Posts Tagged ‘corruption’
Britain: the depth of corruption
Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009The theft of public money by members of parliament, including government ministers, has given Britons a rare glimpse inside the tent of power and privilege. It is rare because not one political reporter or commentator, those who fill tombstones of column inches and dominate broadcast journalism, revealed a shred of this scandal. It was left to a public relations man to sell the “leak”. Why?
The answer lies in a deeper corruption, which tales of tax evasion and phantom mortgages touch upon but also conceal. Since Margaret Thatcher, British parliamentary democracy has been progressively destroyed as the two main parties have converged into a single-ideology business state, each with almost identical social, economic and foreign policies. This “project” was completed by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, inspired by the political monoculture of the United States. That so many Labour and Tory politicians are now revealed as personally crooked is no more than a metaphor for the anti-democratic system they have forged together.
Their accomplices have been those journalists who report Parliament as “lobby correspondents” and their editors, who have “played the game” wilfully, and have deluded the public (and sometimes themselves) that vital, democratic differences exist between the parties. Media-designed opinion polls based on absurdly small samplings, along with a tsunami of comment on personalities and their specious crises, have reduced the “national conversation” to a series of media events, in which the withdrawal of popular consent – as the historically low electoral turnouts under Blair demonstrated – has been abused as apathy.
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MPs quit – and blame the voters
Thursday, May 28th, 2009MPs caught up in the expenses scandal blamed the anger of their constituents and the public backlash for their decision to quit Parliament.
Ben Chapman, Labour, and Anthony Steen, a Conservative, said that they would stand down at the next election while maintaining that they had done nothing wrong.
Last night the Labour MP Ian Gibson also offered to stand down if the voters asked him to, amid claims that he sold a taxpayer-subsidised property to a member of his family. He insisted that he had acted within the rules.
Such is the pressure on MPs that party whips have told The Times that they fear it could result in suicides.
In an astonishing outburst Mr Steen, who spent £90,000 on his second home, including big sums for lopping trees in its grounds, said that his critics were jealous because he lived in a large house. He blamed the Freedom of Information Act for his plight and asked what right the public had to interfere with his private life.
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http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article6338174.ece
