ponders for just a moment why a supposedly intelligent woman (yes, he is referring to Harriet Harman – who would have thought it?) would submit themself to the braying ordeal of Prime Minister’s Questions, before asking:

Is it worth all the effort? And are ministers truly powerful?

An interesting pair of questions – but does Mr Letts take them any further or even begin to hint at why Ministers in Britain have indeed lost many of their powers? Of course not. The EU elephant in the room goes unmentioned once again, and the Mail’s Parliamentary Sketchwriter blabs on undeterred.

Furthermore, one suspects that Quentin Letts cannot even grasp the reasons why a new breed of men and women are attempting to enter high office. In short it probably has something to do with the fact that MPs are, for the most part, short of ideas and lazy. As such, Ministerial hopefuls yearn for the luxuries of the government gravy train – high salaries, big expenses and huge pensions, plus an almost total absence of responsibility.

That is why people such as Harriet Harman submit themselves to Prime Minister’s Questions; it is not for the power but for the perks and the privileges of office – real or perceived. And it is probably also why that with each passing day ‘normal’ citizens in this country become even more fed up with a political system that they can do very little about.

Now, what I have found particularly interesting about the whole Damian Green saga (which I think has been completely blown out of all proportion by our typically hopeless media) is the outcry from the likes of Nick Clegg and an assortment of Liberal Democrat, Labour Party MPs.

Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg told the BBC in an interview that he was deeply shocked by the arrest of Mr Green and claimed the event was a ‘mayday warning’ for democracy in Britain, saying:

This is something you might expect from a tin-pot dictatorship, not in a modern democracy.

The fact is though, like so many of our MPs that aimlessly waft around in Parliament, Nick Clegg only becomes interested in ‘democracy’ when the safety of the increasingly irrelevant Westminster bubble is punctured.

What do the likes of Nick Clegg really know of democracy? Where were he and others when our powers of self-government and democracy were being given away to the EU? Oh yes, that’s right, they were there in Parliament voting to give it away.

Bearing the above in mind, the speed with which our MPs of all parties have rallied to one another’s side and in the process ignored the real issue of our increasingly non-existent democracy betrays the truth that in fact MPs from all parties often have more in common with each other than they do the voting electorate.

A few weeks ago I attended a debate on Devolution at the University of Bath. To my amazement the EU was actually mentioned relatively quickly, but then unsurprisingly was rapidly ignored and framed in such a way that it appeared to be an external irrelevance to the issue of devolution of powers – rather than as it actually is a fundamentally important element.

Now, interestingly enough we had someone on the panel from an organisation called Unlock Democracy – what appears to be a seemingly unremarkable group claiming to be interested in increasing democracy in Britain. Their representative was a member of its Bath branch called Tim Williamson.

Unlock Democracy evolved from Charter 88 and is an organisation which has its distant roots in the Communist party of Great Britain, so you can already guess what such an organisation’s views may be. However, I suppose its history is in some respects by-the-by – what is more important is the type of organisation that Unlock Democracy has now become.

And, yes, guess what, it is your absolutely typical left-wing pressure group that is interested in the usual fare of being in favour of proportional representation and noisily complaining about how ‘unfair’ and ‘undemocratic’ it is to have unelected Lords checking our legislation – but it would seem that they have no qualms with the fact that unelected bureaucrats and Commissioners in Brussels actually make many of our new laws and regulations over which we have no say or control.

In fact, Mr Tim Williamson made the point at least twice that he really had no problems at all with the European Union – which is strange really when you consider that the man was arguing for an English Parliament and ‘English laws for English people’ created by English representatives (ie. English MPs). The thing is though you cannot have English laws for English people made by English MPs if you remain a member of the EU, because the EU will legislate and create laws often without any input from our own Parliament (English only or not) and English people.

That which Mr Williamson was proposing is therefore impossible under our current political climate in which European Union institutions are absorbing ever greater powers from member states such as the UK and power is being centralised and decision-making taken ever further away from the electorate.

Still, it’s not as though Mr Williamson is alone in being content to endlessly discuss the implausible and the irrelevant and continually ignore the elephant in the room – such ignorance still persists at much higher levels.

Could it be that the old left-wing fanatic is afraid of losing her seat at the next election, which she currently holds with only a slim majority of around two thousand votes?

Whatever the true reason for her departure, good riddance I say. Unfortunately however, the damage she helped cause in her time as Education Secretary under Tony Blair’s premiership will not be undone by her political demise.

Ruth Kelly, like so many of her Ministerial predecessors across the decades, presided over the imposition of increasingly pitiful state education on the poorest in Britain while, as emerged earlier this year, allowing her own children to escape the system by sending them to good public schools. Of course, afraid of the public backlash that her hypocrisy would have sparked, she desperately attempted to suppress the truth before the story broke.

Unsurprisingly, Ms Kelly’s arrogant and hypocritical stance is not unique within the Labour party. Diane Abbott famously described her own decision to send her child to a public school despite being against them and for the hopeless state educational system in this country as, ‘indefensible’.

However, the Liberal Democrats share of the vote did also increase slightly despite the fact that they spent more time playing the man rather than the ball in what was for them a typically ‘negative’ by-election campaign.

While overall turnout fell it would appear that the Conservative vote held up reasonably well especially when considering that this was not a high profile by-election in the eyes of the national media in the same way as Crewe and Nantwich.

Much hard work and effort was put into this campaign by MPs and party activists who, much like David Cameron this morning, will no doubt be very pleased by this result as it vindicated their ‘positive’ campaigning approach without revealing actual policies.

This may hint that the Conservative voting electorate are in some respects optimistic that David Cameron will be more conservative in Government than he is saying he will be in opposition.