Poor old John Bercow. It seems the honeymoon is over already if you read the papers today.

But why should we read the papers today. What are the comments of these overpaid commentators worth?

If you have copies of yesterdays papers take a quick look before you put them in the recycling bin.

Yesterday you were being told by all these columnists that Beckett was the front runner and favourite. They told you all slavishly that the Labour Whips were backing Beckett. They told you the sole motive of all Labour and Tory backbenchers and why en masse they would be voting for a particular candidate. It was overpaid rubbish then and hopefully you now see how much rubbish you have to read daily.

There were about 599 MPs voting yesterday. We all supported different candidates for a number of reasons. I have been saying there were 600 of us with 700 different views! Yet the columnists lump us all into one large grouping doing this or doing that as if our individual views counted for nothing. They ought to get out more.

I spoke to lots of back bench MPs yesterday about the so-called Whips operation for Margaret Beckett and they all confirmed they had no contact. Indeed earlier in the contest hadn't the same columnists claimed that the Whips were touting John Bercow? In this secret ballot all sorts of people were touting different candidates. It's what happens in an election!

So take it all with a pinch of salt. These people rely on a small group of people who are willing to talk to them and feed them what they want to hear or to feed them their lines. For years we have sat in the Commons reading this rubbish but on a day liek yesterday the stark incompetence of most of them shines through.

The only sour note today are the noises from the Tories who seem to want Bercow out before he has even started. Give the bloke a chance!

It seems these days wedding have become public property when we hear of multi million £pound deals for rights to celebrity weddings. I have had a sense in recent years that some weddings have lost much of their genuine meaning and have become an expensive themed party.

How refreshing then to be part of a very special wedding on Saturday - that of Andy Flanagan and Jenny Grove.

My friend Andy has been a worship leader (basically a very good singer on the Christian circuit!) speaking out on issues of social justice. We became closer friends over the last few years looking out for each other. With my encouragement he became the Director of the Christian Socialist Movement (CSM) earlier this year.

The difference with Andy and Jenny is that they live out their faith in a way many of us would love to emulate. There was no wedding list - just a list of things needed by an orphanage in Uganda. As the Minister said - why would this couple want another cheeseboard when they know the needs of the orphans.

There was no expensive meal. We had a bring your own picnic. The service was changed to reflect the wedding and thanksgiving for parents and friends.

I often talk about the freedom of simplicity - living lightly and simply in this world. This was an embodiment of what I mean. The day was the most special & loving wedding I have been to in years. Yet it did not cost the earth (financially and environmentally).

More and more I get frustrated at being defined by our current world view of personality and celebrity and of consumerism as our ultimate badge of honour. I want to speak out against the culture and start to learn to live it out in the way this wedding showed it cold be done.

I had a busy constituency day on Monday before heading down to London for parliamentary business. I usually head down much earlier but had agreed in advance to present awards at the Student Union. So I filled the day with various meetings and events.

Although it was accidental it seemed that the whole day revolved around volunteers. As regular readers know I hold various posts in the 'volunteering world' and speak out often in support of the millions of people who give of their time for others. But yesterday I had a gentle reminder about what the statistics mean when you meet and see people living their volunteering. The Loughborough Experience Awards recognised various aspects of Loughborough University life for the students but what struck me was the depth of voluntary work so many students put into their university life when they are here. Again I know we have the best Rag in the country. I know our volunteering figures are impressive and I know how much effort goes into getting out into the community. But when you see the individual winners you start to appreciate just how much time they are committing.

Earlier I had been at the opening of the new Sileby Boxing Academy. I have been following its progress from idea to finish over the last few months but I can say honestly I was blown away by the quality of the work and the numbers of people who turned up. Again it was a Committee of a few committed volunteers who have created this Academy in the matter of months through sheer hard work and the ability to give up their time for others.

Even earlier I had been to the Board meeting of the Special Olympics, which is coming to Leicester this July. The games will cater for 3500 athletes and is only going to be possible because of the 1400 volunteers. Strip them away and we have no games. They will be doing all sorts of jobs across the 21 venues. In 2012 the Olympics will need 70,000 volunteers. We will get them.

Seeing this level of commitment restores faith in human nature. So much of the day job is given to human greed and dealing with a society where the emphasis seems to be what is in it for me? Seeing volunteers in action destroys that view. Well done to the tens of volunteers I have met today.

I found myself in surprising agreement with the Leader Opinion Comment in the Times today about the Iraq Inquiry.

Under the headline No Cause for an Inquiry the Times argues in its sub heading that - judgement on the Iraq war is a matter of politics. Repeated public inquiries have diminishing value and are a quasi-judicial way of supplanting democratic decisions.

This was the point I have been making in the House every time the call for another Inquiry is made.

I opposed the war at the time and resigned from the government so that I could say so. We have to remind ourselves that at the time i resigned a few weeks before we finally invaded that the majority of the public still supported the prospect of war. After we had invaded and won the short conflict public support for the war was even higher. we need to remember this as it now seems that everybody was opposed to the war if you hear them speak!

I understand some of the motives for some people to want or need another Inquiry. But I do sincerely believe nothing more will be achieved by another lengthy and costly Inquiry. I believe we have all made up our minds about what went wrong and who to blame. Most people could sum that up in a paragraph or two. What it seems to me listening to radio phone-in programmes yesterday is that people want in Inquiry to find and conclude what they have already concluded and anything else would be a 'whitewash'.

Even if you thought another Inquiry was justified (what will it do that the others haven't already unearthed) do we honestly believe anybody will change their minds about their own conclusions. Why is it that a Quasi-Judicial process should be the final say. Surely it is Parliament that should be apportioning blame and highlighting the political failures of the policy. In politics we see all sorts of 'evidence' and then have to make a judgement. There is no perfect process very often when all the evidence makes a decision obvious. There is always black and white and lots of grey. Iraq was the same. I expect there were lots of different reasons for people supporting or opposing the invasion. No Inquiry will answer those differences. They are what politics is about and this is where the decision should be debated.

Tony Blair made the decision to stick to the US. I disagreed with him and told him so. He made a strategic decision and hoped to get UN backing for something the US was going to do alone anyway. In one sense this did make perfect sense - if we got the UN backing. I still disagreed but others would have then backed the war (like the Lib Dems who were only opposed without a 2nd resolution). But that is a strategic decision to disagree with. No amount of words in an Inquiry will make a difference.

So it may sound counter intuitive to not want an Inquiry when I was so opposed the war - but for me nothing will really change my mind and I doubt any Inquiry will change anybody Else's mind.

I like to blog my own thoughts but it's sometimes great to create debate with comments from others. I am doing quite a lot of work on well-being issues as this is the key to delivering for constituents. This is another helpful contribution to the debate.

We've never had it so good. Why then are we so downhearted?

In our affluent age, family, church and dusty old virtues seem redundant. But they gave us a sense of contentment we now lack says Matthew Taylor

As the general election nears, an implicit question threads its way through the discussion of Labour's record and the opposition plans for change; is Britain getting better or worse?

As luck would have it, this is precisely the issue addressed by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation in its study of “new social evils”. One big theme to emerge from it is that the greatest evil is the retreat of society in the face of rampant individualism.

We live in a time of profound social pessimism. There is a widening gulf between our view of ourselves and of society at large. Nine in ten of us are optimistic about our family's prospects, yet fewer than one in five feels optimism about other people.

The contemporary feeling of social unease is undeniable; the dark seam exposed by the foundation is the same one mined by David Cameron in his talk of a broken society. Yet, despite the recession, a latter-day Harold Macmillan would have every reason for proclaiming that we have never had it so good.

It isn't simply that we live longer, earn more, travel farther, enjoy more recreation than our parents or grandparents. We are also more tolerant, better educated, more compassionate, overall, than our Victorian counterparts.

There are two obvious ways to resolve this paradox. Maybe social pessimism simply reflects higher expectations and the opportunity we now have to wallow in our doubts. Conversely, isn't what matters what we feel? We are twice as rich as our grandparents but no more content.

The truth may be more subtle. It is the way things have got better that makes us feel worse. Avner Offer, the economic historian, sums up this argument in one line: “Affluence breeds impatience and impatience undermines wellbeing.” Offer means by this that affluence makes us feel as though we no longer need the social norms, conventions and institutions that encourage us to look to our own and society's long-term interests.

He calls these cultural safeguards “commitment devices”. We can include in them not just institutions such as the family, the Church and welfare state, but also the values associated with those institutions: unfashionable ideas such as thrift, temperance and duty. The weakening of these commitment devices has been implicated in the rise of a culture of instant gratification, inauthentic communication (advertising, PR, spin doctoring) and unearned entitlements.

But, as we are starting at last to realise, it is impossible for society to thrive, and for most of us to get what we want, without commitment devices. Progress has its costs. Women's economic emancipation may weaken the extended family; social mobility leaves behind a less self-reliant and self-respecting working class.

But why have we failed to understand what we were losing in the forward march of individualism? An explanation may lie in the disjuncture between human evolution and history. While evolution is slow and incremental, history is accelerating in leaps and bounds. The brains that did fine for us for the first 200,000 years of our existence find it hard to cope with the revolutionary changes of the past century. For most of our existence as a species there was no long term: we hunted, we gathered, we died young. We are hardwired to be short-termist. That's why behavioural economists (the people who brought us the idea of the “nudge”) argue the only way for governments to get us to save more for retirement is to trick us into it.

Many civilisations collapsed, in part, because the elite - the only ones who lived with plenty - succumbed to self-indulgence and a loss of vitality and authority. Today most of the UK's population have more disposable income than they need, not only to survive, but to enjoy good health and opportunities for leisure and self-development. But we have exhibited a mass version of the decadence that history has taught us to associate with the fall of the Roman Empire. There was a “chickens coming home to roost” feel in much commentary about the economic downturn.

Could it be that this period of rampant individualism and hyper-consumerism is transitional? Human beings have spent most of their existence producing just enough to survive. We have only had a few years to see that plenty creates as many problems as it solves. So are we starting to ask a different question: what do we truly need to live the good life? After all, this is what we tend to do in our own lives; we crave something we are denied, we over-consume it when we have unlimited access and then realise (in my grandmother's favourite bon mot) that “enough is as good as a feast”?

The idea of a transition between excessive consumption and the emergence of higher goals echoes Maslow's famous “hierarchy of human needs” that puts self- actualisation at its peak, well above material need. It also chimes with “the environmental Kuznets curve” - which suggests that nations are indifferent to the degradation of the natural world when they are on the road to growth. However, as nations become richer they start to value and protect the environment because social needs are seen as being as important as individual self-interest.

From this perspective our problems with affluence, and our susceptibility to social pessimism, reflect not just the power of new technology and the allure of its consumer goods but also a more general frailty as we go through what some have caricatured as the adolescence of Enlightenment Man.

Our susceptibility to excess may not be the only zone of transition. For nearly all human existence we have lived in relatively homogeneous communities, largely ignorant of the rest of the world. But as technology, commerce and transport widen our horizons, conflicts arising from the clash of cultures and identities reverberate from the Swat Valley to the European election results. Over the longer term will we adjust, developing a truly global model of citizenship, one that is able, for example, to tackle climate change?

A third journey may help to explain the crisis besetting our political system. After millennia of worshipping earth and sky gods, royal dynasties and, much more recently, elected leaders, we are no longer willing to look up to authority. We find ourselves unwilling to be governed but not yet willing to govern ourselves.

Lives are better today but our unease is real. There are new social evils. The better future waiting for us will only come about if we acknowledge the ways current thinking and behaviour are failing us.

Matthew Taylor is chief executive of the RSA and is a contributor to Contemporary Social Evils by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation

So Hazel Blears will face a motion of no confidence next week at a meeting of her constituency Labour Party.

Her decision to quit as communities secretary, on the eve of the English council and European elections last week, has been widely criticised by many of the people I know in the Labour Party.

She has told the Manchester Evening News she regretted the timing of her departure and its effect on the party. I should think so. She knew exactly what she was doing and if she had been successful in toppling Brown she would still be grinning ear to ear!

I have never known so many of my colleagues so universally angry at her self-centred actions. Hopefully she was stung by the reaction she has received over the last week. Although when I saw her in the tea rooms this week she still looked her jolly self - with that grin across her face.

The Labour Party is a party of comrades. We care about the greater good of the party and bury our own self interest. That's what is different about us and the Tories, both in our policies as well as our manner.

Perhaps that is why Hazel has felt the full fury of members who have sacrificed so much time and effort for the Labour Party.

Hopefully she is genuinely sorry and realises she has come down to earth with a bump. She has never been universally popular and a period of reflective humility will be good for her I think.

All too often reform packages in the House of Commons talk about giving more power to back benchers to hold the executive to account. They talk a good game but usually not very much happens. The latest announcements yesterday all sound good individually but will they make much difference?

One initiative caught my eye - electing Select Committees and taking it out of the hands of the Whips. This is a good idea and should have been done a long time ago. Up to a point it will make a difference as back benchers are usually good judges of the characters who will be good at holding the government to account. But at another level this will all be a waste of time if the work of Select Committees is not taken more seriously. These Committees work pretty hard on lengthy investigations into topical matters and produce a Report. If they are lucky the Report is sexy enough to make the news for a day and the Chair of the Select Committee gets to tour the televisions studios. The Report is then passed to the Ministers to to respond the recommendations. They take months and the report is long forgotten. In theory Select Committees are great but the reality from my experience is somewhat different. I have also been sceptical about some of the quality of reports in areas where I have had some knowledge. Why does one group of MPs views on a Select Committee carry any more weight than other backbenchers. Some reports are pretty poor whilst I accept others have been excellent.

So on the surface this is a welcome move and will help a little at restoring the role of backbenchers. But until real power is handed out many of these 'reforms' will be window dressing to the power already held by No10, and government business managers. So if ordinary backbenchers sometimes feel outside the centre of power and unable to change many decisions it is little wonder the public feel even further away. And this is important. Now the pubic in the phone and text vote era are used to having an immediate say on talent and reality TV shows. I am not for one minute suggesting we should enact legislation through text vote - but it simply highlights the gap between the public expectation and the parliamentary system. We need to move the two closer together as quickly as possible.

Even before President Obama entered the White House his 'Transition Team' had been working overtime to fill the 3000+ political appointments at the top of the US system. The President has a Cabinet with similar positions (albeit with very different names) to the British Cabinet. None of them have to be elected as Senators or Congressmen to get into the Cabinet. They are appointed by the President as the people he best thinks can do the job.

Clearly we have a very different constitutional settlement and our cabinet is made up of elected MPs and usually a sprinkling of Lords.

In an attempt to open up government to 'all the talents' (if you are being generous) Gordon Brown has appointed more outsiders to Cabinet than would traditionally be the case. To enable them to sit in Cabinet they are appointed to the Lords where they are accountable.

I have mixed feelings. I have found many of the appointed Lords to be very capable individuals. But they usually have no political understanding of the consequences of their actions. They have never had to stand for election and unlike MPs like myself in marginal seats where we have to listen all the time - they care little about what voters think.

Gordon Brown has created this situation by stealth. But I think we need this question to be part of the national constitutional debate we are supposed to be having. It may be that people quite like having experts like Sir Alan Sugar appointed to government roles. He may be a bad example because of his celebrity status but Gordon has made a habit of appointing people with experience - like Lord Malloch Brown. They have certainly grown into their roles and are far more impressive than some of our MPs who have been made Ministers. There is no automatic reason that just because you are a good backbench MP you will make the transition to successful Minister with all that job entails. They are different skill sets and I have seen many good colleagues humiliated by the process. Just proving your loyalty in the Whips Office is not the only way people should be appointed!

So as it stands at the moment I am not convinced the way Gordon is introducing so may people into Cabinet via the unelected Lords is good for democratic accountability because we in the Commons can't question Mandelson. But if there is agreement that appointing outsiders on the American model can work then we need a new system here in the Commons for all backbenchers to be able to hold them to account and have a say in their appointment. We can't have this hybrid system Gordon has created.

Today we were given a long list of reform proposals from the Prime Minister.

He promised a consultation on changing the voting system - but he said there were "no plans" for a referendum on this issue before the next election.

He also pledged tougher sanctions for MPs guilty of misconduct, including the power for constituents to recall MPs.

Most of the things in the package I would support wholeheartedly but my only worry is that we should have been doing some of this stuff years ago.

One of my first Questions to the Prime Minister in about 1997-98 was to urge for a speeding up of the process of reform of the House of Lords. Like a lot of things we have done as a Labour government we set out with good intentions and got bogged down in a managerial style of consensus. This ended up with some messy compromises for example. We got rid of the hereditary principle but still held on to 92 of them. Looking back I don't know why.

So now we need to press ahead with reform of the Lords. It needs to be fully elected and opened up to the same level of scrutiny as the Commons. There are other issues we need to find agreement but I would like to see perhaps 2 term fixed appointments to the Lords and far more emphasis on people from different walks of life in the Second Chamber for example. We need to define its role and the powers it will have. I feel it should remain a revising Chamber with a longer term view but still with some connection to the electorate.

I have long been a supporter of PR as a principle - the problem always comes when we have to decide what system! I do believe there has to be a strong connection with the constituency otherwise you can become detached and a part of the party machine.

But with a general election probably just a year away we need to act quickly to implement these things. We need to show that we mean business. Unfortunately too many times Gordon said today we will be '...setting out proposals..national debate....' If I has been called today I would have said the time for even more talk is over. Put these issues to a vote in the Commons and deliver the referendum we promised on the voting system.

Now I know before anybody moans that nobody votes because of constitutional matters and I agree. But I also know that we constantly have to modernise and adapt our parliamentary democracy to keep in tune with the times. This is not just a side issue of no importance. It is a fundamental part of our role as MPs and parliament.

After every election loss frontbench spokespersons tour the television studios saying they understand 'the people' are telling them X in the ballot box and they will respond by doing Y.

Everybody else comes on saying we must listen to 'ordinary people'. I would like to know which people we listen to are not ordinary?

In the last few days I have had useful feedback from constituents telling me why this time they didn't vote Labour and what we need to do to get their vote back. And this is where it gets hard. You see the advice and the action we need to take is contradictory. Not all 65 million citizens want exactly the same. I know my 70,000 individual constituents probably have 70,000 different solution tot he probelms of the world. It would be impossible to get 2 people who shared exactly every view about the world on every matter.

A few examples shine through. One constituent wanted us to get tougher on asylum & immigration whilst another thought we were being far too tough. Both claimed to be lifelong labour supporters who need to be convinced to come back! The same goes in issues like housing. Some want us to start a national council housebuilding programme tomorrow whilst others complain of excessive housebuilding plans locally. And so it goes on.

The choice is doing one thing and possibly upsetting one side of the argument or doing what we always seem to do - finding a messy compromise in the middle that seems not to satisfy either of them.

Over the years I have listened and consulted to more people than most people could ever dream to meet in their entire lives. There are may things in life I am happy to try to achieve but trying to please all of the people all of the time is certainly not one of them - because it is impossible. Personally I would much prefer to listen and then set out my position and the solutions I believe are best to achieve a desired outcome. On an individual basis I am here as a constituency MP ready to help anybody who needs help regardless of who they voted for or even if they voted or not. But with over 70,000 individuals with their own opinions it will always be impossible to agree with everybody on every issue. It does mean for example that I could never vote for the death penalty. I can never fully 'represent' the views of those who do. On these issues there are no messy compromises.

So in the wake of an election like last week I am not going summarise why everybody voted a particular way or didn't vote for the 3 main parties. I do listen but I certainly won't patronise voters by saying I know why they voted a particular way or not.