We are now to be asked to vote in a forthcoming general election and pay MPs for another 4/5years — and pay is all it is about now. When I was younger politicans, doctors, teachers, nurses did the job “to make a difference” or as a vocation. Mrs Thatcher nailed that one dead.

MPs tell us that ‘we’ need to pay for the huge banking problem that ‘we’ created.

My local MP has of course made an “unforgivable mistake”, in his own words, in his own accounting of how he claimed our tax to cover his expenses. In the organisation I worked for three people made similar mistakes on their expenses, on a much smaller scale. All three were sacked within a day of its discovery. No way did they get paid £65,000 while someone decided their fate, and keep their pensions and a pay-off. So just how do you remove an MP? It’s as predictable as it’ll rain next week that there will not be an MP ‘sacked’ in any traditional sense.

I note that the Labour candidate hoping to replace Mr Chaytor is to be a 27-year-old. I cannot remember ever in nearly 40 years of meeting hundreds of executive officers of businesses, meeting one under the age of 30. No doubt she is a very clever person, qualified with a lifetime of experience, to understand what? Give me an older person in charge of my private pension anyday. What to do with them then, these impotent MPs and councillors? Simple let’s get rid.

Reduce the numbers drastically. How? Ninety per cent of us have acess to a mobile telephone, a huge section of us are used to Personal Identification Numbers and this growth will increase. The I.D. card fiasco has left us with a huge national computer that has no use, but let’s apply it to democracy with instant referendums by entering our PIN numbers to vote on issues put before us by a national Roman style senate of 100 or so regional mega paid elected MPs. All the senate members answerable to a head of state — the Queen will do for now. What a thought?

Charlie Stone Bury