Just when you thought that the worst of the recession might be over (or not) the cheery prospect of swine flu comes along to provide the 24 hour news channels with a fresh supply of pestilence and doom.

We currently know very little about swine flu beyond a couple of hundred deaths in Mexico, a country of about 109 million folk. However the fearsome investigative abilities of Her Majesty’s Press have revealed that you are unlikely to catch swine flu from eating bacon.

Even if swine flu turns out not to be The Black Death after all, the expenses and allowances of our MPs will provide enough grisly stories to fill the papers through to the General Election.

Gordon Brown should have known better than to try to kill the expenses fiasco with a plan cooked up in Downing Street. Attendance allowance systems just lead to different forms of rule bending. Not that David Cameron or Nick Clegg had anything more convincing to put forward. Creative application of the rules is not restricted to MPs of any one party but this sort of thing always hurts the party in power most.

It is hard to feel too sorry for the plight in which MPs now find themselves. The absurd spectacle of MPs and Councillors having to vote through increases to their own pay could and should have been banished long since if only Parliament had the will to do so. But it is hard the elected to give up power - even when it is blatantly doing them no good.

Attempts have been made both locally and nationally to have independent bodies make recommendations, but Parliament or Council have retained the final decision. It’s the worst of all worlds. The temptation to play politics is just too great so bad headlines still appear. It is nonsense to argue that Parliament cannot give up ‘control’ - the sums of money involved are a drop in the ocean of public spending. It would be perfectly possible for Parliament to set up a system and review the system every so often without Parliament/Council ever getting involved over actual rates of pay. There is no excuse.

But behind these problems lies an uncomfortable fact. Politics in Britain does not pay well enough. One reason why the pool of talent going into Parliament draws on a limited number of trades is that the rewards were, for a long time, comparatively poor. A basic wage equivalent to a middle manger in local government might seem a lot to some but not for the grief involved in being an MP. Put alongside that a system of allowances with plenty of scope for creativity, add some human nature and there’s only one outcome. MPs have created reasonable joint incomes (as well as a civilised life) by employing their partners and have provided for the long term by building up property portfolios entirely within the rules.

For the good of public confidence we need to get real - end allowances people don’t understand and pay MPs realistic salaries instead.

Instead of staffing allowances for individuals, a proper system where Parliament employs MPs’ staff on recognised pay scales. Most people are expected to pay to travel to their place of work from their salaries. So should MPs. Distances from the constituency to Parliament could be recognised in regional pay scales. And there is something obscene in voting up taxes on booze while enjoying subsidised bars at Westminster.

And Maybe instead of the discredited second home allowance MPs could have a ‘hall of residence’ - just imagine the potential for behaving badly! OK, perhaps not.