British politics is in trouble. The anger of the past fortnight has been frightening, even a little threatening. But almost as worrying has been the morose, resigned silence of the past decade, perhaps two decades. A gulf has opened up between the governed and those doing the governing.

It is not difficult to see why talk of moats, duck ponds and £8,000 television sets provokes a debate about the political system and the conduct of Parliament. But controversies whose origins and import may be miles away from Westminster often find their voice in a loud condemnation of the way that politics works. The dispute over the Iraq war, for instance, became a knockdown battle over spin doctors, lying and accountability to Parliament. And the major issues in British politics — from the recession and the fiscal crisis to the poor standard of public services — provoke a desire for change coupled with a resigned feeling that nothing ever changes, that all politicians are pretty much the same.

Low turnouts in elections are the most obvious manifestation of the public mood. But anyone who has engaged in a political debate in the past few years will have encountered it. A sullen, cynical lack of regard for politicians has predominated. And all this even before the electorate discovered that these people, besides failing in their job, were helping themselves to Maltesers.

The message is simple. Any politician who wants to champion change needs to change politics first.

First, improve the quality of those who serve in Parliament.

There is vast disparity of ability among MPs. Some are eloquent, principled, creative and charismatic. Others struggle to string together the words necessary to ask an entire question to the Prime Minister, even though one has been typed out for them by the Whips’ Office.

Watching Anthony Steen yesterday accuse the electorate of jealousy of his big house, which only looks like Balmoral when photographed from a certain angle, is to be reminded how many politicians lack even the most basic political skill. One of the most striking features of the claims against the cost allowance has been the unbelievable stupidity of some of them. Another has been how cumbersome and unreliable the process for getting rid of these people proves to be.

So change requires moving from centrally accountable politicians — people who come up through the party machine and can only be removed by accident if they happen to be in a marginal seat representing an unpopular party — to individually accountable politicians.

This must begin when MPs are chosen as candidates. The recent selection of a Labour candidate for Erith & Thamesmead was in the hands of just 279 people, the party’s tiny local membership. Local activists have an incentive to keep their party small because it makes them more powerful. In Erith they picked, naturally enough, one of their own, a local councillor. This system is inadequate.

Local selections should be conducted like a US primary contest. Anybody who registers should be allowed to vote and anybody should be allowed to stand for the nomination. The aim should be to encourage many thousands of voters to select party candidates.

Once elected, MPs should be subject to recall by voters. Constituents, provided they can muster a sufficient number of others who agreed, should be able to force a vote on whether to recall the member from Parliament and have a by-election. The number required to make this happen would have to be very high to prevent abuse, but it would mean that MPs could not slowly decline in their safe seats, satisfied that almost no misconduct could unseat them.

Another way to obtain better MPs is the standard way that employers get staff of higher quality — pay more for them. The pay of Members should be settled not by some arbitrary notion of fairness, or as a way of rewarding or punishing current incumbents. Pay should be increased in order to hire better people, while allowances are abolished to make sure that remuneration is simple, clear and publicly accountable.

At the same time, the number of MPs should be cut so that Parliament has fewer, better people.

Second, make politics more transparent.

Parliament is, literally and metaphorically, a law unto itself. The allowances disaster was only the latest among many indications that Parliament does not see itself as others see it. Indeed, it often seeks to exempt itself from regulations that it imposes on others. A shocking feature of the allowance system is that Parliament had, many years ago, removed the system from normal tax scrutiny.

The information revolution, the fragmentation of the media and the end of deference all make such behaviour impossible. And MPs have been shockingly slow to realise this. Voters who can find out in seconds, from their home, almost any fact imaginable are not willing any longer to tolerate the obscurity and secrecy of Parliament.

The traditions of the House of Commons — its incomprehensible order paper, its bizarre forms of address, its conventions about voting — all appear not quaint but irritatingly opaque to outsiders seeking political redress. The notion powerfully held by officers of the Commons, that voters are reluctantly tolerated guests when visiting their own Parliament, is insulting.

At the same time, laws seem to fly through the Commons so quickly that no one has time to consider them properly. Britain’s fewer, better MPs should pass fewer, better laws.

Parliament needs urgent reform.

Third, make politics more like real life.

The way that MPs yell at each other in Parliament and have to be told off like naughty schoolboys has been accepted for years as just the way that things happen. Indeed, some suggest that this parliamentary style makes political discourse vigorous. This is quite wrong.

Few things cause more disillusion with politicians than their apparent inability to engage in a reasoned discussion. Voters dislike intensely political knockabout in which each side is simply intent on blaming the other. There is no reform that would be easier, and at the same time more invigorating, than simply to stop behaving like this.

This is not, however, all that is required. Politicians need to assert their independence from their own party and be more readily willing to co-operate with those from other parties. The whipping system is far too oppressive, sweeping all before of it and forcing MPs to obey a code of behaviour that seems alien to observers. It needs to be relaxed.

The House of Commons should also allow far more time for those outside the government to propose new laws and initiate debate. This is not an arcane matter of procedure. Voters would have far more faith in MPs if they saw them as individuals, not just instruments of the party machine.

This links to one further feature of politics that leaves voters bemused and frustrated: the current conventions regarding collective responsibility. Ministers are required, at present, to pretend to agree with each other about everything. A vital part of the political debate — the decision-making that goes on in government — is thus hidden from voters. And senior politicians appear on the media sounding like machines. Their smooth denial of doubt or difference can be intensly irritating. It is time for this convention to be altered.

Fourth, give people more politics.

At a time when people are disillusioned with politics it seems counter-intuitive to offer them more of it. Yet that is what is required by the need to make a closer connection between voters and what they are voting for.

One of the main reasons why people are dis-illusioned with politicians and reluctant to vote is that they feel that voting and changing politicians doesn’t change much. The old Left joke — “if voting changed anything, they’d abolish it” — has begun to seem less amusing. And the intuition of voters is correct. Politicians are able to change less than they let on.

A vast centralised NHS, numerous quangos and countless local police forces make policy without much reference to politicians or voters. The electorate needs to win back the franchise.

More powerful local government, locally elected police chiefs, locally accountable health services and political leaders should seek to reconnect political decision-making with the services that are delivered. At the same time, both locally and nationally there should be greater use of referendums. And government should not monopolise the right to call one.

And no consideration of devolution can be complete without considering the powers that the European Union now has and its ability to exercise those powers without proper democratic scrutiny.

When the subject of political reform is raised, the natural tendency is to consider the big-ticket items. How should the House of Lords be constituted? Should we introduce proportional representation? Do we need a written constitution? Do we need fixed-term Parliaments?

These all require debate. There is a crying need for change. But each of these controversies on its own could take decades to settle. And the need to begin work fixing politics is urgent.

The manifesto set out here is large enough, radical enough, and it needs to take precedence over debates about the constitution. This programme — open primaries, a recall mechanism, fewer but better-paid MPs, an end to the allowance system, a modernised and more open Parliament, a more civilised standard of political debate, looser whipping, less government domination of parliamentary time, fewer laws more carefully debated, a change in the conventions of collective responsibility, much more local democratic control of public services, elected police chiefs, more referendums with the power for voters to call them, better scrutiny of European laws — will require the full attention of political reformers.

When the Kennedys were campaigning against Richard Nixon a poster was produced that, beneath a picture of Nixon, read: “Would you buy a used car from this man?” It was superbly effective. The Kennedys understood that in politics, without trust, there is nothing. And the British political system has lost trust. There is a great deal of work to be done to win it back.