The revelations about members of parliament’s expenses just will not end – and are expected to continue well into the summer. What does it tell us about our body politic and what needs to change?

A new day and a new MP is splashed across the front page of Britain’s daily newspapers. Be it a floating island for ducks, the cleaning of a castle moat or the replacement of an ice tray (less than 99p) there is plenty of scope for genuine outrage and the humiliation of those that should know better.

Typically a number of campaigners and commentators have used this very low point in UK politics as an opportunity to suggest their own pet schemes as the answer to the country’s embarrassment. Apparently it has become a constitutional crisis – one that requires sweeping changes to how we do things.

What absolute drivel.

It is not Britain’s constitution that needs junked – it is the attitude of so many of our MPs that has to change.

Suggestions being floated include Labour cabinet members such as Alan Johnson advocating that we change our voting system to proportional representation and David Cameron considering fixed term parliaments. Both are wrong.

It is not our first past the post voting method that needs to be replaced by one of the many versions of proportional representation. Most continental European countries have such elaborate electoral systems and it makes absolutely no difference to how corrupt individual politicians are. Just think Italy, think Greece – countries with a reputation so poor that African countries like Botswana rank better in the international league of corruption.

In fact proportional representation would offer one significant disadvantage to our traditional way of doing things – it can be far harder to unseat an incumbent. Closed party list systems, like those used in the Holyrood elections are especially bad in this regard as the candidate is elected by the party members rather than the electorate - who vote for a party not the candidate.

Gordon Brown dislikes the idea of proportional representation but in an effort to look concerned about the debacle that has damaged his party most is wiling to countenance the idea being included in the next Labour Party manifesto. Not a bad ploy if he wants to win Liberal Democrat support in the event of a hung parliament, although that scenario is looking less and less likely as the election approaches.

The public appears to be making its judgment already. Poll after poll shows Gordon brown to have suffered far worse in the public’s opinion and Labour looks set for a real drubbing at the European elections.

The man who said he had ended boom and bust but gave us the worst recession since the thirties, now looks set to give Labour it’s worst electoral performance in living memory.

It is now quite clear what has been happening over the last ten years and all parties have been complicit in the abuse. Rather than raise MPs salaries at a time when both public and private sector salaries were increasing the parties agreed, in a deceitful gesture, to increase the expenses, expecting the public not to notice. Then MPs were actually encouraged to use their expense allowances to the max, often being rung up by the Commons’ Fees Office asking why they had spare cash left unclaimed.

This is why so many MPs don’t think they have done anything wrong and why the use the defence of working within the existing rules as justification – but they did not have to claim to the hilt, they did not have to take the money. But many did.

Of course this behaviour was before freedom of information and when claims below £250 did not require a receipt. One story goes about how a Glasgow Labour MP was able to replace his Jaguar saloon every year when the ashtrays were full on the back of his ‘mileage’ expenses.

Fixed term parliaments also miss the point. What do the ethics of individual MPs have to do with the ability of the Prime Minister to call an election earlier than the five-year limit because it might offer a political advantage? Precisely nothing, that’s what. In fact the idea is entirely contradictory to Cameron’s call for an early general election – an election that would require Gordon Brown to go to the country before he is required to by tendering his resignation to Her Majesty our sovereign. Such a desirable action is exactly what Cameron’s proposal is meant to remove.

The answer to the Westminster expenses scandal is there for all to see in the way that it has come to notice – make every last detail public. This is already done at Holyrood (after learning the same lesson the hard way) and expenses have retreated into the background as a hot political issue – only the matter of second home mortgage interest payments has attracted criticism in the last few years and that is now going to end.

Nothing quite works like the public shame and humiliation of being caught and plastered across the nation’s newspapers and a television camera trailing you down the high street. If the MPs who have agreed to resign had their time again they would all have done it differently, they would have preferred to stay as members with the best pension in the land, foregoing the iffy invoices and the dodgy documentation.

The drip, drip, drip of individual revelations could not be better tailored to build the story up for the media. Brown had the opportunity to bring forward the full publication and get the whole mess over and done with in a fortnight a month or two ago – instead he agreed to wait until the summer recess in the hope it could be contained. Instead it is an disatrous train wreck with many Labour casualties.

It’s just another example of Gordon Brown’s hapless leadership and another justification for the case of an early general election so the public can bring about the change it so badly needs and wants.

Brian Monteith is policy director of ThinkScotland.org