Britain has got a talent…

Further confirmation – if any were needed – has come in the last week or so about our ability to ignore the important issue and focus on the meaningless.

In one breath we are told the public is getting bored with the on-going revelations about how our MPs have been joyously playing the expenses game in recent years.

In the next, one of the lead items on BBC news is a talent show runner-up buckling under the pressure of being in a very harsh media spotlight.

Are we really bored with how our elected leaders have been coining it in whilst telling the rest of us of the need for prudence?

Are we happy that the lives of everyday people are dissected to the minutest of detail for our entertainment, or that a 10 year-old girl is put under huge pressure to perform a song live on TV and to keep trying until she gets it right?

We have a talent alright – for celebrating the superficial.

In recent years politicians from all parties have talked in increasingly strident ways of the need to crack down on benefit fraud. But they have used a big blunt stick and in the process have swiped merrily away at countless genuine and deserving benefit claimants.

In the meantime, the career criminals gleefully milking the system for tens of millions of pounds carry on regardless.

Yet politicians speak triumphantly about tackling the scroungers playing the system.

The revelations of the last fortnight prompted by The Daily Telegraph prove our politicians are most adept at insisting that we should “do as they say, not as they do”.

When it comes to playing the system and fleecing tax payers of money, our MPs are ahead of the game.

And when it comes to expressing our anger but failing to follow that through into decisive action, the rest of us are past masters at bending over and taking whatever comes our way.

So a talent show runner-up’s personal problems becomes the main talking point, not the Cabinet ministers insisting they’ve done nothing wrong but still agreeing to pay back tens of thousands of pounds in expenses.

It is time we had a proper opportunity to have our say and a chance to vote out those unworthy of representing us.