Skip to main content

Honours List Farce

You know, it is hard to work up a sense of real outrage at the cash for peerages scandal.

Mind you it really is a scandal- it is not just the harmless trumpery of absurd pseudo-mediaeval titles: these fat cats were buying membership of our national Parliament.

Yet I can't say I am surprised- for as long as patronage remains a gift of the Prime Minister, and especially this Prime Minister, then corruption will be an inevitable side effect. But is it really that bad? We do regard the desire to be "The Right Honourable The Lord Scrod of Bottley" as fairly harmless- and it is less economically damaging than to demand 25% of a government contract in exchange for your dubious financial support for the ruling party.

Nevertheless, with every drip of slime, it is not just the image of the compromised and morally dubious Blair government that falls- it is the far more corrosive "you are all the same" that damages politics as a whole. Blair is not "a pretty straight guy"- he has been in office too long for that.

What frightens me is that the alternative for many people is an even more cynical, shallow and opportunist figure: David Cameron. Personally, I am more and more of the opinion that the Public Schools seem rather too good at producing the smooth and well practiced liar.

Privilege and class are not quite dead in our supposedly meritocratic country- hence the absurd desire to be part of a system that continues to award the five classes of "The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire" as a reward for good works. Five classes? Oh yes MBE for lollipop ladies, OBE for charity work, CBE for nearly a knighthood, KBE for senior government approved figures, DBE for actresses...

Mind you, as far as social mobility is concerned, I look forward to the first comprehensive kid as the PM- we still have not had one...yet.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Post Truth and Justice

The past decade has seen the rise of so-called "post truth" politics.  Instead of mere misrepresentation of facts to serve an argument, political figures began to put forward arguments which denied easily provable facts, and then blustered and browbeat those who pointed out the lie.  The political class was able to get away with "post truth" positions because the infrastructure that reported their activity has been suborned directly into the process. In short, the media abandoned long-cherished traditions of objectivity and began a slow slide into undeclared bias and partisanship.  The "fourth estate" was always a key piece of how democratic societies worked, since the press, and later the broadcast media could shape opinion by the way they reported on the political process. As a result there has never been a golden age of objective media, but nevertheless individual reporters acquired better or worse reputations for the quality of their reporting and ...
1 comment
Read more

Liberal Democrats v Conservatives: the battle in the blogosphere

It is probably fair to say that the advent of Nick Clegg, the new leader of the Liberal Democrats, has not been greeted with unalloyed joy by our Conservative opponents. Indeed, it would hardly be wrong to say that the past few weeks has seen some "pretty robust" debate between Conservative and Liberal Democrat bloggers. Even the Queen Mum of blogging, the generally genial Iain Dale seems to have been featuring as many stories as he can to try to show Liberal Democrats in as poor a light as possible. Neither, to be fair, has the traffic been all one way: I have "fisked' Mr. Cameron's rather half-baked proposals on health, and attacked several of the Conservative positions that have emerged from the fog of their policy making process. Most Liberal Democrats have attacked the Conservatives probably with more vigour even than the distrusted, discredited Labour government. So what lies behind this sharper debate, this emerging war in the blogosphere? Partly- in my ...
20 comments
Read more

One Year On

  Head vabariigi iseseisvuspäeva! Happy Estonian Independence Day! It is one year since I stood outside the Estonian Parliament for the traditional raising of the national flag from Tall Hermann tower. Looking at the young fraternities gathered with their flags, I was very sure that Estonia too would soon be facing the aggression of the criminal Russian regime. A tragic and dark day. 5 eyes intelligence had been clear: an all out invasion was going to happen, and Putin´s goals included- and still include- "restoration" of Russian imperial power across Europe, even to the Atlantic. Yet there was one Western intelligence failure: we all underestimated the guts of the Ukrainian armed forces, the ZSU, and its President and people. One year on, Estonia, and indeed all the front line states against Russia, knows that Ukraine saved us. Estonia used that time to prepare itself, should that "delayed" onslaught ever be unleashed, but equally the determination of Kaja Kallas, ...
Post a Comment
Read more