Part of the great political reform programme to be generated from the Commons will entail a head-to-head with Government. The aim, as I have said before, is not the Romantic one of trying to move back to the 1860s when MPs made and unmade Governments and were seen as great initiators of legislation. That was the age when only 3% of males had the vote.

Responsible government - in the sense of governments being held to account by voters - necessarily entails party Government. Trying to go back to a pre-party age will drive the reform programme into a cul-de-sac.

The aim of the Commons must be to ensure that the Government's programme is better prepared and, to use that horrible phrase, "fit for purpose". There will always be emergencies to which a Government must react. But outside this narrow area all legislative proposals should start with the publication of a green paper which:

• Explains why the measure is necessary.
• Justifies why the new measures cannot be achieved under existing legislation.
• Sets out the reasons why Ministers believe the option they are proposing is the right one.
• Analyses the costs, benefits and risks of the different options that have been considered.
• Lists the discussions that have already taken place and the timetable for further discussion.
• Invites the relevant select committee to help shape the main parts of the Bill.
• Gives a timetable when the Commons might expect a Bill.

There is nothing revolutionary here. Much of this was agreed by the House in 1997 following the Scott report, but never implemented.

The House also needs to establish a Committee of equal weight to the Public Accounts Committee which would be concerned exclusively with the Government budget, its size and the main headings of expenditure. This new Committee is urgently needed for reasons I have explained elsewhere. This reform is urgent if the Commons is to play its role in helping the Government shift, over the short to medium term, the record levels of debt it needs to market.

One of the other necessary reforms I have already mentioned in the establishment of a Business Committee which sanctions the Commons' timetable. This Committee would be responsible for ensuring that all Government measures are properly debated and amended by the weight of argument. But it would also be responsible for delivering back to Government its Bills on an agreed timetable.

The Business Committee would also be responsible for ensuring that Select Committee reports are properly debated soon after publication. It would also timetable space for Select Committees to introduce legislation resulting from their reports.

But the overall aim of the Committee should not be more, but less legislation, and of course better legislation.

We are only 8 days into a 34-day contest for the Speakership. Already two characteristics stand out.

The first is the lack of declared candidates. Sensibly the potential aspirants to the Speaker's chair are seeing what support they have. The successful candidate needs to have good support across all three main parties.

A second characteristic is how the reform agenda is developing or, rather, how the party leaderships are responding to rapidly changing events.

There appears to be a growing agreement that the Commons needs more control over its own timetable. The leaderships are offering more time for backbencher measures and, perhaps, a secret ballot for select committee membership and chairmanships. Nick Clegg is proving to be the most radical on this issue.

What is not being conceded yet is for all Commons' activities to be controlled by the Commons itself.

This is crucial for a healthy realignment of power between Commons and Government. Governments have a right to get their mandated election programmes through. How else can they be held accountable by voters at an election? No, or less whipping, as the Commons considers the details of a Bill, would be a good move.

But what of measures that have never been presented to the electorate? Given the volume and importance of the swathes of European legislation, how can the Commons get real and devote what perhaps might be one or two days a week, to debating, deliberating, changing, and if need be, rejecting European legislation?

Reforms on this front are all issues that, in normal times, could be considered by a Speaker's Conference. But, given the mire we are in, the next Speaker needs to develop his or her role in becoming the voice of the House, not only in the media, but in extending the reform agenda and enabling MPs fully to make such a programme their own.

In the past Speaker's Conferences have considered a single aspect of reform and have had small membership. A 21st Century Speaker's Conference could divide itself into a number of working parties each considering part of the emerging reform agenda. It will be the new Speaker's task to bring these working party reports into a coherent reform programme.

Such a Speaker's Conference could involve all those backbench MPs willing to play a role in one or more aspects of developing a truly revolutionary change in how politics operates in this country. Such an agenda would cover the following.

• How voters select candidates - should this be by open primaries or are other, better, methods available to candidates to be more representative in their views of the constituents who return them?

• How would this reform on open primaries reflect how MPs are elected? Much of the debate now is how to make MPs in safe seats more accountable to voters by changing the voting system. Would open primaries change this aspect of the debate?

• Voters are increasingly footloose with respect to party loyalty. Will this willingness to vote for third party candidates give such groups a fairer representation? Or are new measures necessary? To what extent should the Boundary Commission be asked to take into account third party representation when drawing up new boundaries?

• Increasing voter power over the selection of candidates would impact on the whipping system. Successful candidates, while still coming in on party labels, would feel more independent than candidates chosen by small and often declining party memberships. What other measures are necessary to strike a more mature balance between being able to hold a government accountable for its programme and treating MPs as mature specimens of the human race? David Cameron is moving on this issue.

• To what extent would open primaries serve as an effective recall measure on poorly performing MPs? Is mid-term recall necessary and, if so, how can MPs representing unpopular views, and who make our national debates more representative by sticking to their line, be protected against intolerant pressure groups who could wield power way beyond their true influence? Gordon Brown is right to stress the dangers of reform here.
  

There are still 26 days left in debating what sort of Speaker we need in the next parliament. What could be one of those once a century flowering of debate on parliamentary reform looks as though it is going to take off, thank goodness. Hence my delight in seeing a rolling reform programme. Let's hope much of what is proposed here may look old hat by the time MPs choose the next occupant of the Speaker's chair. I am sure in 26 days time my blog entries will show just such a progression.

My next entry will be on how the Government needs to clean up its act.

One wag reported, on hearing the news of the death of Metternich, "Now what did he mean by that?" The actions and sayings of Alan Johnson will likewise be analysed. So what did he mean by raising the question of electoral reform?

Here was a cry for traditional British politics to re-emerge. What Cabinet Government was like is still within living memory of older voters. It was not uncommon then for major figures in a political party to engage voters in a wider debate.

Alan is right in insisting that the reform of Parliament has to go beyond electing a new Speaker. The new Speaker could have a key role in driving through a new contract between the Commons and the voter but also, as Alan suggests a new contract between the Commons and government.

This is the central issue of the Speakership election. But is Alan right to back the Jenkins proposals? Again what is so good about Speaker Martin's delayed resignation is that the country now has perhaps a unique opportunity to debate not that tired old phrase "constitutional reform" but to remake our democracy.

We must move to a system where minority parties are better represented in Parliament. But is any reform which contains a list system, however modified, going to satisfy an electorate fed up to the teeth at what is sees as a conveyor belt of party hacks being thrown at it?

For that is a key aspect of the Jenkins proposals. An element of proportionality will be brought into the system by "electing" members from a list system dominated - yes you've got it - by the party caucus.

We surely do not want more of that. One of the tasks of reform is to lessen the grip parties have in a way which doesn't destroy a party system delivering responsible government i.e. a Government that is able to be held to account.

I have long advocated the French system. This keeps the constituency link so that every Member of Parliament knows that the buck stops with them. But it does ensure that every MP is elected by 50% plus one of the voters.

On the first Sunday of an election those representatives passing that margin are declared elected. On the following Sunday French voters turn up to decide between the top two candidates from the previous week when neither had passed the 50% plus one barrier. This system is capable of delivering not only authority to the MP, but better representation for minority parties. Take my Birkenhead result in 1979.

On our first part of the post system, I gained 49% of the poll, the Tories were second, the Liberals third. Under the French system I would have probably won with Liberal Votes switching to me.

But suppose the Liberals had come a good second and I was still a good way from gaining the support of the majority of voters. I am not so sure in those circumstances that the Conservative voters, not to mention a whole chunk of Labour voters, would not have moved on the second ballot to elect a Liberal Member. The closer the parties are in votes, i.e. the further any candidate is from gaining 50% plus one of the votes, the greater the "upset" is likely to be.

The other system I have advocated is open primaries. I believe in Birkenhead the law should allow the local Labour party to put me up with other Labour candidates in a primary and allow all voters, Tories and Liberals, to select the candidate who will in all likelihood the next Member of Parliament.

Not only would such a system prevent the wasted vote syndrome that there is in the safest seats. But it would likely result in a large number of such seats seeing the successful candidate from the primary being elected in a General Election unopposed. The fight could have already taken place in the primary.

Why not let parties hold such primaries should they want to? A small change in the electoral law would give a green light to greater voter choice of their representative.

For more information please see my Policy Exchange pamphlet "Life Support".

We are all reformers now. This will be the refrain of all the candidates for the Speakership. It is a phrase that hints at the opportunity, but also the danger. Will the election open the way to the most powerful Speaker in our history?

Both candidate and programme are of equal importance. The next Speaker has to be strong enough to get the reforms through.

Speaker Martin has done the Commons a great favour in setting out a leisurely election process. It will be the first campaign ever in which candidates will be required to publish manifestos and possibly to participate in hustings.

But the election will go further than that. The public will want their say in who they see as their Speaker. Local newspapers are likely to run their own polls on who constituents would most favour. And this is likely to be the first election in Britain where the internet plays a key role.

The next Speaker will only be the most powerful in history if he or she is elected on a programme that points to the next phase in our Parliamentary development. I have been asked whether I will throw my hat into the ring. I am thinking about that as I accept that there maybe too many colleagues on my own side who would block any such possibility.

I will therefore spend the next ten days or so developing the details of a programme, and I shall be happy to support anybody who is more likely than I to drive through the programme of reform. I will make an announcement on whether I am a candidate after we return from the Parliamentary recess.

I have already given the headings of what I believe that manifesto should cover in my previous blog, I intend to develop over the next ten days or so each of its ideas in more detail.

Any great reforming programme has to take the two central ideas that underlie our democracy - representative and responsible government - and reinterpret them for a Parliament in a deep crisis that goes, way, way beyond expenses. The Commons is failing to fulfil its historic role.

We MPs only get responsible government because parties are elected on a programme and are then held accountable for this programme by voters at the following election.

Crucial to the delivery of that responsibility is the political party.

Without political parties we would be in a worse state than the fifth French Republic. But voters increasingly loathe how parties operate.

No new contract is going to be successful unless a new balance is found on the need for the government to gain its programme through the House and a revitalised House of Commons being as a representative assembly. We will never get that revitalization until the Commons itself controls its own programme by its own business committee.

But that business committee has to go beyond simply "receiving" government Bills.

How can the representative arm of our constitution be strengthened in totally new ways so that Parliament's consideration of government Bills allows the representative arm of our constitution new powers. But, likewise, how can these powers be exercised in a way that is effective but does not threaten either the Government's existence or it being held accountable at the end of the day by voters for the totality of its programme.

I will pick this point up in my next blog.

When the Speaker stands up today at 3:30, he has to deal with what might become a complete breakdown of trust in our Parliamentary system, by voters, as a result of the expenses fiasco. The question of expenses rightly angers the public, but the Speaker is now offered a unique opportunity to reform Parliament.

His statement will hopefully cover five areas:

1. He should announce zero tolerance to fraudulent claims. Those in the outside world guilty of the worst abuses that have been uncovered would face prosecution. MPs should not be exempt from the criminal law. My guess is a lot of local parties will also begin the process of deselection. Failure to do so will see incumbents challenged by anti-sleaze candidates, who will probably win their seat.

2. The Speaker needs to announce immediate measures governing all allowances while awaiting the Kelly Commission on Standards in Public Life to report. All expenses from the beginning of this financial year should go online, the moment they have been agreed by the fees office. A slim-line Additional Cost Allowance should be announced with the clearest of guidelines outlining what can be claimed - not what cannot be claimed. The Communications Allowance should be abolished, no allowances should be used for supposed "services" received from local parties, and MPs should be forbidden to allow their local parties to use their offices in the constituencies.

3. The Speaker should announce that he has requested the Kelly Commission to report by mid-July. MPs can then debate the proposals before the summer, but they need to approve them without changing a dot or comma. The Fees Office would then have the summer recess to bring in the totally new system operating from the autumn.

4. The Commons must recognise that we live in an age of party governments, and that parties are crucial for delivering responsible government. Failure to get through their election programme would result in governments not being accountable for broken election promises. As a part of a new clear contract between the government and the Commons, while accepting the need for party government, the Speaker should announce today that it is up to the House of Commons to decide how the Government gets that programme through the House. He should set out that he intends to propose new machinery for managing House of Commons business, so that the Commons itself will in future organise its own timetable to consider Government measures, as well as its own measures.

5. The House of Commons must now better represent the views of voters. This should naturally follow from the Commons gaining control over its own timetable. The Government needs to be much more relaxed about the details of their programme so that MPs, better representing their constituents, can make measures contained in government Bills are more fit for purpose. Similarly, the Commons needs to elect the Chairmen and Members of each of its own Committees by secret ballot. The Select Committee system should also be enhanced not only in a pre-legislative role on Bills. It needs to extend its works so that serious issues raised by constituents are reported upon making it easier for those issues to be translated into future reform programmes.

Further reading:

Expenses are just a symptom, parliament must be remade - Sunday Times.

"And take upon's the mystery of things As if we were God's spies...."

William Shakespeare, King Lear

Today's Times has another exposé, not this time on MPs' expenses, but on the spy rings that operated against this country leading up to the end of the Second World War and beyond. Here's a personal note.

This paper has a strong record in exposing espionage. It led the campaign over what was known as the "Fourth Man" in the Cambridge spy network. The great investigator was Peter Hennessy.

Hennessy was getting too close. The Times was fed, I guess, misleading information from questionable sources in the security services and named the wrong B (as he was known).

B turned out to be Sir Anthony Blunt.

Years on the Times returns to this topic and writes up an exposé on the Oxford spy ring. They name Arthur Wynn as a key player.

I know Arthur's wife, Peggy, from my days at the Child Poverty Action Group. She was and remains a grand figure influencing British life in two significant ways.

The first was the research she undertook looking at how families were unfavourably treated in the tax and benefits system. She wrote a seminal work, Family Policy, which was a fitting tribute to the work Eleanor Rathbone began in her campaigns for family endowment and documented in her great book, The Disinherited Family.

In my days at CPAG, and on official visits to Sir Keith Joseph, then the Health and Welfare Secretary of State, Margaret Wynn's book would be either on a shelf behind him, or on the table itself. It was he who told me about the importance of the book, that I should read it and as they say - the rest is history.

But not quite. That book certainly started to change the Heath Government's policy towards families which has more recently run into the sands. For some reason best known to themselves, the Government has devised an unbelievably generous tax and benefits system which is totally blind towards whether the family has one or two parents. Not a move Margaret Wynn would have supported.

But Margaret, who is still alive, and her husband had an even more dramatic effect on British politics. As part of my job with CPAG I edited the group's journal - Poverty.

The Wynns- submitted me a piece on the worrying trend of a falling birth rate amongst more prosperous families and a significant increase in the birth rate of poorer families. Keith Joseph, a CPAG member, read the piece and used it for a speech just prior to the challenge to Heath's leadership.

He pointed to this trend and to the dangers it held for a prosperous country. Of course it had overtones of the Eugenics debate of the 1930s which had widespread support and which was quickly buried, thanks to the evil Hitler regime's policies on racial purity.

But not to look at how societies are changing, and what benefits or challenges this throws up, is simple irrationality bordering on the idiotic.

There followed a huge hullabaloo in the press and as a result of the media coverage Sir Keith Joseph announced he thought he was not suitable to challenge Ted Heath for the leadership of the Tory party. It is at this point that Mrs. Thatcher realised that, if there was to be a challenge, she had to be the challenger.

Two rather good footnotes to history on God's spies of families, do you not think?

There is literally no obvious way out of the appalling mess in which MPs now find themselves over our allowances. The opportunities we have had - in deciding how to disclose information about our allowances - were squandered.

Worse still we have given up any attempt to control events. Authority has been passed to the Kelly Committee on standards in public life.

What we can therefore do now is limited. But we are not totally without influence. The leadership should come from the head man. The Prime Minister should act today.

He should invite again the leaders of the other parties to join him in Downing Street. The purpose would be to agree an all party leadership recommendation to the Kelly Committee and they should not leave Downing Street until the outline of an agreement is made. If he doesn't, one of the other party leaders should take the lead.

They should then ask the Kelly Committee to speed up their enquiry. It should be asked to report on the second homes allowance within a month.

Can the second home allowance live up to its name? Should Members who are required to have a second home not loose out financially compared to London MPs?

If that is answered in the affirmative then some reforms fall immediately into place.

The Kelly Committee should list what it believes it would be legitimate to expense. Parliament should accept without amendment the Kelly proposals. Naturally all expense claims each month must go online as soon as they are cleared.

But how does the political class get some sense of authority and dignity back? Only the electorate can give this back. And it will not come back by simply holding a general election. We have to be much more radical.

We will know from opinion polls whether what Kelly proposes is supported by the voters. If it is not so, then Kelly and MPs must sell the proposals to the country by way of debate, and, if needbe, by calling a referendum.

The voters who pick up our bills must approve.

And I don't kid myself that that will be nice for MPs. Voters are pretty angry and may well be in vengeful mood. The only way we can make a new beginning is to submit our allowances to the electorate to decide.

I don't for one moment think the course of action will be an easy ride for MPs. But do we deserve one?

I didn't think I would feel so sad. How wrong can you get?

Friday was my last day in Birkenhead Town Hall - the place where I have held surgeries throughout the past thirty years. The Council has kindly fixed me up with accommodation across the square in the Treasurer's department. But I hadn't realised what a wrench it would be.

In those early days, I had a tiny boxroom on the ground floor which just held me, a constituent, two chairs and a very small table. People would come in to the Town Hall on a ground level and would sign in to see me.

It was in this little room that I first met Edmund Dell after being selected in January 1979 as the prospective Labour candidate for the town. Edmund was a glorious person and part of his glory was in his shyness.

The shyness prevented him from looking straight into my face. But, steadily directing his eyes towards to the wall I was facing, he gave me two pieces of advice.

The first was not to rush in and increase the numbers of surgeries that he held. It is very easy, later, to make surgeries even more regular, but it is very unpopular to cut the number. That advice I have followed to the letter of the law and it is only been over the last five, or is it ten, years that I have held surgeries as he did on the second and fourth Friday in the month, but now include the fifth Friday as well.

The other piece showed his optimistic nature. "One day", he told me, "you will be famous. People will ask you to speak in their constituencies.

You can only ever lose votes in an election. Accept every one of those invitations for it is better to lose votes in someone else's constituency that your own".

I fear I have failed Edmund on his second prophesy, but all those memories came flooding back to me on Friday evening.

These surgeries play a crucial part in my role as MP. I don't mean here the traditional role that constituents should be able to go to their MP and, if possible, seek redress for any legitimate grievance. This role is crucial importance and becomes more so.

Part of one's job as an MP is to say there is no redress. But my role is to try and change the law.

This has been a really valuable side of surgeries for me. The have been my constant tutorial over the past thirty years.

All the good ideas I've had in proposing reform have had their genesis in that little room in the Town Hall. On another occasion I will list some of the best ideas and best reforms you, my constituents, have taught me.

But now I leave the Town Hall. It is up for sale. Will anyone buy?

More importantly, what will it do to Birkenhead not to have a Town Hall? Having a place to meet cheaply is another public service drastically cut back by this latest closure.

Two glorious opportunities to give Birkenhead Town Hall new life have slipped through our fingers. It was the obvious site, being at the centre of the borough, for being the office of the new Wirral authority.

The Labour group decided that was where the Central Office should be and Labour councillors in Bebbington, West Wirral and, of course, Birkenhead voted for it.

But the Labour councillors in Wallasey voted with the Tories throughout the borough to have Wallasey. How stupid can you get?

The other splendid opportunity was when the current council was looking for decent accommodation in Birkenhead for some of its staff. A Senior Officer (without authority) signed a contract to remodernise the Cheshire Lines building.

How stupid can you get again? The £11M - or whatever the huge sum was that was spent on Cheshire Lines - a building we will never own and on which we pay rent - could have been used to make Birkenhead the second council centre in the borough.

And guess what? That chief officer who acted in this way remains in post!

The political economy of the crisis moved on significantly both yesterday and today. Yesterday the Commons debated the second reading of the Finance Bill - the Budget in other words.

I had already tabled an Early Day Motion, backed by Vince Cable, calling for a rational debate about public expenditure cuts that are on the way, and for the Commons itself to setup a committee that would recommend how public expenditure - forecast yesterday by the National Institute of Economic and Social Research to come in at 48 per cent of GDP in 2012 - is brought into line with the Government's optimistic projections for revenue coming in 10 per cent lower at 38 per cent in the same year.

Supposing the market simply can't digest all the debt the Government intends shovelling out this year, next year, and for many years to come. So in yesterday's debate I made a plea that the Government and the House should have a plan B.

£25bn in debt has been successfully sold this year - leaving about £200bn to be offloaded. What will happen if the Debt Office tells to the Treasury, then to the Prime Minister that the market is refusing to buy?

The Treasury Select Committee has just reported that the cost of floating this debt will rise i.e. even more of future budgets will be ear marked for interest repayments.
Please God the day will never come, but if the Government cannot shift its debt even at higher interest rates, it will have to act that evening before the markets open the next day.

Failure to do so will see the value of Sterling plunge through the floor. In attempt to safeguard the currency the Government will be forced into a slash and burn policy with respect to public expenditure. It might also be forced into forming a national Government. It may even have to adopt both approaches.

My plea has always been that in the run up to the election shifting the debt will prove much more difficult than the optimistic souls that run the Government believe and, that we should get a plan B in place now. Hence the plea for the House to act to start planning the new radical politics of achieving key goals while cutting severely the level of public expenditure.

That was the theme of the amendment I tabled to the Finance Bill Second Reading yesterday and I again was joined by Vince Cable and his deputy Jeremy Browne.

This topic is no longer confined to a no-go area of debate. There is now the beginning of movement on the Tory benches. What was noticeable, however, was the totally impassive way Treasury Ministers sat in the debate while MPs, now of all three parties are raising their concerns on whether it is simply possible to raise the levels of debt the Government believes is necessary to balance the book. .

An equally important report was issued today by the shadow monetary policy committee run by the Times and the IEA. At long last this group has begun to expose one of the dangers with the Bank of England's strategy for printing money, or as it is euphemistically called, ‘quantitative easing'.

There might be a case for such a policy but, given the banks' failure to lend adequately to businesses, surely this money should have been used to buy corporate bonds and debts, rather than Government gilts.

The result of concentrating on gilts has meant that far from injecting money into the economy, quantitative easing has seen the money go abroad, as it is foreign holders of Government gilts who have been quickest to sell.

Surely there must be a halt to this policy until a careful analysis has been done of the impact so far of a printing money policy. There may well be a case for this strategy if it is targeted on the corporate sector.

But soon, surely, somebody is going to put their good brains to the question of how one withdraws the printed money from the economy. For unlike the bank, I don't believe the inflation genie is safely secured inside the lamp.

The Government is to wipe clean its DNA database. That was the headline, although careful reading suggests that not all will be lost.

What is lost, or missing from this debate, is the view of those who believe that this craven act, in response to a European court ruling, weighs the criminal justice system even more towards the thug and against the decent citizen.

So this blog carries a health warning. I am in favour of the police keeping records people like me who are not criminals who have everything to gain from being part of a national DNA database which would catch many murderous suspects and bring their trail to a safe conclusion.

Look what the figures tell us. I asked the Home Office back in March 2006 for the number of major crimes solves due the use of the police DNA database.

Thanks to an amendment to the police and criminal evidence act in 2001 - so we are talking about a fairly short period of time - 8,493 profiles of individuals have been linked to crime scenes involving 13,964 offences.

These offences included 214 murders, 55 attempted murders, 116 rapes, 68 sexual offences, 119 aggravated burglaries and 127 supplying controlled drugs.

More recent figures are even more impressive there are 3100 DNA matches per month and over the period from April 1998 to March 2008 there have been over 272,000 detections which probably would not have been made otherwise.

It is worth rereading those figures again. The likelihood is that none of those criminals would have been found, brought to trial and sentences had it not been for the police DNA database. Criminals have everything to fear from this database and we innocent citizens had no such fear.

In my constituency a young mother was murdered but no-one charged. Years later the murderer set alight to the little shop which was used as the local mosque when an individual was inside. DNA samples from this site linked back to the murder scene. He was convicted of murder.

Would it not have been better to put the resources which are being wasted on ID cards into building up this most effective way of weighting justice in favour of effectiveness? Should this not have been an area where Government sought a derivation from the human rights legislation so that balance of our criminal justice was kept in favour of the innocent and not the guilty?

What about a movement by those of use who would quite happily offer our DNA sample to be included on the database? We have nothing to lose other than those criminals who wish us harm.