Cash For Honours.
The Government, allegedly, has been selling Honours to its dwindling number of wealthy supporters, in order to stave of bankruptcy of the Party. There is nothing new in such accusations; or in the actuality. Lloyd George sold peerages to businessmen, and to salve the consciences of husbands cuckolded by his intemperance. Wilson at least had the good manners [and sense] to wait until his last Honours list to hand out the goody bags. But in recent years we have lost the habit of expecting, or demanding, better.
What makes it so galling this time round is, as you might imagine, spin.
The police are conducting a lengthy, detailed, and extremely sensitive investigation into corruption that goes to the very top of the legislature; the Prime Minister has been interviewed twice, Lord Levy [responsible for party fund-raising!] arrested twice. If charges are eventually brought to court, it will shatter the remaining, frail faith in Britain’s democratic processes; it will be our Watergate.
And yet No. 10 has put forward an anonymous aide [and these things, we can be sure, don’t happen without detailed planning] to complain about the delays in the investigation, led by Assistant Commissioner John Yates. The investigation, says the spokesman, “is blight on all politics, not just on the Labour Party”. Consequently, No 10 says it has no credence in what the police say, because the investigation has taken some five months longer than anticipated, or desired.
Assistant Commissioner Yates is compared by the pro-government media to Kenneth Starr, the monomaniacal Special Prosecutor hounding Bill Clinton out of the White House, like a modern day Witchsmeller Pursuivant. This seems at best unlikely; at worst a deliberate attempt to pervert the course of justice by questioning the professional authority of the investigating detective.
Perhaps, we humbly suggest to you, the blight poisoning the democratic bloodstream of British politics is the politicians themselves. Things are bad enough if they can’t recognise that; they are totally lost if politicians are maliciously undermining the forces of law and order.
Power, they say, corrupts; and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Andrew Mishmash
3 comments:
Absolutely. We need to introduce state funding for political parties and ban this archaic system of petronage.
Let me get this right, as a taxpayer I have to pay political parties that i want nothing to do with, and pay for these clowns try to get in to office. Why don't we make open,companies,people can pay as much as they want and all put on the open record. Put taxpayers money where it should be put,at the moment cuts in healthcare ,schools, etc and you want more of the cake to pay for a political party. My life!!!!
Better still, ban the Parties and make all the MPs indipendant.
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