There was an irritating story in the newspaper last week about a scaffolder in Merseyside who is being fined by the council for not declaring the clingfilm in which he wraps his daily sandwich as industrial waste. And when I say irritating, I mean irritating in so many different ways - a cluster bomb of irritation going off in my brain.

First, and most obviously, it's irritating because that does sound unreasonable: his sandwich wrapper isn't industrial waste - the guy even offered to take it home with him every day - why should he get fined? But then my irritation is intensified by the realisation that this is all grist to the mill of articles like that. Inducing impotent fury is their stock in trade and I hate giving them the satisfaction. It's the first step towards surrendering to a world view that a certain type of journalism seems bent on inducing in its readers in which a supposed majority of upstanding citizens have their good-heartedness and common sense perpetually betrayed by feckless and liberal low functionaries. 'Society is everyone else's fault but yours,' they tell anyone who'll listen, 'and that angry feeling we've just made happen in your head is proof of it.'

But most irritating of all is that it's an example of more moaning about councils. People moan about councils in the same way they moan about the weather - as if there's nothing they can do to affect it and as if it's not their fault. But it is our fault: we don't bother to turn up for local elections very often; when we do we vote on national issues; hardly any of us could name our local councillor; and yet we give these people a vast amount of our money.

Essentially, we get exactly the idiots, jobsworths and crooks we deserve. The wonder is not what councils get wrong but that they achieve any level of competence at all. We've collectively put a pile of cash in an unlocked garage and have the gall to moan when it doesn't get spent in the public interest. We're too bored by local politics to scrutinise it and so when councils screw things up, we should see that as the inevitable consequence of all that extra TV-watching time we've bought ourselves.

The contrast with our attitude to national politicians could hardly be greater. While it's liberty hall for councillors to lose all our money in Iceland and give building contracts to their brothers in law, MPs just can't catch a break. We've always paid them poorly (and when I next hear someone say: 'Well, they earn a lot more than me!' I swear I will reply: 'Well, I want them to be a damned sight cleverer than you!') but now they can't even eat a few free meals or give an admin job to a relative.

We are chipping away at their perks: expenses claims are quoted in humiliating detail, right down to the junior minister's last pair of rubber underpants; they can't take so much as an olive on a stick from an oligarch without declaring it. And only last week, they were being criticised for Parliament taking a 24-day Christmas break, as if, out of respect for the credit crunch, they should be spending the entire period passing uplifting festive laws.

I fail to see why we expect anyone normal with any prospects to do this job. We've made it so unpalatable that only the truly power-crazed, those who will forsake comfort, privacy and the respect of their peers for the thrill of authority, would consider it. (And I suppose, to be fair, those with a genuine sense of public duty, but that's hardly to be relied upon.) Of course, many of our leading politicians hardly seem deserving of more cash and freebies but, had more cash and freebies been on offer, more capable people may have jostled them out of power.

But why are we so resistant to the idea that senior politicians should be paid to the point where they could be considered rich when this happens to people at the top of almost every other profession? We're happy enough for local councils to piss away billions of pounds of public money unscrutinised but a few tens of millions making MP a job worth having is, for some reason, beyond the pale.

As a result, we have the unedifying spectacle of a Tory frontbencher and a Labour cabinet minister exchanging insults about who behaved most grubbily on a Russian billionaire's yacht. In the case of poor old George Osborne, all he's even accused of doing is trying to find a legal way for Oleg Deripaska to give £50,000 to the Tory party. Only £50,000 - he'd probably have found that down the back of one of the yacht's sofas. It wouldn't pay for a spin doctor - it would barely pay for a spin nurse.

We've made our politicians people who are too easily wowed by a free holiday in Corfu. I say, let's splash out nationally and give MPs enough money for their own relatively lavish holidays so they won't end up in the thrall of the likes of Nat Rothschild, a man whose prominence has little to do with merit and everything to do with money. And yet he is in a position to play our elected representatives off against each other, to call them rude, to humiliate them.

People capable enough to become our national leaders, in any functional system, shouldn't have to take that shit from a playboy. They should be sufficiently well rewarded that their heads aren't so easily turned and, if we need to give them a yacht each to ensure that, it's money well spent in my book and a tiny percentage of what we allow councils to waste every year simply because the leaflets that come through the door are too boring to read.

But the way things are heading, soon the Rothschilds and Deripaskas will be able to buy a cabinet minister's good opinion with a steak dinner and a go on a full-sized snooker table.