Douglas Carswell gives the useless, futile, unaccountable and smug House of Commons a Z-rating

Douglas Carswell MP has marked nearly four years as an MP with an A to Z guide to Parliament on his blog.

It amounts to an extraordinary attack on the "futility" of the Commons.

Here are some of his conclusions:

• A is for... Accountable, something many of our MPs are not...
• C is for ... Commons Committees, and all their spineless, executive-controlled futility....
• D is for ... Directives, the EU rules - issued despite Westminster - which really decide how Britain's governed...
• H is for .... Hansard, that record of evasion and bluster...
• P is for ... Pocket, as in “the Commons is in the pocket of government”...
• Q is for ... Quango, the unaccountable institutions that really run Britain...
• S is for ... Smug, self-satisfied, self-regarding SW1...
• U is for ... Useless, as in the House of Commons...
• V is for ... Vanity, which stops many MPs 'fessing up to the fact they no longer count for much...
• W is for ... Whitehall, which is to Westminster what puppet-master is to puppet...
• Z is for ... The grade I give our broken Westminster system after four years there as an MP.

Read the full A-Z here.

Tim Montgomerie