The current furore over MPs' expenses seems to be having an effect no-one expected. Despite the anguished bleating of Joan Smith in the Guardian, who thinks that MPs are jolly nice people and should be jolly well left alone because her husband (oh no, sorry, we're not allowed to say that any more, are we - "partner") is one and so are all her friends and they're all suicidal and it's jolly unfair, we now know who our true enemies are, and finally appreciate the lunacy of expecting our MPs to protect us from the excesses of our bankers, rather like a flock of sheep running to the wolves for protection. The great outpouring of rage is spilling over into unrelated areas, and suddenly people are standing up to be counted on all kinds of issues.
It's certainly produced an odd effect at the BBC. Who would have thought, just a few months ago, that on one and the same evening - and a bank holiday at that - we would be treated to an edition of Panorama in which a reporter posing as a new MP investigated all the perks she could get and ended up, in theory, very rich; while half an hour later on BBC2 a new series about the surveillance society began with some examples that showed how brilliant CCTV and ANPR can be in the fight against crime and disorder, but left you somehow disturbed at their possibilities for abuse, and worried about the CCTV supervisor who modestly talked of his God-like ability to change people's behaviour. Away from the public eye, in a back room among friends, so must Pol Pot, Stalin and Hitler have sounded - calm, reasonable and full of the best intentions.
Neither programme told us anything we didn't already know or suspect, and neither was exactly great television, but at least it left us with an illusion of being seriously informed as we sank back into the usual diet of talentless talent shows, prurient documentaries about people with three legs and their brains inside out, extraordinarily unfunny comedies about disillusioned businessmen having mid-life crises, and wildlife programmes that lecture us every week about dying species and carbon dioxide.
In one of the more cynical leaps towards the band-wagon, health secretary Alan Johnson tried simultaneously to deflect media attention from some of his colleagues' expenses and stake a claim to the leadership of the Labour Party (if, indeed, it still exists in twelve months' time) by proposing an emasculated and ineffective form of proportional representation under the guise of electoral reform. That the proposed method would do little to remove the stranglehold the main parties have in parliament is not Johnson's problem, of course. Quite the opposite - he knows that the voters may well support it because they are desperate for any change, that the Tories will support it after a show of reluctance because they know that true proportional representation would ruin them, and that the present system which ensures that Britain is at all times ruled by the party most people voted against, will continue.
Still, there are some eloquent voices being raised about various issues unconnected with duck islands, moats and flats for the kids. We've been doing our best on this website for the last five years and if others are finally joining in, that has to be a good thing.
For instance, there was Amanda Platell getting her teeth into the alleged sexual equality ...
Majority rules? If you take a look around you these days, nothing could be further from the truth. That sacred tenet of democracy, which holds that the view of the greatest number of citizens should prevail is no more. Increasingly, we are ruled by the tyranny of the minority - or rather by the PC thought-police who believe they have a monopoly on public grievance.
How else would you explain an edict from the powerful Advertising Standards Authority that has decreed this week that it is socially acceptable to treat men as mindless sex objects, but a crime to make similar references to women. In one recent advert for the bookmaker Paddy Power, two sexually provocative young ladies in short skirts cosy up to a banker.
Hardly sophisticated, for sure. But offensive? The ASA thought so, banning the advert on the grounds that it associated sexual success with stockmarket betting. That decision would have made more sense if the ASA hadn't rejected several hundred complaints about an equally idiotic misrepresentation of the sexes in an advert for Oven Pride kitchen cleaner that portrayed men as simpletons who don't know one end of a scouring pad from another. The voice-over says: 'So easy, a man can do it.'
Now, you and I may know that oven-cleaning is by no means an activity that most men would readily volunteer for. But then nor would most women, if we're honest. Which is why I have some sympathy for the 673 people who complained that the ad was sexist - a significant number in ASA terms. Yet because the ad belittled men rather than women, the protests were overruled on the basis that the advert was 'unlikely to cause serious or widespread offence'.
But the horrible truth is, the ASA is right. As a society, we have become so institutionally sexist against men that it is now accepted practice to treat them as second class citizens. Think of the huge number of TV comedies in which the men are portrayed as under-performing dolts who are vastly inferior to the female characters (Men Behaving Badly being the most notable example). Think of all those women's magazines that routinely reinforce the stereotype of men as being helpless inadequates who think only with their lower organs. On a more serious note, think of the raft of legislation that has been put in place to benefit women, and indeed positively discriminate in favour of them, often at the expense of male interests.
In the supposed attempt to impose equality across the board there is - often quite literally - one rule for women and another for men. What's equal about that? Surely the only true test of equality is a simple one. A little gender role reversal will do it. Imagine the same Oven Pride ad with women portrayed as imbeciles incapable of performing a simple domestic task. The firm would be flayed alive as sexist pigs and commercial chauvinists.
But then the problem extends much further than the age-old battle of the sexes. It reaches into every arena of public life in which a supposedly weaker group is entitled to mock or denigrate anyone or anything it chooses, but must never, ever be ridiculed or criticised in return. So it's fair game for any paid-up member of the commentariat to belittle heterosexual marriage, but gay partnerships are deemed beyond reproach. It's culturally acceptable to make jokes about Christians, or openly denigrate their faith, but belittle or insult any minority religion in a similar vein and you will be branded a hateful bigot. It's fine for the bien pensants to sneer at Middle England with its bourgeois values, but should Middle England dare to pass opprobrium on the cultural values of any other group and they are condemned as quasi-fascists.
Just look at some of the big news stories of the past few months for a snapshot of the new orthodoxy. In March this year, a large group of Muslims in Luton protested in the town with deeply offensive posters vilifying our returning troops, calling them rapists and murderers. Only two people were arrested that day.
No, not any of the Muslim rabble, but two of the decent majority who could not tolerate this abuse against our brave troops and shouted back at the fanatics. They were eventually released without charge.
Or how about the boss of the British Association for Adoption and Fostering, David Holmes, who described as 'retarded homophobes' those who believe that heterosexual couples make the most suitable adoptive parents.
Then there is the way Christians are routinely ignored in our society in a craven attempt to appease minority religions, with crosses banned from public buildings and civic officials reprimanded for daring to mention their faith in public. You'd never imagine we are a country where more than 60 per cent of people still define themselves as Christian. Can you imagine for a moment a devout Muslim nurse being suspended from the NHS because she prays to save a sick patient? Or a Christian succeeding in complaining about a traditional Muslim festival and having it cancelled - as so often happens each year in schools and town centres at Easter and Christmas?
Of course not. Minority rules, OK.
Meanwhile at the Telegraph, Philip Johnston spreads his net a little wider ...
We need a real life Howard Beale. Remember him? He was the fictional American television newsreader played by Peter Finch in the film Network. He became so frustrated at the refusal of anyone to listen to reason that he invited viewers to open their windows and yell into the streets: "I am as mad as hell and I am not going to take it any more.''
Let's face it: we are even madder than that; and not simply because we have found out that our MPs – or some of them at any rate – have been siphoning off large sums of our money to subsidise a lifestyle most of us can only dream about. We were already mad; we were just waiting for something to happen on which to vent our anger.
Normally when the British get irritated, we respond with a resigned and embarrassed shrug rather than shout and bellow. We are not like the French who take to the streets at the drop of a hat to chuck cobblestones at the police. But our characteristic mildness as a nation is being tested to destruction by our politicians – whether in national or local government – who have forgotten that if they must interfere in our lives, to do so only when it is absolutely necessary. We have the worst of all worlds – not only are we over-governed; we are badly governed as well.
We are snooped on more than the average North Korean, harried by marauding armies of parking enforcers and wheel-clampers; pestered by health fascists and safety obsessives and shaken by speed humps. If we smoke we are told where to puff; it we drink we are made to feel guilty; if we drive a big car we are pariahs; if we hunt we have been turned into criminals; if we make an "inappropriate" remark we can expect a visit from the police; if we stand up to hooligans we can end up in court.
Innocent people have been put on a DNA database meant for criminals and will stay there for some time even after the European Court of Human Rights said they should come off – which is a bit rich given that this government introduced the Human Rights Act in the first place to wave its progressive credentials around. Our children are all to have their details placed on a database known as ContactPoint because one appalling set of relatives killed a little girl who should have been watched by social services. For the failings of the system, all children have to be considered potentially "at risk".
In addition, we are all to be considered potential suspects in a crime, too. Why else would the government want us to be on an identity register, other than to know where we are all the time? And why should it? I have nothing to hide and I have nothing to fear but I fail to see why that means I should be on a state ID database.
How has all this come about? A clue can be found in the expenses crisis that has engulfed Westminster. MPs have simply not being doing their jobs properly. They are there to hold the Government to account but have allowed a torrent of legislation to pour forth. They have spent too much of their time thinking up ever more imaginative ways to claim their generous allowances. They have given up their primary task.
This Government has brought in more legislation than any of its predecessors. Since 1997, the Home Office alone has introduced 50 Bills, launched more than 100 consultation papers, made at least 350 regulations and created an astonishing 271 new offences.
Overall, more than 3,000 new criminal offences have been created by Labour – 1,000 of them punishable by imprisonment.
Here are just a few of the things you could do before 1997 but can't now – many of them, it must be said, forced on us by EU directives, though our government in most cases agreed them ...
• Smoke in a pub or on a railway platform in the open air in the middle of the countryside, or at a covered bus stop, or in your own car if it is used for work, or in your own house if it is used as an office where outsiders may come.
• Own a horse, donkey or Shetland pony without possessing a passport carrying a picture of the animal.
• Ride off with a pack of hounds in pursuit of a fox or stag.
• Play the piano in a pub without an entertainment licence.
• Stage more than 12 events a year at, for instance, a school or church hall at which alcohol may be served without a full licence.
• Set off a firework after midnight or be in possession of a firework if aged under 18 at any time other than the period around Bonfire Night and New Year's Eve.
• Own a pistol for any purpose, including sport target practice.
• Stage a protest of any sort, even if alone, within 1km of the Palace of Westminster, without the authority of the Metropolitan Police Commissioner.
• Fish in the River Esk without authorisation.
• Enter the hull of the Titanic without permission from the Secretary of State.
• Import into England potatoes which a person knows to be or has reasonable cause to suspect to be Polish potatoes.
• Obstruct the work of the Children's Commissioner for Wales.
• Imbibe an alcoholic drink on a London Underground train or bus.
• Keep a car on your own driveway without tax, even if it not being used, without filling in a form.
• Sell a grey squirrel (though you can kill one).
Labour has created new offences at twice the rate of the previous Tory administration, which was bad enough in this regard, and it has done so at an accelerating pace. Now you may support some or all of these new laws. What cannot be denied is that we have had a frenzy of law-making that has changed the character of the nation in a way that many of us neither expected nor wanted – even those who voted Labour (especially those who voted Labour, perhaps).
What is that drives the legislative mania of modern governments? Will any of them really, truly commit themselves to stop frustrating the activities and livelihoods of Her Majesty's law-abiding subjects with unwarranted interference, intrusiveness and incompetence? Have they no sense of history, no philosophical framework within which they can understand the point at which government activity must end and the private citizen begins? They have lost all concept of the impact of excessive law-making on the freedom of the individual.
The expenses crisis has merely brought all this to the surface: resentment against a Government that raised taxes after promising not to and then wasted billions of pounds on failed IT systems and top-heavy administration; incredulity over ministerial claims that crime has fallen when we can see with our own eyes that it hasn't; frustration at the inane regulations, the unjustified use of fines and charges, the bloody-minded parking restrictions, unreasonable European directives, multiculturalist busybodies, and the vast, overpaid and largely useless quangocracy disconnected from the rest of us.
It has all gone on for too long and the people to blame are those who failed to put a stop it: our MPs. That is why we are so angry about duck islands, bath plugs and second-home flipping.
Nadine Dorries yesterday said that the second-home allowance was an entitlement which MPs were encouraged to claim and everyone at Westminster and in the media knew that. She suggested it was unfair to criticise MPs since they were only enhancing an income most people would consider inadequate.
Well, the public did not know any of this and this conspiracy against the voter has been busted wide open. We are as mad as hell so shout it out the window. You know you want to.
The GOS says: Philip Johnston's obviously been reading our list of 500 Things You Can't Do Any More.
We're flattered.
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