The age of deference is dead. If our masters needed further proof, then the unprecedented collapse of Gordon Brown’s approval ratings has provided it.

The prime minister’s election-that-never-was and his handling of Northern Rock were certainly clumsy. Yet John Major didn’t receive as vicious a drubbing for his much worse “crime” of presiding over the pound’s humiliating expulsion from the European exchange-rate mechanism in 1992. Brown blames the “feral beasts of the media” as Tony Blair called us in his farewell speech. The rebellion over the abolition of the 10p tax band is apparently all our fault, too.

There has been a sea change in opinion. A young John Simpson of the BBC got a left hook from Harold Wilson, the then prime minister, 38 years ago for daring to ask him the date of the election. Ever since that encounter, journalists have given up pleading: “Have you anything else you would like to tell the country, prime minister?” Now, after years of spin, the public has become a feral beast, too. Voters won’t tug their forelocks to prime ministers, either. That’s democracy for you.

It follows that politicians who come demanding more money had better watch out for the voters’ left hook instead. Taxpayers know that government wastes bank vaults of their money although the sums are too big to grasp; hence the Pentagon joke: “A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon it adds up to real money.”

But when politicians exploit their housing allowances and put their sons on the parliamentary payroll, they really get it in the neck. People think there is little difference between a welfare cheat and an MP on the fiddle.

So it’s not a good time for Labour to come cap in hand to the voters asking for a handout. Last week the prime minister had to tell his party’s debtors that they will get their money back later rather than sooner. The wells of loot are drying up in the wake of the cash for peerages and Labour deputy leadership scandals.

A white paper setting out proposals for new legislation about party funding is expected soon. Two jewels in the crown of our supine Establishment, the Phillips committee and the Electoral Commission, have tried to pave the way by thinking of excuses to give parties more of our money. But do they really need it?

A new study for Policy Exchange, the think tank, by Michael Pinto-Duschinsky, the world authority on political finance, says no. He concludes that there is no “arms race” between the big parties over spending, the reason most commonly cited by politicians to cap donations from powerful individuals and get state aid.

Labour could once legitimately claim that the Tories were the party of the moneybags, spending ever more dizzy sums. But by 1997 the historical advantage of rich backers that the Conservatives always enjoyed had largely disappeared. By 2005 Labour spending had caught up with the Tories, who were spending in real terms 4% less than they did in the late 1960s. Yet state funding has shot up. By 2006-7, local councillors received more than £216m in salaries and allowances, MPs received £87.6m and members of the House of Lords £17.7m. A large chunk of this money found its way into party coffers or was used for partisan political purposes. Remember that the parties get free broadcasting time and there is a ban on paid-for political advertising on television and radio too.

There are dangers to the health of democracy in Britain here. First, “the growth in payments to sitting MPs has given them a substantial advantage over their challengers. Any move to restrict spending on elections by challengers or their constituency organisations would be unfair unless payments to MPs were severely pruned”. We can see what that means in the United States where incumbents, especially senators with huge staffs, are extremely difficult to remove.

Second, the root problem of British political finance is not rising costs but diminishing popular support for parties. Handing them more of our money gives them no incentive to recruit members or part-time supporters, which should be the lifeblood of democracy. This suits the party bosses fine, allowing them to ignore the views of ordinary members (becoming more unrepresentative as their numbers decrease) or even ordinary voters, except at general elections.

That is why the British political class avoids the obvious democratic solution to its funding problems: the internet. It’s just too democratic.

In America, Barack Obama has shattered fundraising records and challenged ideas about the way presidential bids are financed. While past campaigns have relied largely on support from a few rich citizens, Obama has received contributions from more than 1m donors. He raised $91m through the internet in the first two months of 2008 alone, most of it in small amounts from individuals who want him to win. Ron Paul, a libertarian Republican, raised $4m on a single day last year for his own failed candidacy.

Howard Dean, another Democrat, almost stole his party’s nomination four years earlier by enthusing his supporters through the internet. From nowhere, some 432 of his supporters on the net mushroomed into 190,000.

As Tim Montgomerie, founder of the ConservativeHome website, says, British politicians are in “send mode”, not “receive mode”. They use the internet to send you their dull thoughts instead of asking you for your opinions “and changing their opinions accordingly”. Hence when Brown told us on ITN last week that he was listening to our worries about mortgages, we doubted him.

It is hardly surprising that the website of the British National party gets more hits than all the others put together. The internet is a great way of channelling private political passions, not all of them good.

Check out the Labour website: it headlines with a clip of Alan Johnson, the health secretary, washing his hands as part of the hospital “deep clean”. Very 1940s. On WebCameron the Tory leader struggles with a baby while discussing with a bemused Yorkshire family a “warm front” scheme to insulate their home. The Liberal Democrats are so out of date that Sir Menzies Campbell, their former leader, is still spouting away about climate change. What’s there to like?

After 1.8m people petitioned the No 10 website to demand the government scrap road pricing, they got their way. (There is also a petition to make our columnist Jeremy Clarkson prime minister which has not worked – yet.)

Of course, there is a price to pay for democratic anarchy. Just as journalists and columnists have had their monopoly of wisdom challenged by free opinion sites on the web, so the party bosses would find their monopoly of power challenged. Robert Colville reminds us in a Centre for Policy Studies publication, Politics, Policy and the Internet, that the fuel tax revolt and road pricing petition were out of the control of the parties. George Osborne, shadow chancellor, had to face down ConservativeHome web users on tax.

Party democracy may also have lost its attractions for Brown. Last week he had to abandon his busy Washington schedule and the company of the international top table to plead with a minor government aide not to resign over the abolition of the 10p tax rate.

The internet gives active backbench MPs, who see their roles as something grander than mere lobby fodder for the whips, a big opportunity. A sturdy independent in the mould of Ken Livingstone, Frank Field or the Euro-sceptic William Cash will be able to garner support from the internet to cock a snook at their parties.

So let’s have no more money for party bureaucrats. Let Labour and the Tories enthuse us all with their policies so that they can raise money by their own efforts on the web, bolstered through tax relief on small donations.

It might usher in a new age of deference with a difference. Gordon and his successors would be forced to ask, “Have you anything else you would like the government to be doing, Mr and Mrs Voter?” And who knows where that might lead us.

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