A Culture of Fear

I wrote recently about the atrocious case of Stafford Hospital, a place where hundreds of patients are now thought to have died needlessly as a result of mismanagement, negligence and incompetence. Mismanagement, negligence and incompetence seem to have become the three wicked fairies haunting the state-funded British National Health Service (NHS). The scandal caused by their malevolent magic is now all but impossible to disguise.

The attempt has been made, though. The rot here goes high; it goes high as Sir David Nicholson, the former communist who is now Chief Executive of the National Health Service.  He recently made it plain that he had no intention of resigning, despite the damning and damaging report on Stafford Hospital, detailing abuses committed under his watch. But now the dam has burst; now we know of even further abuses that he chose to ignore.

In 2010 Gary Walker was sacked as the chief executive of the United Lincolnshire Hospital Trust in the east of England. The reason given was that he swore openly at meetings, which seems pretty flimsy on the face of it. Swearing or not, he was given a very generous severance package - £500,000 ($775,000) is not to be sworn at. It now appears that this money really was meant to shut his mouth.

The year before Walker was sworn off he raised concerns with Sir David over the standard of care in Lincolnshire hospitals. It seems that close on 700 patients may have died needlessly as a result of poor care. More were at risk. His warnings were ignored by Sir David, allegedly because he was “not interested in patient safety.”

He may not have cared about patient safety but he certainly cared about swearing Walker to silence. As part of his Midas handshake, he pledged to keep his concerns to himself. It was not, perhaps, a commendable choice on his part but his conscience got the better of him. His silence has been broken despite emails from NHS-funded lawyers warning him to keep to the terms of the 2010 agreement.

Speaking to the Daily Mail Walker said “I want David Nicholson to be held to account. I warned him that this was going to happen. I warned him that Lincolnshire was going to become the next Mid Staffordshire. He didn’t investigate those concerns, and now look what’s happened.” He went on to refer to the “culture of fear” within the NHS, something that seems to have been part of Nicholson’s management style.

United Lincolnshire Hospitals is one of fourteen trusts presently under investigation for negligence in the wake of the Mid-Staffordshire revelations about death under care. Gagging is clearly no longer an option. But Walker’s honesty has placed him in an invidious position;

I stand to lose everything if they sue...Now I risk having to repay more than the settlement because I could be liable for the Trust’s legal fees. I face ruin. But if it’s got to the stage where thousands and thousands of patients are dying needlessly in NHS hospitals and the government says no one’s to blame, someone needs to stand up and be counted...I lost my career, my partner of six years and most of my assets challenging my dismissal. But I would not lose my integrity.

Letters have now emerged written by doctors and staff at the Lincolnshire Trust warning that they were being coerced into treating patients in an unsafe environment and thus endangering their safety. High mortality rates were simply ignored and staff told that “targets must be met regardless of demand.”

The recent Francis Report on the Stafford Scandal might useful be subtitled the No One’s to Blame Report; for seemingly no one is to blame for the abuses and the atrocities inflicted on patients, from Nicholson downwards. But at least it recommended an end to gagging orders imposed on whistle-blowers. Gary Walker’s case has now been raised in Parliament. Stephen Dorrell, Chairman of the House of Commons Select Committee on Health, has said that he will be invited to give evidence. He went on to condemn gagging orders, describing them as “unacceptable in the NHS” and “against the public interest.

But that’s the thing: they clearly were acceptable, a part of a corporate culture that had little concern for the public interest or patient welfare. Speaking to the BBC Walker compounded an already heavy indictment against his former employers;

This is a culture of fear, a culture of oppression - of information that's either going to embarrass a civil servant or embarrass a minister. These are big problems. And if you consider that the people that have been running the NHS have created that culture of fear, they need either to be held to account or new people need to be brought in to change that culture.

On present indicators it seems likely that little will change. The corruption, the complacency and the laziness here go deep. In face of monstrous state bureaucracies like the NHS ordinary people, those who cannot afford private care, are effectively powerless, as much guinea pigs as they were in times past. Rather ironic considering that the whole institution is supported through their taxes. Here, perhaps, we have the true meaning of taxation without representation.

Waiting for Siegfried

Let me begin with a personal anecdote.  Father has travelled extensively across the world on business, usually flying first class.  On one trip to Hong Kong he saw Leon Brittan, then Deputy European Commissioner, in the departure lounge for the flight back to London. 

I should add that Brittan, who formerly had served in Margaret Thatcher’s government, is a politician for whom he does not have a great deal of time.  "Never mind", he thought, "he's on his own. I'll ignore him." But no sooner had he boarded the flight than he discovered that he was the only 'independent' in the first class cabin. Every other seat was taken up by Brittan and an entourage from the Commission.  I do not know what the fare is now, but then the first class return flight to Hong Kong cost around £8000, that’s almost $13,000. 

I suppose it’s only to be expected that the Deputy Commissioner would travel first class.  It really is stretching things, though, when all the toadies of his court, who did little but drink the free champagne and talk too loud, should also travel at the expense of the benighted European taxpayer. 

I dare say things are much worse now.  There is so much about this venal and corrupt organisation that simply never comes to light, so much about the waste of its bloated bureaucracy.  I was interested to note, though not at all surprised, that the EU’s own auditors have refused to sign off on its accounts for the past eighteen years. 

For me the EU, aside from the ever present challenge to the integrity and sovereignty of our nation, means one thing – waste.  But it’s not just waste; it’s a total disregard for the interests of the ordinary taxpayers.  It’s almost as if the Eurocrats are an old new aristocracy, full of a sense of entitlement, full of disregard for the serfs who have to pay for this entitlement.  There they are, every one a Marquis St. Evrémonde, sitting in their luxury coaches, tossing the occasional coin to the plebs as they pass by. 

I mention all of this as a background to Saint David Cameron’s tilt with the European Dragon, roaring for more in the latest budget talks.  The beast wants approval on a £809million ($1296million) budget, with lots more perks, privileges and first class junkets.  Cameron wants to cut the monster down.  Contrary to expectations, he wasn’t alone here, with delegations from Germany, Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands also pushing for cuts. 

Meanwhile a gang of Estonian farmers gathered outside the dragon’s lair, demanding that his horde grow bigger.  Oh, they are not on the perks; they just get subsidies from the so-called Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), which allow a lot of peasants to pursue peasant-like farming that turns the rest of us into, well, peasants.  It seems to be all part of the grand aristocratic plan. 

This is only the first round.  The beast is not even wounded.  It will come back, breathing fire.  Estonian farmers and the CAP can go hang.  The truly important thing is the beast’s own well-being.  Pee Wee Herman Van Rompay, who masquerades as the European President, the Great Bureaucrat in person, was unable to identify a single euro of potential cuts on administration, which accounts for 6% of the total budget.  Alas, the beast may eat him alive if he did.

No sooner were the talks over than the leaders slopped off for a spot of luncheon, all washed down with a delightful Chateau Angelus Premier Grand Cru, an unpretentious little claret, a real pinch at £120 a bottle. This is our Brave New Europe that has such worthies in it.

Meanwhile, Tony Blair, shouting from the sidelines, says that leaving Europe would be a ‘disaster for Britain.’  What a perfect reverse barometer Mister Cosmopolitan is, a man who fills me with more contempt than the dragon has gold.  This is a man who, if he had had his way, would have taken Britain into the common currency years ago.  This is a man who clearly knows an awful lot about disaster.  We will be ‘irrelevant’ outside the EU he says.  I just hope we are as irrelevant as Switzerland and Norway rather than relevant as Spain and Italy.  The Dragon and Blair deserve one another.  Personally I’m waiting for Siegfried to emerge.  David Cameron, contrary to appearances, is no dragon slayer.  

Russia is a Beggar

The Beggar Queen

I’m sure it will be no great revelation if I tell you I take no interest at all in beauty pageants.  You know the sort of thing; a succession of women whose breast size is in inverse proportion to that of their brains, telling some slavering old Jimmy Savile-type host that they want to help old people when they grow up, with hints, perhaps, of oral pleasures to come. 

I was amused to discover, though, that one of these contests is called Miss Earth.  What, Miss Earth?  Does the competition come from Miss Mars, Miss Venus and the rest, from the ultra hot Miss Mercury to the cold and distant Miss Pluto?  Now that might be something worth watching!

Earth girls come from all over the Earth.  It wasn’t really the name of the competition that caught my attention; it was the comments of one of the competitors.  She is Natalia Pereverzeva from Russia, different from the usual run of beauties in that she had some unusual things to say about her country. 

Asked what makes her proud of her country, she started off in a glowing if slightly eccentric fashion.  Russia, she said, “is bright, warm, patched, but it is pleasant to slumber under it on a winter evening when the storm rages outside.”  I get it: Russia is really just a giant duvet.  Wait; it’s more than that, it’s “a kind of cow with very big eyes, funny horns and always chewing its mouth oh, what sweet milk she gives!  Oh, how it smells – meadows, herbs and sun.”  A comfort blanket, kindly cows and fragrant herbs, my, my, Russia is obviously the lost Eden.

But it’s not.  In an instant bedding, cows and herbs disappeared, revealing something nasty in the woodshed.  Russia started to smell not of fragrant meadows but of corruption.  “But my Russia – it is also my poor long-suffering country, mercilessly torn to pieces by greedy, dishonest and unbelieving people.  My Russia is a great artery, from which the chosen few people drain away its wealth.  My Russia is a beggar.” 

The beggar cannot help its orphans and its elderly.  Engineers, doctors and teachers are fleeing, as from a sinking ship, because they can’t make enough to live on.  This is her country, she concluded, her dear, poor Russia.

Not the sort of thing one expects in this kind of bash, I feel sure you will agree.  It’s caused quite a stir in Russia.  Komsomolskaya Pravda, one of the main tabloids, headlined the story on its front page.  Did our Miss Earth 2012 contestant slam Russia or tell the truth?, it asked.  No, she did not tell the truth, one of its commentators proceeded; her tirade was just a rehash of Western clichés about Russia.  That would not include the bit about duvets, meadows, herbs and cows, I suppose

Dmitry Steshin went on to accuse her of “trading her body in photographs to arouse the sexual instincts of the end consumer, thereby ruining her credibility.”  You can make of that what you will but I rather thought trading one’s body in photographs to arose the sexual instincts “of the end consumer” was what beauty pageants were all about.  Perhaps Dmitry is of a more innocent cast of mind, giving no thought at all to the girl’s future intentions towards old men. 

Alas, he seems rather out of touch with the rest of Russia, or at least the more than 90% of the thousands who responded in her favour in the paper’s online poll.  Clearly the end consumers’ sexual instincts have been aroused by the former Miss Russia’s body of photographs.  Either that or she speaks a deeper truth, one that explodes the self-serving illusions and forms of political deception that Putin’s gangster-state specialises in.  That is no beauty contest.  

Some Animals are More Equal than Others

Earlier this month the African National Congress, the ANC, celebrated the hundredth anniversary of its foundation. This is the party of Nelson Mandela, terrorist come secular saint, that rules South Africa, the wonderful ‘rainbow nation’…or a sad cesspit of corruption.

The latter is the view of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the country’s other secular saint, who once observed that the ANC had stopped the gravy train only long enough to get on board. Actually he may have underestimated the problem, at least according to the writer Zakes Mda, who has said that the new South Africa is overtaking Nigeria in patronage and cronyism.

The ANC has been sadly misrepresented. In the good old bad old days of apartheid it was taken to be the face of black South Africa. In reality it was only ever the face of a self-interested and self-serving minority, one that hijacked a cause to advance its own ends. The old apartheid state was bad; the new rainbow state headed by Jacob Zuma, its corrupt, polygamous and laughable president, is not really that much better.

In some ways South Africa is a little like post-communist Russia, a place where a few well-placed individuals established a monopoly over the good things in life. It was a case of power not to the people but power to themselves. Almost two years ago I wrote an article in which I made the following points;

Socialism or capitalism, it really makes no difference, because the principal beneficiaries will always be the ANC nomenklatura. Helen Zille, leader of the Democratic Alliance, the official opposition, has accused Zuma and the ANC of corruption and the abuse of power. It’s easy to see why when some seventy million rand has been spent on perks; on grace-and-favour homes for cabinet ministers wives and families, and of course cars and more cars, the kind of gas-guzzling toys African leaders love.

Zille, the conscience of the nation, has faced death threats, been called a “filthy whore” and “an exponent of a new apartheid” for her outspokenness. But look beyond the villas of the ANC cadres, look beyond the houses and the cars, and one might easily conclude that there is no need for a new apartheid, for the simple reason that the old apartheid is still very much in place; that the new bosses look very much like the old bosses, except for the colour of their skin; that oppression and poverty feel like oppression and poverty no matter if the ruler is white or black. In many places people still live in squalid townships where the government fails to deliver on the most basic services, including clean water, sanitation and power. Protesters have been dispersed by riot squads using rubber bullets.

Under apartheid the black majority were second class citizens. They are still second class citizens. To deflect them from the miserable condition of their lives a scapegoat has been found, and the scapegoat is the vulnerable white minority, repeatedly blamed for all of the country’s problems by the black racist Julius Malema, onetime head of the ANC’s youth wing, a man who takes Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe as a model. Yes, indeed; Robert Mugabe, who transformed one of the richest nations in Africa from a breadbasket into a basket case.

Richard Dowden wrote in the Spectator that the new South Africa is an archipelago of fortified islands of luxury in a sea of poverty. To be more precise, it is a fortified sea of black luxury amidst a sea of black poverty.

The ANC has become what it always was, not a party for the people but a party for itself, an elite determined to protect its own interests. In November of last year the nation’s parliament was told by Willie Hofmeyr, head of the Special Investigative Unit, that some five to seven billion dollars a year was being lost in corruption, negligence and incompetence in the public service. Not long after he was sacked.

Fearful of further exposure the government drew up the Protection of State Information Bill, a measure which effectively treats any investigation of official activity as spying, carrying a possible twenty-five year jail sentence.

Here we are eighteen years after the ANC came to power and South Africa has one of the highest rates of inequality in the world. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. The poor may be poor, miserably poor, but at least they have one comfort in their bleak lives – they no longer suffer from oppressive white rule. But, alas, the pigs are in the trough. All animals are equal. But some animals are more equal than others.

I Give you Che Juju

I can remember the moment exactly, the moment when my suspicion of Nelson Mandela, the former terrorist who became South Africa’s living saint, spilled over into outright dislike. It was 2005, at the end of a Make Poverty History rally in London’s Trafalgar Square, where Bob Geldof, the boom town rat and abject acolyte, declared him to be president of the world. Seemingly the world agrees, at least in the shape of the United Nations, which launched 18 July, Saint Nelson’s birthday, as an international day in his honour.

If only Mandela could have done for the world what he and his cohorts in the African National Congress (ANC), a party seemingly set to rule in perpetuity, have done for South Africa. What did they do, what have they done? Why, drawing on the observation of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, they stopped the gravy train of corruption only long enough for them to get on.

If anything the situation for a great many in the black community is even worse than it was in the days of the old apartheid state. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer, but that’s OK because a lot of the rich now have black faces, so it must be better, this inequality of opportunity, this rainbow kleptocracy.

Yes, just as life gets better for President Jacob Zuma and his ANC cronies it gets worse for the majority of ordinary South Africans, black and white alike. Under the old regime infrastructural services for the black majority were bad, that’s true, but that has to be better than virtually no services at all; for no service is what they are getting.

Amazingly some 80% of South African municipalities are now bankrupt due to misspending spurred on by the demon of corruption. Power shortages and the abysmal state of repair of many of the public roads have made the problem even worse, all this in a country with crippling rates of personal taxation.

Somebody has to be blamed for this; some scapegoat has to be found. Not the corrupt, inefficient and venal ANC, absolutely not; rather there is an easier target, the target favoured by Julius Malema, head of the ANC’s Youth Wing. It is they who are to blame. Who are they, you may wonder? They are the whites, the people, according to Malema, who “stole our land”, who are “criminals and should be treated that way.”

Malema, widely known as Juju, was not so long ago the butt of national humour, after the school results of the ANC’s leadership were leaked on the internet, showing him to be particularly dim. Bad Juju may be an academic dud but he is not stupid. He’s managed to carve a nice little niche for himself as the ANC’s number one demagogue and rabble-rouser. He is the new voice of the townships, the voice of the dispossessed, labouring under the burden of frustrated hopes, labouring under the disappointments of a rainbow nation that has made them even poorer than they were under apartheid.

It’s no longer possible to blame past injustices for present wrongs; no, present wrongs are all the fault of white people, or those white people who still own businesses and farms. Malema, looking to the example of Zimbabwe, where his hero Robert Mugabe has all but destroyed a once flourishing economy, is calling for the expropriation of white-owned mines and land without compensation.

Some may consider this as all so much verbiage, but Malema, a power to be reckoned with, has been suggested as a future president of South Africa, even by the present incumbent. So, if you want to know South Africa’s future look to Zimbabwe’s present, look to the viscera of a goose, plundered in a futile search for a horde of golden eggs.

This radical, this darling of the masses, recently took to sporting a Che Guevara-style beret, declaring that “Cuban revolutionaries should be saluted. Because of their ideological clarity and willingness to fight, millions were released from colonial subjugation”. The huddled masses yearning for more of the good life, any of the good life, lap up this kind of stuff. But, as Rian Malan wrote recently in the Spectator, they are poorly educated and unlikely to know that an illiterate Johannesburg gardener earns more in a day than the average Cuban does in a month

Let’s look a little more closely at Che Juju, racist and revolutionary. Beret or not he is no aesthete, no paragon of virtue, no sea-green incorruptible. “He poses as such a figure”, Malan writes, “but in person he resembles nothing so much as a capitalist porker grown fat on shady dealings” Pretty much in keeping, then, with the tone being set by the rest of the ANC, South Africa’s oligarchy in perpetuity.

Apparently he earns around $5000 a month as president of the Youth League, a decent income, beyond the dreams of his rag-tag army, but nowhere near enough to explain his lavish life-style. Fiona Forde, an Irish journalist, recently published An Inconvenient Youth: Julius Malema and the ‘New’ ANC, in which she details his considerable assets. He has more than eight known properties, including a farm and a $2million mansion in Johannesburg. He recently demolished one house valued at $700,000, to be replaced with one at an estimated cost of $2.8million, complete with a bunker (Hitler style?)

His expensive tastes run to designer suits, several Breitling wristwatches at $17,000 each and Luis Vuitton manbags. All gifts from friends, who also offer him the use of several luxury cars, he told Forde. Not friends and comrades from the townships, one assumes. This self-styled “economic freedom fighter” is now being investigated by the revenue services, the office of the public protector and the elite crime-fighting unit known as the Hawks.

On this evidence, and other examples like it, South Africa is a predatory state on its way to becoming a banana republic. That’s not my view, well it is, but they are not my words. They are the words of the Congress of South African Trade Unions.

Ironically, while he makes life better for himself, Malema’s power-hungry demagogy is making life even worse for his benighted and resentful supporters. His rhetoric about nationalisation and property seizures is frightening off foreign investment. According to a recent UN report, South Africa’s share of foreign direct investment fell 70% last year from 2009. That same year it overtook Brazil as the country with the widest gap between rich and poor. Unemployment increases still further, particularly among the young; resentment increases, hatred increases; Juju, the ‘saviour’ of the poor, waxes fat and wealthy on the results

Meanwhile, at rallies, Malema and his supporters like a rousing chorus or two of Shoot the Boer, a song from former days which incites ‘hate speech’, so South Africa’s Equality Court ruled recently. But the singing goes on as, sadly, does the practice. In one of the most horrific examples, Attie Potgieter, a white farm manager, was stabbed and slashed more than 150 times, with implements as varied as a machete and a garden fork. The pathologist concluded that he had been “tortured to death.” His wife and three-year-old daughter were killed with a single bullet in the backs of their heads.

Potgieter and his family now join more than a 1000 others from white farming families who have been killed since the end of the apartheid regime in 1994, on average 70 a year. These are the official figures. The true number is calculated to be closer to 3000. But that’s just part of the picture in a country that now has one of the worst crime rates in the world, a country were 21,000 people are murdered and 52,000 women raped every year.

That’s the world Nelson Mandela was president of in time past; that’s the world that Julius Malema may be president of in time to come. You may care to think of that next July when you celebrate, at the behest of the UN, the achievements of Geldof’s tawdry saint.

This is no time to talk of hedges and fields, or the beauties of any country. . . . Cry for the broken tribe, for the law and the custom that is gone. Aye, and cry aloud for the man who is dead, for the woman and children bereaved. Cry, the beloved country, these things are not yet at an end.

Tyranny Remains

The more things change in China the more they stay the same. In social and economic terms no greater contrast could be imagined between the country at the time of the death of Mao in 1976 and the high-tech nation of today. But the political technique, the technique of oppression, the techniques favoured by Mao Zedong both before and after the creation of the People’s Republic in 1949, are still very much in place.

There always have to be enemies, always outsiders, counter-revolutionaries then, disruptive elements now. China, in a sense, is in a state of permanent revolution. The enemies may have changed, the definition of what constitutes an enemy certainly has, but the fallback position remains the same – they have to be eliminated in one manner or another. It’s the technique inherited from Mao, the default position as Jonathan Minsky argued recently in an article in the political journal Standpoint.

Here it’s as well to remember that that it was Deng Xiaoping, the man normally associated in the West with modernisation and reform, who oversaw the so-called ‘anti-Rightist’ campaign of 1957, which saw the purge of thousands, and who also presided over the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989 as well as the ensuing reign of terror.

Now, in the midst of prosperity, when even the word ‘jasmine’ is banned, as if it carried a kind of plague bacillus, it has been estimated that the number of extra-judicial executions range between 5000 and 10000 per annum, more than the rest of the world combined.

Thousands of people, often the poorest and least powerful, are being held in secret ‘black jails’, free enterprise institutions run by thugs to contain ‘troublemakers’, often no more than petitioners anxious to redress some abuse – a right granted to them by precedent and by law -, people who are an embarrassment to the authorities. There they can be held indefinitely without charge, beaten, starved and abused, out of official sight and out of official mind.

Corruption, mismanagement, official neglect and sheer incompetence get worst by the day. Officially the casualty toll from the recent high-speed rail crash near the city of Wenzhou stands at 40 dead and 191 injured, though according to the buzz among the country’s micro-bloggers the true figures are much higher. What is certain is that the government cleaned up the site with indecent haste, burying one of the carriages and restoring rail services even before rescue operations had been completed.

True or not, the rumours are based on past perceptions, on other scandals that have created a mood of widespread cynicism and scorn, a reluctance to believe anything the authorities say. Here the case of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, when so many children died as a result of shoddy school construction, comes to mind. It was the determination to establish the true facts over this scandal that lead to the first serious clash between the complacent and negligent authorities and Ai Weiwei, the brilliantly unconventional artist, recently convicted on a charge of ‘tax evasion.’

In Mao’s Invisible Hand, a collection of papers edited by Sebastian Hellman and Elizabeth J. Perry, published earlier this year by Harvard University Press, the point is made that the policy style that emerged from Maoism was “fundamentally dictatorial, opportunistic and merciless. Unchecked by institutions of accountability, guerrilla leaders pursue their objectives with little concern for the interests of those who stand in their way.” Rightist opportunists, class enemies, counter-revolutionaries, seditionists, disruptive people, inharmonious elements - the terminology may change, the tyranny remains the same.

Watt Tyler, Where Are You Now?

Yes, you’re tired of the expenses scandal; I’m tired of the expenses scandal; we are all tired of the expenses scandal, but we must not allow this issue to die by a process of lethargy and exhaustion. That’s what Joker Brown, ‘The Best Man for the Job’, is relying upon. One would have thought, though, that he would have acted with a little more skill and political acumen in playing the game of time and opinion, but these are qualities the man clearly does not have.

The one thing that may have been to his credit is to get on top of the whole fiasco in the way that David Cameron has, even though his own MPs expenses claims are, for the most part, far more outrageous than those of the Labour benches. But he did not; it got on top of him.

Now, only two days after he emerged from his ‘vote of affirmation’, refreshed and renewed, he has reappointed Shahid Malik to the government. Malik stepped down last month as justice minister after revelations about his creative-and lucrative-living arrangements. Shady Shahid claimed a minimal rent for a three-bedroom house as his main home while designating his London property as his second home, allowing him to make off with an impressive £66,827 in three years, the maximum allowable. He also claimed £65 for a court summons for non-payment of council tax. My, what fools we mortals are!

Now Shady has been ‘cleared’ of wrong doing by Sir Philip Mawer, the Joker’s adviser on ministerial conduct. What wonderful news, one bright light on a dismal episode! Well, yes, it might be, except the Joker is refusing to allow Sir Philip’s report to be published. Is there anything this man can do right, anything at all?

Let me finish with two letters from today’s copy of the Telegraph which made me smile;

SIR, We know have the absurd situation of an unelected Prime Minister being nursemaided by a twice-disgraced former MP who, as an unelected peer, sits at the Cabinet table alongside other peers, one of whom, the new Minister for Europe, comes straight from Brussels. Cromwell would be apoplectic and so should we the electorate.

SIR, I am becoming increasingly frustrated by MPs, including Gordon Brown, telling me that, despite what I might feel or think, what I actually want is for them to continue the fight against the recession on my behalf, because I know they are the best people for the job. This wholesale nationalisation of public opinion is becoming very annoying.

Watt Tyler, where are you now we have need of you? Alas, all we have is Jack Straw. :-))

Duck Soup

This affair gets more ridiculous by the day. Among the latest revelations I note that a Tory MP claimed for a ‘Duck House’ that he could float in his pond. Yes, a Duck House! As far as I am concerned Westminster, our present Parliament, is an Augean Stable of corruption, turpitude and filth. Oh, where are you Hercules? These people, the Members of Parliament, are supposed to be the best and brightest. I find it difficult to conceive of the worst! I can just imagine how this is playing across the rest of the world, you know, that place firth of these shores that ‘did corruption’ when we did not! At least the appalling Michael Martin, the Speaker of the House, is going, a man who was never, ever fit for such high office, a man that Charles Moore described, with his usual cutting wit, as being ‘thick as mince and tatties.’ Martin is just a particularly acute symptom, not the disease; that goes deeper; yes, it does. Enough, enough, enough!

The Crooks' Parliament, or if this is Democracy Let it Die

It was once the practice to remember English Parliaments by the name subsequently given to them, usually determined by some notable feature. I mentioned the Long Parliament in a previous blog. Others that come to mind are the Mad Parliament, the Merciless Parliament, the Fire and Faggot Parliament and the Parliament of Devils. It would be an excellent idea, in my estimation, for this admirable practice to be revived; yes, indeed. My favoured name for the present assembly has to be the Expenses Parliament or, better still, the Crooks’ Parliament.

How I would love the people of this country to rise in a body, as in V for Vendetta, a march on Westminster to watch the benighted place blow apart, to remember and reverence Guy Fawkes. I think a clarion call is required. I would favour the stirring the words of the German poet Carl Theodor Körner Das Volk steht auf, der Sturm bricht los-The storm is out, the People are roused.

OK, OK, there is a strong element of sardonic humour here but, in all seriousness, democracy in this country is sick and sickening, perhaps terminally so. I note from an article in this week's Spectator (16 May) that the whole Westminster system of democracy rises and falls on a mere 20,000 votes, that’s 0.5% of the total electorate, in key marginal constituencies. It is here where the real battles are fought; the rest, the bulk of the electorate, count for nothing. I voted for the first time in the General Election of 2005. The way I feel at the present I don’t think I will ever vote again.