As a result, Parliament itself no longer looks like our greatest national institution. Instead, it has been exposed as an organised criminal conspiracy whose primary purpose is to defraud the taxpayer and serve the vested interest of a venal political class.

From the Daily Mail’s website. Where’s this all going to lead? I was listening to a lecture by David Harvey recently where he makes a convincing case that while the financial crisis is unlikely to lead to anything other than a consolidation of class power: witness the recent large-scale acquisitions in finance and beyond, as those left standing rationally take the opportunity to take over fallen rivals on the cheap. However the process of this is likely to engender a new legitimation crisis as the theory and the practice of neoliberalism stand more publicly contrasted than ever before, with the former increasingly represented in the popular consciousness as a facile and deeply ideological legitimation of the latter. The contradictions inherent in it are coming to the fore as, far from there being no alternative, the bail out of the system involves massive coordinated and concerted action of a sort that is so utterly at odds with the fundamental premises of the vast ideological edifice that’s been so painstakingly constructed over the last few decades. In short: (1) people are going to be much less likely to believe this sort of bullshit when the contradictions inherent in it have been so clearly exposes (2) people are going to be much less moved by neoliberalism’s lop-sided conceptions of individual freedom and consumer sovereignty at a time of global recession.

Against this background, what should we make of the current backlash – albeit led by the right-wing press – against MP expenses? The kind of uber-mundane ‘corruption’ of which they’re being accused is very much a product of the managerialism that has come to dominate the political class, understanding themselves as the technocratic stewards of a fundamentally managerial project: governance of a post-industrial nation in a globalised and post-adversarial world. This perhaps accounts for the vacuousness of New Labour’s ‘morality’ as they have attempted to reimpose explicitly moral concerns on a set of institutional and cultural structure that systematically precludes them. I think it’s important that proper criticism doesn’t lead to popular calls to return to the good old days - when politicians were moral and selfless – but rather to tracing out the causal links between large scale economic restructuring over the last few decades and the culture and practice of modern politics. So that far from being a isolated phenomenon, explicable purely in terms of the poor characters of today’s modern politicians – as opposed to the noble statesman in days of yore – they are both symptom of a wider neoliberalization of social life, as well as a major agentive force in entrenching and exasperating that process.