The scandal over ministers' expenses, by turns comical, enraging and shaming, tells us not merely how MPs are prepared to milk the taxpayer for personal gain but also about the values and ethics of the people who have waged war on the nation's liberties and rights, as well as about those opposition MPs who have failed to defend them.

For you cannot separate the steady misappropriation by New Labour of our liberties – taken stealthily over the last dozen years in deniable quantities – from the kind of venality exposed in both the major parties. The two types of theft are part of the same contempt for voters; part of the same light–fingered amorality that has allowed this government to amass power at the centre at the expense of the individual.

If you think I stretch the point, consider the authoritarian measures that ministers introduced – insisting they are for our own good – as they remove the small change from our wallets.

While the communities secretary Hazel Blears instituted a system of tension monitoring in local communities in effect, little more than a network of local spies feeding into the government's surveillance apparatus – she was content to claim on three separate homes in order maximise both her income and her tax position. While she trumpeted the need for ID cards to stop benefit cheats, her own claim against public funds certainly seems to fall into a bracket that most benefits investigators would regard as suspicious.

While the immigration minister Phil Woolas explained that one of the advantages of the intrusive eBorders scheme would be to monitor more closely the criminals going in and out of the country, he was apparently putting in expenses claims for women's panty liners, wine, nappies and children's comics (an accusation Woolas has unconvincingly denied). The greed is so pathetic it makes you weep with laughter, until you realise that Phil Woolas has been chiefly responsible for pushing through laws that will demand 53 pieces of information from everyone wishing to travel abroad, at which point anger becomes the only reaction. For this mediocrity to be lecturing us about monitoring criminals is intolerable.

While the home secretary was posturing on the evils of lap dancing clubs and prostitution, her husband was slipping the bill for his porn movies to the taxpayer. While, under her direction, the Home Office fear factory whipped up ever greater public anxiety about crime, Ms Smith was claiming £24,000 on her property in Redditch, saying that her main home was a broom cupboard in her sister's London house. The former chairmen of the committee on standards in public life, Sir Alistair Graham, regards this as "near fraudulent".

Instead of resigning the only possible course of action 20 years ago — Smith reacted by saying she might sue for libel. We can only pray she does: apart from seeing her explain the ins and outs of the property and porn issues her life, a senior government minister accounting in a public court for their hypocrisy would be greeted by considerable national glee. The absurdity of a Home Office spokesman suggesting that Sir Alistair was guilty of "malicious falsehoods" shows how detached from reality MPs have become, especially when we learn that the HM Revenue & Customs are to investigate whether they have been evading capital gains tax.

Let me underline that point: the people who have been primly telling us that due to the current economic crisis the rich must be taxed more, are themselves now to be investigated for tax evasion. It will not have been a problem then for the same ministers to mislead the public about the true costs of the database state, or deny its existence or tell some transparent lie about why the state needs to take and store all our personal information.

It is astonishing that no one has yet been forced out of office but when we have justice minister Jack Straw – one of the main architects of the attack on liberty – overcharging the taxpayer for mortgage bills and council tax, the revelation about the morals of this government seems hardly surprising.

This post should be occupied by an individual whose ethical standards cannot be questioned, yet we learn that only when Straw discovered that MPs' expenses receipts would be published did he repay £1,500 he owed after claiming for the full council tax. These thefts from the taxpayer, the degradation of parliament, the use of spin doctors to slander and lie and the general contempt for voters are all part of the same syndrome, and I have absolutely no doubt that the Conservatives are almost as guilty as Labour.

It may be too much to hope for, but what needs to come out of this is some kind of settlement between the people and their politicians. The limits of power and personal expenditure must be set and the freedom of the people guaranteed by more than the word of a few dubious characters like Straw, Blears, Smith and Woolas, and a parliament that seems to have lost all sense of its duty to serve the people.