Public confidence in parliament and politics has fallen off a cliff.

By Alex Stevenson

Everyone in Westminster - from the prime minister downwards - has bright ideas about what to do next.

The three-week maelstrom over expenses provided the sense of crisis needed to make, for the first time in a long time, real change possible.

The pervading nature of the need for transparency has transmitted itself far beyond the system of allowances granted to MPs.

Politicians, who above all others have a nose for sniffing out opportunities to get their favoured policy or idea some publicity, have been coming out of the woodwork in recent weeks.

Amid the passionate but somewhat disparate calls for change politics.co.uk has been picking out some of the ideas which, though not in the mainstream, could be worth a second look-over.

You wouldn't expect Sir Nicholas Winterton, one of the Conservative party's most senior Tories, to be a zealous reformer. But the member for Macclesfield, who has been an MP

They call the Home Office a poisoned chalice for a reason, and Alan Johnson is about to find out why.

The Law Lords are looking into the government's control order legislation today, specifically whether it contravenes Article 6 of the Human Right Act. The control orders take away an individual's freedom without them ever having gone to trial, and allows authorities to deny them access to the evidence against them or even an explanation of why they have been selected.

Your comfort with this law will depend on your faith in the government, the police and the security forces. If you've got it, it's a sensible measure to prevent any further terrorist atrocities. If you haven't, it's a symptom of a society which is blind to the danger of a tyrannical state. I don't have faith in the government, the police or our security forces. They've been wrong too many times, and lied about it - from Damian Green to Jean Charles de Menezes - for me to accept their argument that we don't need to see the

On Friday Gordon Brown had tamed his Cabinet. Could he do the same on Monday evening to a much greater foe - his seething backbenchers?

The weekly meeting of the parliamentary Labour party (PLP) was the touted moment when Brown could meet his demise, brought down by a raving pack of desperate MPs.

It was the perfect storm for the prime minister. A calamitous series of high-level ministerial resignations. Appalling local election results. Extremely appalling European results.

So it was now or never for the plotters, and no surprise that the Labour MPs who walked into committee room 14 in the Palace of Westminster were utterly divided.

Not divided on policy, necessarily, but on their response to the hordes of journalists camped outside. It seemed as if every hack within miles around had flocked to perch on the benches lining the grand corridor running the Palace's entire length. Some of the more experienced responded with utter contempt - John Prescott's grimly set face was an example to

It's a funny feeling being ashamed of your country.

Discovering that two British National party (BNP) candidates have been elected as MEPs by the British public is like finding out your girlfriend cheated on you, or a mate stole a tenner from your wallet.

But today, that is where we are. We're now in the same position that many of our European neighbours have been in for decades. We've elected fascists.

The political class has been thrown into turmoil. One of the arguments doing the round is that it's the fault of the proportional representation system on which the European elections are conducted. This is extremely disingenuous. The problem is that too many people voted for fascists, and not enough people voted against them. The solution is not to make our system less democratic. It's to challenge fascism.

The system is not to blame. People are. The people who voted for the BNP, and the people who didn't vote at all. Those BNP voters need to take a good hard look at themselves. I

Gordon Brown's last-gasp reshuffle will only succeed in dividing his new Cabinet from Labour's parliamentary party.

Throughout the day the ministers to-ing and fro-ing from Downing Street will dominate the headlines, professing their loyalty to the prime minister.

Analysts will be impressed by the rallying-round as they seek to isolate ex-work and pensions secretary James Purnell.

And there will be many who believe the newly-invigorated Brown Cabinet could give the prime minister the energy he needs to continue struggling on into his final year in office.

They will be wrong.

For while Brown might lure some to support him with the promise of powerful positions, the divisions within the Labour party opened up this week are simply unsustainable.

Today's reshuffle will come against the backdrop of calamitous local elections results. Labour is likely to lose all four of the councils it holds and receive a "drubbing", as one backbencher put it, across the country.

Worse still for Brown is

Britain doesn't have much of a problem with fascism. It's one of the best parts of being British, one of the proudest records this country has.

You don't have to look very far overseas to see just how proud we should be. The French National Front usually gets around 15 per cent of the vote in national elections. Holland's far-right Party for Freedom is expecting to get four of the 25 Dutch seats in tomorrow's European elections. And those are the more left-leaning countries.

The British are made of different stuff.

We fought fascism, and we destroyed it. It's no exaggeration to say Britain saved the world from fascism, with a little help - obviously - from our Russian and American friends.

It was the proudest moment in our island history. For one year, Britain stood alone against the mighty strength of the Nazi empire. It had no allies - none who would come to our aid anyway. It stood alone, and because of that strange, understated strength of British character which we so rarely talk

These days you'd be hard pressed to find too many rats on ships but go back a few decades and they were a common feature. Unless that ship happened to be sinking that is, when they were normally the first to look for a route off.

Gordon Brown's government, irrespective of what you think about him, is now seriously beginning to resemble a sinking ship. But it is far from sunk yet.

It has been suggested for a long time that Brown lacked the authority to lead the country and that he lacked the ability to communicate to the electorate his vision for the future. So much so that no-one is able to tell me what his vision for the future of Britain is. But now that even the Guardian has turned on him, can he really survive the next week?

And then there are, of course, the rats, or the Cabinet as we used to call them. After yesterday's (apparently accidentally leaked) departure by Jacqui Smith, we today have Hazel Blears' resignation. A woman, who whatever else she may have been, was one of the

Jacqui Smith has quit. In the end it happened quickly, prompting frenzied scenes in Westminster as journalists and politicians desperately tried to find out what was going on.

But the signs had been there for some time. First, there were her strange living arrangements, where she made a room in her sister's house her primary residence and directed her second home allowance to the house she had with her husband and children.

Then her husband's viewing habits, which included two pornographic movies, made matters worse, when it transpired he accidentally charged them to the taxpayer.

And then, once expenses became day-to-day front page news, she made it into the scandal once again after it emerged she tried to claim for an iPhone for her husband, who works in her constituency office.

But in truth, Smith's expenses claims were never any worse than many others' in Westminster, although the porn angle did make them slightly funnier.

In any sensible, decent political system, she would have