Breaking news: Jacqui Smith to stand down this afternoon.
Don’t You Know There’s An Election On?
The story above is now a thing of the past, says Gordon Brown, who’s been touting his newly rediscovered (for the 5th, or was it 6th? time) Presbyterian conscience all over the media, all the while grinning as rigidly as only someone who just had his medication can.
But crowded out by the blanket coverage of MPs’ licensed larceny and untroubled by very much scrutiny at all Labour’s petty election tricks roll on as usual:
A couple identified as “Gillian and Barry from Port Seton” were quoted in leaflets used in the Lothians as saying: “It’s Gordon Brown’s leadership that will get us through these tough times. Labour is the only party on the side of hard-working families, standing up for Scottish people nationally and in Europe.”
The couple and their young daughter Hanna also appear on the front of Scottish Labour’s manifesto for Thursday’s poll.However, leaflets distributed in the Highlands and Islands attribute precisely the same quote to “The Conniff Family, from Wester Ross”.
The quote also appears next to a family on Labour leaflets in Greater Manchester, with the phrase “British people” substituted for “Scottish people”.
Another variation turns up in Central Scotland, where “the McDonald family from Sauchie” feel they can “rely on Gordon Brown’s leadership to see the country through these tough times”.
One of the Conniff family, Christine, was a Labour party list candidate in the Highlands and Islands at the 2007 elections.
Dundee West MSP Joe Fitzpatrick, the SNP’s European election campaign coordinator, said Labour had been caught red-handed.
They do seem to making a habit of that.
Lest the voters should temporarily forget such blatant dishonesty and actually make a decision on the issues, Labour’s spin merchants have drafted ‘personal’ apologies for Labour’s MPs, MEPs and local councillors to send to voters ahead of this Thursday’s Euro and local council elections :
The letter for Labour’s local councillors
Dear [Insert Name]
I know how angry people are with Westminster politicians. I suspect you are as fed up I am, as day after day more stories come out showing greed and in some cases, serious wrongdoing. I would like to echo Gordon Brown’s words – that I am sorry that the political system and some MPs have let you down.
I’m sure Insert Name will find that very reassuring and resolve to vote Labour right away, or they would if they could find its name on the ballot paper.
But Insert Name may be a Wirral voter, where the spirit of Damien McBride is alive and kicking. Local Labour activists are accused of using BNP tactics against a defecting councillor:
WIRRAL’S Labour group last night refused to comment on an email calling for help to hand out leaflets in the ward of a defector from their party – despite one of their own volunteers comparing it to “a BNP mailingâ€.
The email, leaked to the Daily Post, contains a furious rant against former Labour councillor Denis Knowles who two weeks ago quit the party and crossed the council chamber to the Tories.
The leaflet also featured a mock-up picture of Cllr Knowles with two faces – one saying he is a Labour supporter and the other saying he is Conservative.
[…]
… the email calling for party members to deliver the leaflet was criticised by one of its recipients. The email describes local Conservatives Ian Lewis, Leah Fraser and Chris Blakeley, along with Tory leader Jeff Green as “very scary people†and highlights their names with skull and crossbones motif. It is signed “ANON†and underneath says: “Leader’s Office, Wirral Council†and gives local Labour HQ contact details…. It is understood that the email was not intended to go outside the Labour group.
They really don’t have much luck with those internal emails, do they.
Now I don’t want to be accused of being partisan, so will I’ll also point out that Labour aren’t the only party resorting to negative spin and dirty tricks. The Lib Dems in Cornwall are also accused:
THE LIBERAL DEMOCRATS have been forced to make a formal apology after using a highly offensive obscene term to describe an opposition councillor in a campaigning leaflet.
Mebyon Kernow councillor Stuart Cullimore said he was “absolutely appalled” at being the subject of foul-mouthed abuse in an official Lib-Dem leaflet ahead of Thursday’s county council and Euro elections.
The leaflet, calling Coun Cullimore a “greasy-haired t***”, was distributed to houses in the Camborne South division on behalf of Lib-Dem Cornwall Council candidate Anna Pascoe, who said “foul play” is suspected.
It’s my considered opinion that judged entirely by his photo and the fact he’s a candidate for the formerly Vlaams Blok-sympathising, Cornish separatist party Mebyon Kernow, that the candidate is indeed a greasy haired twat. Anyone can have an opinion, but it’s hardly the thing to put in an election leaflet.
With only 3 days to go till the election there may well be many more dirty tricks happening nationwide, but if there are, they’re not being reported very well. Not enough space o the front or inside pages and for that we can again blame dishonest MPs.
Surf’s Up! Or Not, As The Case May Be.
The sun is shining, the shy is blue, it’s a gorgeous day for the beach. Pick up the kids and the towels, surf, sun, steak pasties for lunch and fresh cooked fish and chips on the way home. Brilliant.
But not for me, unfortunately. I’ve just had to cancel our week’s holiday in N. Cornwall because of the rapacity of the local dialysis clinic in Bodmin. It’s private, not NHS; so regardless of whether you have insurance to cover it they charge £225 per session, upfront, get it back from the insurance who knows when. Three sessions for the week = nearly a thousand euro = too damned much to pay out not knowing when you’ll get it back.
There are beaches here but they’re not the same – it’s not the Atlantic. There are no cliffs, just less endless muscle-sapping dunes and no surf to speak of despite the constant chilly wind. Ideal for windsurfing, but not much else. No, Dutch beaches just won’t do. It’s Summer and I yearn for Cornwall. Just the whiff of a pasty would do.
Oh well. Surf’s always up in Hawaii. It even comes out of the walls.
From The Telegraph’s picture gallery of trompe l’oeil murals by John Pugh:
His [John Pugh’s] immense mural in Honolulu features Queen Lili’uokalani, the last monarch of the Hawaiian Islands, with Duke Kahanamoku – the ultimate father of surfing. A colossal wave appears to crash right onto the pavement. It took two months of studio work to plan and a further six months to execute with the help of 11 other artists. The scene is so realistic that just as it was near completion, said John, it attracted the attention of the fire brigade which stopped its truck in the middle of traffic. “They jumped out to rescue the children in the mural,” he said
I thought they were real children looking at the painting too, until I saw the closeup:
.
Incredible. But still not quite the same as being there.
As Above, So Below
When it comes to entitlement do some paid public servants not only make their mostly hardworking and often underpaid colleagues look bad with their petty venality, they even outdo many political representatives. Take this American public employee, for example:
In April, accounting clerk James Kauchis made a formal complaint to the personnel office of the county Department of Social Services in Binghamton, N.Y., demanding that he be compensated for a recent interrupted lunch hour.
Kauchis had missed lunch when DSS offices were locked down as police secured the neighborhood surrounding the site of the April 3 massacre in which a gunman killed 13 people and then himself. Although DSS had pizza and beverages brought in during the siege, Kauchis felt that wasn’t as good as a regular lunch hour.
[Binghamton Press & Sun-Bulletin, 4-14-09]
That’s venality at its most petty. A sense of entitlement starts small like that; you begin by having little or no regard to improving the collective conditions at your workplace. Those others don’t matter; why care? It’s you that’s important. Take everything you can get and then some, if the rules can be made to say you can.
Rationalise it to yourself by thinking ‘well I must be meant to have it if their rules make it possible”. If the others aren’t clever enough to do it, unlike you, then screw them. Once a civil servant like this gets some actual power they can interpret the rules to their own convenience. Funny, isn’t it, how the value of senior salaries and perks rockets when they do?
When they reach seriously senior levels and start to hobnob with the Great and Good rich and powerful, that sense of entitlement, always overinflated, balloons to a such grandiose levels it makes MPs claiming council tax back for the servants’ wing of their mansion look quite modest.
Here’s the cost to the public of funding just one British mandarin, Sir John Bourn, to live in the grand, lavish manner to which he made sure he became accustomed:
175 lunches and dinners since 2004 with permanent secretaries, directors of big accounting companies and defence contractors at the Ritz, Savoy, Dorchester, Brown’s Hotel, the Goring Hotel, Cipriani, Bibendum, Wiltons, Mirabelle and The Square. The bills, nearly all for two people, vary from £80 to £301. Many of the bills came to between £150 and £220. One bill for four people – two from the NAO – at Wiltons was £500. In the past six months, he has spent £1,651.56 on meals.
[…]
· Sir John and Lady Bourn took foreign trips with first class air travel to San Francisco, Venice, Lisbon, Brazil, South Africa, the Bahamas and Budapest. Their air fares and taxi fares ranged from £15,997 to Brazil and £14,518 to South Africa, to £2,238 to Budapest and £1,718 to Venice…..Over the past six months, Sir John has spent £16,998 of taxpayers’ money on mainly first class travel for himself and his wife.
The position which Sir John had to maintain? Auditor General, the man ultimately responsible for guarding the public purse and vetting every government expense account, from huge ministries to quangos to the regional police forces. The fox was in the henhouse and he was very well fed indeed.
It would be funny if it weren’t so serious. A corrupt auditor’s much less likely to out politicians (who ultimately fund his department and his long lunches at Wiltons ) for their own financial misdeeds; and how can any voter expect transparency and honesty from our public servants when the guy policing them is himself crooked?
Politicians and mandarins alike advance the same self-justifications:
- They’re important now, they have a public position to maintain.
“The auditor general justifies the dinners and lunches as part of the need for the NAO to keep in touch with a wide range of people, including companies that are doing business with government and the NAO.”
[Trans: I must live a lifestyle commensurate with those I now associate with, never mind if they are corporate privateers and dodgy arms dealers or I won’t be taken seriously. How can I schmooze properly if I can’t talk about what millionaires talk about?]
The government’s representative cannot be seen to lose face. It’s about the prestige of the nation.
[Trans: My socially insecure partner’s giving me hell, I really need that chauffeur for my spouse/trip to Barbados/new servants’ wing or we’ll never be able to hold our heads up at Waitrose/Glyndebourne/Sandy Bay.]
I take big expensive decisions. Therefore I should get big expensive perks.
[Trans: Everyone else gets rich from PFI deals. Where’s mine?]
Anyone with a modicum of common sense or morality can see how hollow these arguments are, but that certainly never stopped a mostly unquestioning media from swallowing spurious ‘explanations’ like these whole. One of the biggest fallacies is trotted out at every available opportunity and accepted as gospel truth by journalists:
- I could earn more in the private sector.
[Trans: Please don’t make me, please don’t make me….
Only very few currently employed by government would earn more in the private sector, and that generally only because of inside knowledge gained while a civil servant or minister – the fabled revolving door.
Of course there is another way to make millions in the private sector.
Many senior civil servants get to take their own departments private, making themselves a fortune in the process. For example the top managers of the UK’s Defence Establishment privatised it and renamed the company QinetiQ, having bought the shares (that they valued themselves) at a a knock down price, just over half a million pounds. The day the stock went public they then sold them on to the Carlyle Group and some very recent former civil servants who had been on generous but moderate salaries saw their minimal investments rise in value by 20,000%. A report into the deal said:
“”We consider the returns exceeded what was necessary to incentivise them”
I think that means they were greedy. And if the National Audit Office (former Prop., Sir John Bourn) calls you greedy, then you really must be greedy.
But it was just words. The NAO didn’t take any action against them, or tell the government to negate the deal, or charge anyone with insider trading either. If it had been less elevated civil servants trying to make a tiny profit off the weekly tea money, I expect the story would’ve been different. That’s what I think is the hidden factor in entitlement, in the junior ranks at least.
Senior staff turn a blind eye to their and their peers’ corruption while coming down heavily on inferiors for minor transgressions, all the while cutting workers’ entitlements, whether to fair pay, time off, or even just a job – QinetiQ fired 800 people not long after the former bosses took the money and ran – which breeds resentment and a feeling that you should grab everything you can, while you can. Why not? The bosses use lax rules rules to profit – why shouldn’t they profit too, if they can find a handy loophole to do it with? And who can blame them?
No wonder it isn’t just politicians. It’s the whole system of government, entitlement’s the way it works. Constitutional reform won’t be enough. Fiddling with the rules until we think they can’t be fiddled with anymore is OK – until they are fiddled. Get rid of everyone suspect, perhaps? Wholesale firings are impracticable and smack of a political purge.
Whatever the reform, the same people operating the old system are likely to be the same in charge of any revamped one. The roots would still be there. Like ground elder corruption is hard to eradicate : if leave a little root in the soil, up corruption pops again, more vigorous than ever. Maybe the only thing to do is burn it out.
When Middle England Attacks
Just because they don’t shout doesn’t mean they don’t want to lynch you. Watch troughing Tory Andrew McKay MP get taken apart over his expense claims by his politely furious constituents :
His face is an absolute picture. I might’ve been a little less contemptuous of McKay had he got up, told them to go forth and multiply, and walked out with his greedy and amoral head held high.
But he can’t get away – he’s spent so long playing the Tory grandee he’s permanently stuck in character. He has to sit and listen to people tell him what an asshat he is, because to do otherwise would conflict with his mistaken gentlemanly self-image. Look at his expression: it has the studied rigidity of the baddie brought to book in an Enid Blyton school story.
Exceedingly enjoyable. I’d like to see every MP made to sit and watch it several times a day for several days at least once a year, on their own time, no expenses payable. Can’t wait for the next one, for this surely is the start of a longrunning series.