On June 4, Great Britain will go to the polls to vote in elections for the European Parliament and for local councils. European elections are normally dull affairs that draw few voters: the European Union may exercise an outsized influence on the governing of Britain, but the European Parliament is a distant, pompous, and irrelevant organization that plays only a minor role in the Union. Local council elections are more exciting – they are the nearest Britain comes to American-style mid-term elections – but in a highly-centralized state like Britain, it has, regrettably, become difficult to take local councils seriously.

Of course, critics might say that that is part of the problem. Indeed, that is precisely what they do say: no less than David Cameron, the leader of the Conservative Party, has called for “a massive, sweeping, radical redistribution of power. From the state to citizens; from the government to parliament; from Whitehall to communities. From the EU to Britain; from judges to the people; from bureaucracy to democracy.” This call does not come out of a clear blue sky: indeed, it is a direct response to the scandals that have rocked all the major parties over the past month. Gordon Brown has had problems of his own – a Labour effort to establish a deniable ‘dirty tricks’ team backfired spectacularly – but the main scandal crosses party lines.

In outline, it is simple enough: MPs from all parties have been caught submitting dubious expense receipts. The varieties of alleged misconduct are almost endless, and range from minor claims for travel to more serious questions about the purchase and sale of second homes, and occasionally, for moat cleaning. The amounts in question are, as scandals go, not terribly large, which makes it a very British scandal: only in Britain could a leading member of the Socialist Campaign Group, and a Labour MP, get into hot water for spending 1,100 pounds on up-market wallpaper.

But as always, it is not just the facts that hurt: it is the effort to conceal them that really makes the scandal. The Speaker of the House, Michael Martin, was forced out on May 20, when it became clear that he had lost the confidence of all sides of the House after he attacked backbenchers who were raising questions about the scandal. Already, at least ten MPs have announced they will not contest the next election, and the Times is projecting that, at the next general election, at least 325 MPs – over half the House – will stand down or lose their seat. If that comes to pass, it would create the largest incoming class of MPs since the great Labour victory in 1945.

In these circumstances, the elections matter. No MPs will lose their seats as a result of them, though one could lose his job: a crushing defeat for Labour might force Gordon Brown to depart No. 10 before the next election, which on present betting will not come until May 2010. But apart from that exciting, though now somewhat unlikely, possibility, the scandals and the elections have come together to bring front and center a problem that has sat on the side of the stage for over a decade, and to give the voters a chance to say something about it.

The problem, simply, is that Britain is both over and under-centralized. It is over-centralized in that, depending on how you define the terms, English local authorities receive between 68% and 75% of their funding from central government. That is why local government barely matters. Labour’s reliance on a top-down model of targets and planning has only made this problem worse. But it is also under-centralized in that, while Parliament dominates the nation, it is itself increasingly dominated by the European Union, which is already responsible for much of the law-making in Britain and which, through the Lisbon Treaty, is trying to control a good deal more.

The result, not surprisingly, has been the growth of a culture of irresponsibility in Parliament. The expenses scandal is eye-catching, and important, but it is only a minor part of the problem: the Commons also devotes far too little serious attention to matters such as the national defense. Parliament has come to combine the worst features of over-centralized big government and irrelevance: it claims to run everything, fails to deliver and loses creditability as a result, and suffers from the quiet sense that it no longer matters as much as it used to. In those circumstances – especially with a government wobbling from crisis to crisis, and therefore unwilling to upset its MPs by encouraging them to scale back on their claims – the temptation to indulge in nice wallpaper was evidently irresistible for many. Indeed, with so much money flowing through the system, and so little attention being paid, it was inevitable.

Monetary corruption is the least interesting kind of scandal, because its motives are so obvious. But it is revealing that the expenses scandal was exposed by a U.S.-born investigative journalist, Heather Brooke. Politics in Britain are extremely open by the standards of every other country in the world, except the United States. From that perspective, the question is not, so much, whether the public should know more about what goes on in Britain. It is what is going on Germany, France, the E.U., the U.N., or any other nation or international organization where public visibility is almost entirely absent. Actually, it is obviously a bad sign that we have to guess about this: if the British system concealed these relatively minor abuses, it is safe to say that the much more closed systems, in spite of their pretensions to moral superiority, hide far greater ugliness.

But if a lack of sunshine usually breeds scandal, the reaction of the voters when the facts were finally revealed was equally inevitable: an outburst of anger at MPs who appeared to believe that they belonged not only to the political class, but to a privileged one as well. Neither the privilege nor the anger is an entirely healthy phenomenon. At the root of the problem is the de-Victorianization of British politics, and British society more broadly. It is impossible to imagine William Gladstone – or, for that matter, Clement Attlee – tolerating, much less engaging in, this sort of behavior. In place of the standards and ideals of the Victorian era, Britain increasing has only those of the generation of the 1960s, which was basically scornful of both politicians (which it viewed as part of the system) and the concept of disinterested public service (which it argued was simply a cover for the interests of the establishment). Britain is now well into the second generation of this problem, and the public anger, no matter how understandable, will only make it worse.

It is a particularly bad sign that the idea of moving to proportional representation (PR), from the current first past the post system, has floated back to the surface in Britain as a result of the scandal. This idea has sloshed around in British politics since the mid-19th century: its backers have tended to be either high-minded intellectuals or liberals with a keen sense of the injustices that the first past the post system does to their own electoral prospects. Its basic flaw is two-fold. First, elections in Britain are not held to mirror public opinion: they are held to make a government. PR would reduce the strength and coherence of the major parties, and turn the Commons from a collection of parties into a collection of opinions. For those who believe in party government in parliamentary systems, that is not an appealing prospect.

The other flaw is that PR is about changing the machinery of politics, not its content. Its backers have devised innumerable clever arguments to sustain their belief that changing the waterwheel will affect the fall of the water, but none of them are persuasive. The problem the British political system is not basically one of structure: it is one of ideas, and the consequences these ideas have had for structures. The centralization of Britain has been a deliberate policy, as has the move into Europe. If public belief in the system is to be restored, governments need to stop advancing wrong-headed and destructive initiatives. No change in the electoral system can guarantee that.

The first thought of many was that the Conservative Party was likely to be the major beneficiary from the expenses scandal. It is, after all, Labour’s opposition. But so far, the scandal has benefited none of the major parties. That is partly because it is not possible to say that Tory MPs, on the whole, have behaved any better than Labour’s: if Labour has more problem MPs, it is only because they have more MPs overall. But, more fundamentally, it is because the Conservative Party is the most successful modern political party in the world, so anything that discredits the British political system is likely to hurt the Conservatives.

And that is exactly what has happened. In early May, the Tories had pulled out a lead, depending on the poll, of between 6 and 15 points in European voting intentions. But as the public had a chance to think it over, the Tories fell back to a mid-single digit lead over Labour: as a result, Gordon Brown may, weirdly, be the scandal’s foremost beneficiary. In party terms, the beneficiary was not the Liberal Democrats, who have also dropped slightly, but the nationalist and minor parties: the Scottish Nationalists, the British National Party (BNP), and the UK Independence Party. In the latest Telegraph poll, the BNP and UKIP alone had 23% support in Britain as a whole, while the Scottish Nationalists – in what may have been a rogue poll – drew 43% in Scotland.

The BNP is commonly described as far-right, though its program of economic nationalization and protectionism is far-left and it draws much of its support from alienated Labour voters: it has advertised itself as “the Labour Party your father voted for.” UKIP’s appeal revolves around the widespread dislike of the EU. What both parties have in common is that they are anti-establishment in appeal, which is magnified by the fact that the major parties spend so much time condemning them and thereby reinforcing their appeal for the disaffected. In a broader sense, the Scottish Nationalists, too, are anti-establishment, the establishment being the United Kingdom. When scandals undermine the system, these parties are the natural beneficiaries.

In political terms, the situation in Britain is now much like that of 1962, when a tiring government (Conservative then, Labour now) faced an opposition (Labour then, Conservative now) that had not fully found its feet. The beneficiary then was the Liberal Party, which benefited from the fact that it was not the establishment and enjoyed a brief, shocking burst of popularity. Now, almost fifty years later, the Liberal Democrats – the descendents of those Liberals – are a mainstream alternative. If voters want to smash the system, voting Lib Dem is not the way to do it.

It will not be at all easy for any of the minor parties today to repeat the long-term survival of the Liberal Democrats: in a first past the post system, it is hard enough to keep three major parties going. Quite likely, the European and local elections, like many Parliamentary by-elections, will see a large protest vote (and an even larger stay at home vote for ‘none of the above’), and a return come the general election to the three major parties. But what is unlikely is not impossible: watch the vote for the minor parties. And watch Scotland: if Labour loses badly, and the Tories fail to advance, Scotland will have taken a portentous step towards breaking up the United Kingdom.

The vote for the minor parties is not, just, a measure of alienation from the major parties. It is also a measure of the unpopularity of the European Union. The BNP and UKIP are – in quite different ways, and drawing on quite different groups of voters – both skeptical about the EU. The incoming Tory MPs are likely to feel the same way: one recent survey found that 94 percent of all Tory candidates agreed that Britain has transferred too much power to the EU. And the broader public agrees: a recent ICM/Taxpayers Alliance poll found 75% opposed Britain joining the Euro, and 62% saying they would vote against the Lisbon Treaty in a referendum. The irony is that when Britain votes on June 4, many of those voting will be participating in a European system that they dislike, or even actively oppose.

There is one further irony. The results of the June elections are likely to show that British Euroskepticism continues to gain strength. And, as Cameron has noted, there is a very coherent case to be made that Britain’s move into Europe is part and parcel of its broader retreat from responsible, limited, parliamentary government, and that the logical cure is to back away from the EU. All this makes excellent sense.

But it will not be popular in Washington, where the new Obama Administration is more enthusiastically pro-European than any administration since Kennedy’s. The outcome of the elections is likely, therefore, to create storms not only for the Union, but for the Special Relationship. The sooner both sides of that relationship realize this, the better equipped Britain will be to fight its corner against American demands that it continue its fifty year slide into the elitist, undemocratic European experiment.

Ted R. Bromund is the Senior Research Fellow at the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom and a frequent contributor to Commentary.