ON MAY 19, the Speaker of the British House of Commons, Michael Martin, declaimed to fellow parliamentarians and the public, “We have let you down very badly indeed. We must all accept blame and to the extent that I have contributed to this situation, I’m profoundly sorry.” It was a Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo moment, a public apology that only succeeded in igniting public outrage.

After Martin concluded his speech, the floor erupted with calls for a vote of confidence on the Speaker, because the Speaker showed he intended to brazen out calls for him to quit. An MP, Sir Patrick Cormack, spoke up, invoking the words Leo Amery had directed at Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in 1940, over the failed invasion of Norway: “You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!”

Amery had quoted Britain’s dictator Oliver Cromwell when he dismissed parliament in 1653 on the grounds it had gotten fat and corrupt. That this reference could be so powerful is due to Britain – and its politicians – having a tremendously long historical memory about its institutions. Observers immediately pointed out the last time a Speaker had faced an ouster attempt was back in 1695.

Within days, the inevitable happened: Martin resigned. But it was not enough. For public outrage had already been burning at a ferocious intensity for days, before the embattled Speaker made his speech; on May 11 Prime Minister Gordon Brown had said, “I want to apologize on behalf of politicians, on behalf of all parties, for what has happened.”

The public outrage has turned into a full-blown political revolution, a peaceful one but which has put all three of Britain’s major parties – the ruling Labor, the opposition Conservative, and the Liberal Democrats on the defensive. The issue was the exposure, in media, of a report detailing the MPs’ allowances, particularly for maintaining second homes in the capital, London. The expenses charged taxpayers for an ornamental floating island; for cleaning a moat; for reimbursement of non-existent mortgages; for pornographic films; for manure; and most of all, for exemptions from taxes that parliament imposes and the public has to pay, but not, it seems, their representatives.

The British papers have featured a parade of members of parliament who’ve announced they will not stand for reelection because of their constituents’ anger over their expenses. Others, trying to salvage their reputations, have announced they will return the allowances they received; the justice minister, Shahid Malik, had to resign; MP Andrew Mackay, aide of the opposition leader David Cameron, has quit; Cameron himself had publicly stated, “Politicians have done things that are unethical and wrong. I don’t care if they were within the rules – they were wrong,” something Filipino public opinion has felt keenly for some time concerning our own politicians.

Our politicians invented allowances for themselves in 1945, on the pretext that the War had left them homeless and in some cases, literally shirtless. Since then, despite congressional allowances being a topic guaranteed to inspire public contempt, our politicians have brazened out institutional controls like the Commission on Audit or screaming headlines exposing official excesses.

Sober observers, including The New York Times, have editorialized that the problem of allowances is due to British politicians being unwilling to pay themselves salaries commensurate to their responsibilities, preferring the sneaky route of padding their income by means of dubious allowances. The same holds true here at home. But also, the British parliamentary scandal was due to a law passed in 2000: a strengthened Freedom of Information Act.

We lack such a law. A bill has been passed by the House of Representatives, but a counterpart is still pending before the Senate. Even as Britain hails the whistleblower that produced the information damaging to parliament, and journalists have confirmed it by means of freedom of information legislation, public opinion here at home still has to rally to the cause. We can only hope we, the people, can do as the British are doing now.