As the Westminster elite grow ever less confident, alienation from mainstream politics is increasing. We need reform – and need it now, writes Michael White

During opening skirmishes between Gordon Brown and David Cameron ahead of 2 April’s overhyped London summit, the Tory leader managed to pay parliament an old-fashioned compliment. Had the G20 leaders been summoned from four continents on the very day MPs departed Westminster for Easter, just so that the Prime Minister could avoid facing the opposition’s questions?

Good try, but no, of course not. All that can be said in defence of parliament’s role during the protracted credit crunch is that it has not behaved like the US Congress, actively obstructing the Obama administration’s tentative efforts to revive the US economy. Parliament has asked awkward questions, but it has not got in the way of the executive branch of government’s attempts to “save the world” (© G Brown).

This is the kind of week when the reader has the advantage over the columnist: you probably know, as I do not at the time of writing, how much the Brown-hosted G20 has achieved and failed to achieve. Rather than pile on yet more postdated speculation, it is best to concede the field, in the hope that this London summit has turned out better than the equivalent conference in 1933; better, too, than gloom-mongers predicted.

But we can safely debate parliament’s role. Nothing will have happened this week to change the fundamentals. With the politicians away, nothing much will happen next week, either, unless it is true that a mole is waiting to detonate an MPs’ expenses dossier. The video bill for the woman the tabs call “the Porn Minister”, Jacqui Smith? You ain’t seen nothing yet.

It is a truism that the British parliamentary system is in crisis, the stuff of hand-wringing speeches through most of the past century though it has survived successive crises in recognisably similar shape to the form in which it existed in 1900. As Alan Watkins, who once occupied this spot, still likes to say: “They say parliament is dead. But, just as they are wheeling the old lady off to the mortuary, she sits up on the trolley and asks for a cup of tea.”

Is it different this time? Will the economic crisis deepen, in combination with political alienation and social unrest, to the point where the system is fundamentally reformed – and the old lady reaches the mortuary fridge?

There is certainly a fin-de-siècle feeling about the old place. The vast sums belatedly spent to restore the ancient fabric have given it a sheen of modernity. Bustling Portcullis House, the new office block sitting above Westminster Tube station, is rated a huge success, albeit at the cost of giving the neo-Gothic pile next door a neglected air. In the deserted Members’ Lobby, once teeming with intrigue, I constantly look for the first weed to push through the stonework.

But spirit matters more than fabric, collective memory and habits that fade fast. Put simply, why did no local MP cause a ruckus in the chamber once the scale of persistent neglect became apparent at Stafford General Hospital? Perhaps one did and it went unreported: the Press Gallery is even emptier than the chamber usually is. We can watch it on TV while doing other things. So can MPs.

A lethal combination of procedural “modernisation” and “family-friendly” sitting times has improved MPs’ health but undermined collegiality, not always a euphemism for drink. It is not true that government backbenchers are supine, as John Major can confirm. Ever-wider Labour revolts since 1997 have been meticulously documented by Philip Cowley’s research team at Nottingham University. Ministers insist they make more oral statements than ever, though Brown (like Tony Blair) rarely engages in full debate. Select committee inquiries sometimes acquire weight and authority. Look how the Treasury committee, chaired by Labour’s John McFall, has struck a credible, cross-party balance in its pursuit of errant bankers. Angry voters have seen them squirm on TV.

Better to be a good backbencher than a ministerial minnow, concludes Chris Mullin’s memoir, A View from the Foothills. The half-reformed Lords sometimes keeps excess at bay. But in an executive-minded age, MPs struggle to hold the executive effectively to account. Energy drains from the chamber; attendance fades, even for PMQs. There are always emails to answer, committees to attend. The temptation to become Westminster’s representative in Loam­shire South (rather than the other way round) is encouraged and funded: activism may help save the seat from Lord Ashcroft’s millions.

Outside the Westminster village roam other hostile forces. No one knows how serious the recession will prove to be, nor how resilient or resigned the electorate. We do know that the entrenched deference and the disciplined, masculine life of unionised factories, which helped keep society together in the grim 1930s, is long gone. A good thing, too, in many ways, but not where it has been succeeded by what a veteran MP once called “shell suits and Rottweilers” – plus pardonable bitterness. What do the main parties say to such voters, obsessed as they are with centre-ground-hugging managerialism that suits prosperous times only?

Unless we count the panacea of devolution and Celtic nationalism (I will return to the English mutation), no one has offered more than ameliorative adjustments to the system since Margaret That­cher stormed to power in 1979. Her counter-revolution triggered demos, urban riots, terrorism and hunger strikes. The poll tax bust-up in Trafalgar Square eventually helped bring her down, but her settlement has prevailed – until now.

Iraq apart, there has been nothing like the militancy of the 1980s for a decade – until now. The admirable Make Poverty History campaign was ameliorative and, in the proper sense, disinterested. Environmental protests have tended to be Tristan-and-Pandora territory. But that, too, is changing. John McDonnell’s working-class constituents in Hayes and Harlington have joined protests against the proposed third runway at Heathrow. Is street politics back in Britain, as it is across much of Europe? If so, who benefits most – police or protesters – from the organising power of new technologies such as mobile phones, internet, texting, even Google Street View?

Conventional politics has to respond to these challenges, find ways of channelling public anger about bank and regulatory failures, ways of preventing a repeat. But how? Contrary to Peter Oborne’s thesis in The Triumph of the Political Class, the political elite are less confident by the day, run ragged by the incessant demands of an unforgiving political agenda and those same technologies, not least the drumbeat of 24-hour news and FoI searches for ministerial porn.

Voting in a new government is the time-honoured remedy. But, 12 years after Blair’s first landslide, there is nothing like the same mood of optimism as Cameron edges warily towards the door of No 10. Ladbrokes has already cut the odds on the MEP Daniel Hannan becoming next Tory leader from 200-1 to 50-1, this on the strength of his Brown-baiting YouTube clip from Strasbourg being such a viral hit.

Voters want results and want them yesterday.

“There’s no real enthusiasm for Cameron on the doorstep,’’ insist Labour MPs, who mean none for Brown, either, though less loathing than the blogosphere claims. Among frontbenchers, probably only Vincent Cable evokes real enthusiasm outside his own Lib Dem ranks, and that largely confined to those sufficiently educated to know they don’t understand quantitative easing, but Vince does. A coalition could be the making of him, but things will have to get much worse before that happens. Wannabe mould-breaking parties are surfacing.

Declan Ganley, the Irish sort-of-Eurosceptic, has raised the Libertas standard in Britain ahead of the 4 June European parliamentary elections. The former Tory party director general Paul Judge has launched the Jury Team, which seeks to persuade patriotic folk of integrity and no vested interests to put themselves forward. Both strike me as fantasy politics. Nats, Lib Dems, Greens and Ukip may all benefit from main-party disaffection between now and the general election.

Some Labour MPs fear the breakthrough grouping this June may be the British National Party, whose nostrums may appeal in hard times. At his now notorious Tory chairman’s reception on Monday night (no ruckus when I left), Eric Pickles warned against Labour bigging up the BNP threat and dismissed ministerial talk of them getting four or five MEPs.

But two, perhaps, he conceded. Would it really take a BNP presence at Strasbourg, using EU funds to stalk Westminster, to frighten parliament into urgent reform? An uncomfortable thought. Brown has shown he can move fast if the pressure is on, as he did over expenses. Let’s see if he really means it.

Michael White writes about politics for the Guardian

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