Broken or busted - or both

According to current polls, or rather the research outfits commissioned to conduct them, voters intend punishing politicians for the expenses scandal for some time to come.

It does not really matter whether you believe the projected figures. The grim perception conveyed is that it is not Britain that is broken; but British politics. And, by association, the same applies to everyone and everything it touches.

Nothing has really managed to staunch the haemorrhaging of residual respect for politicians which started more than a year ago as revelations emerged of nepotism, the John Lewis list, duck-houses & moats, flipped second homes, inexcusable errors and inevitable scapegoats.

The scandal and successive attempts to draw a line under events has cost a lot more than the symbolic sacrifice of a Speaker. It has generated a dangerously widening space between parliamentary democracy and the people it is supposed to represent. What is frightening is that it has happened far more markedly than if the public anger was over an abuse of power – such as sanctioning an illegal foreign war.

And yet the parliamentary apparatus still appears unable to grasp the realities of the goldfish bowl they now occupy. MPs seem genuinely surprised at the negative reaction to news of a £6.5 million price tag for monitoring expenses at a time when police forces are facing budget deficits of the same proportion.

And as much as Welsh AMs would seek to draw a distinction between their own upgraded expenses system and the tainted arrangements at Westminster, the fact that revisions at Cardiff Bay were deemed necessary at all is sufficient indictment. From the outside, respective members answer to the same political hierarchies, often share the same constituency offices and speak in more or less the same coded language.

Politics is not fair. It never was. A year after the Iraq invasion, Labour was decimated at council elections around the UK regardless of individual performance. And if the polls are to be believed, the voters will not just restrict their on-going wrath to Westminster issues when it comes to value for money.

The challenge for Welsh politicians therefore is to understand the dynamics at work here and to appreciate how the survival of Cardiff FC is still seen by a sizeable proportion of voters to have more relevance to day-to-day life in Wales than an extension of powers in Cardiff Bay.