WHERE HAS ALL THE SCANDAL GONE?

The question asked in this post refers of course to the staggering array of serious wrongdoing by so called respectable individuals and organisations that has gripped the attention of the British public one after another in recent months then, like a series of lights going out, have suddenly disappeared out of sight as     if by magic.

There in the white heat spotlight of publicity some newsworthy piece of filth drenches everyone in dirt for a few days or weeks then vanishes as though someone’s turned off a tap. It’s gone. Shut out. The awfulness of it sinking below our consciousness only to be replaced by something equally disgusting!

Does anyone remember those dirty Liberal Democrats lying to us for their vote before the last General Election?

Remember the news about British Gas manipulating and fixing the wholesale price of gas that put up your bills and put more money into the pockets of the shareholders? Thank you the last Labour Government for deregulating the energy supply industry…

Remember Rupert Murdoch’s gutter journalists hacking the phone of a dead girl?

Remember the police breathalysing the dead bodies of the Hillsborough Victims then perverting justice by falsifying all their own statements?

Remember Jimmy Savile, the nation’s favourite son, who the police knew was engaged in a vast slew of sexual illegality with children but did nothing to stop it?

Remember the appalling HSBC Mexican drugs money laundering scandal where the largest British based bank not only channeled billions of dollars of cartel drugs money from its subsidiary in that country into its banks in the United States but did the same kind of thing for thousands of Iranian financial transactions that also ran counter to United States law, only recently acknowledging its guilt and paying a massive fine in America. And all under the eyes of a Labour Government and the great center of financial propriety, the City of London!

Remember the notorious Libor Rate fixing scandal in which various British banks colluded to fix the interest rate at which they lent money to each other. This was highly illegal to say the least, and has at last led to the arrest of three banking executive homeboys.

And while I’m on the subject, remember the name Gordon Brown, the Labour Prime Minister who operated a policy of ‘light touch regulation’ for City of London financial institutions, giving bankers license to do just about whatever they wanted. The resulting economic depression has seen a major attack on the standard of living of the British people with many losing their jobs and suffering genuine hardship.

Oh yes! How about the Labour Home Secretary who not so long ago claimed expenses on the taxpayer for her husband’s porn videos? How very charming!

This is just the tip of the iceberg! The apex of a great betrayal of trust. Beneath is a vast undersea mountain of hidden evil that only briefly and occasionally makes it up into the light. Remember the Care Home staff who abused and humiliated the sick and the old. Those they were supposed to look after and respect.

Out of the revolving news and into the dark of short term memory. Where indeed have all the scandals gone? One subsumed beneath another even more disgusting. Covered up by red herrings like Leveson, celebrity chit-chat and gossip, the mirage of press control, the media hysteria about royal babies and juvenile footballers who now make a living out of spitting and accusing each other of racism.

Here one minute gone the next, with nothing sunk into the British psyche deeper than skin. Nothing really learned. Nothing really cared about. Remember the M.P.’s expenses scandal that once burned bright as a nova. So how many people demonstrated outside the Houses of Parliament at a scandal that exposed the rottenness inside British politics?

The question is why. The answer is that nobody cared.

How many of you watched a television documentary exposing the Inland Revenue? How members of its Executive Board held directorships in companies set up in offshore tax havens that give specialist advice to wealthy clients about how to avoid paying UK taxes or minimize such payments. In other words those with specialist knowledge who are publically employed to collect taxation for the Government are at one and the same time privately employed to use that knowledge to help people avoid it and are furthermore publically and privately remunerated for such an entirely contradictory activity at one and the same time! Such an anomaly is ludicrous never mind being obscene, yet it goes on.

Hidden away beneath trivialities like footballers, royal babies, nutcase M.P.’s and endless celebrity chatter there’s been a whole universe of gutter journalism, an exploitative and corrupt political system with little difference between the main parties at Westminster, a well embedded Establishment ring of child molestation and an only too often complicit police service. The latter, let it be said, is not just another spoke in the wheel of poison but as the force of law and order pivotal to the operation of the criminal justice system ultimately the hub of so much rottenness and perverse practice circulating like viruses in the bloodstream of our society.

However there’s far more to the web of disgust than scandals exploding with supernova brilliance in the media, dazzling us for a while before switching off. There’s the other kind of dirt already alluded to. Stuff that stinks as badly as anything else while remaining hidden from view. Dark stars of filth that rarely get picked up on. The activities of the Inland Revenue Executive is one such stinkeroo, the illegal sexual activities of undercover policemen another. The secret conduct of the intelligence services and what goes inside the BBC yet others. And all this to say nothing of the private lives of Members of Parliament! So much of this cosmic dark matter kept out of the public eye by the ever ready instruments of the British Establishment, the good old red herring and a well-rehearsed police policy of see no evil.

The Universe, cosmologists tell us, is full of dark matter. Society equally, is full of hidden scandal just as serious of the explosion of Jimmy Savile into our minds and the police cover up of his activities or their vile conduct over Hillsborough. The activities of Inland Revenue directors was likewise unknown before its exposure and is now crucial for understanding the general climate of permissiveness within which large multinationals manipulated taxation procedures. A legal sleight of hand that passed us all by unnoticed while we drank syrupy cups of coffee and paid our taxes. Not even a mention on Ceefax at a time when decreasing tax revenues would cause a reciprocal diminution in public welfare spending.

Actually tax avoidance by corporate big business is also an attack on the poor because it’s ultimately the vulnerable and the needy who have to pay for what they dodge.        

As for the wholesale price fixing of gas, a matter of crucial importance for millions of people who can’t afford to keep themselves warm in a freezing winter, that was only a Ceefax item for a day! A kind of Brown Dwarf in cosmic terms. Who indeed cares about old people freezing to death? Clearly a lot of powerful and influential people do! The subject is so emotive, so visceral, that the activities of the energy providers on behalf of their wealthy shareholders, fixing prices between themselves to maximize profits never mind whether the elderly are desperately cold at night just had to be hidden. Covered up. The idea   not allowed to escape into a horrified public imagination where it might have become yet another monster  of moral outrage.

So no supernova brilliance for that kind of moral monstrosity. Beyond Milly Dowler, Hillsborough, police shooting innocent people in their cars, News of the World pay-dirt, Jimmy Savile and Cyril Smith it’s no go! What? Stuff that’s worse than good old Sir James, knighted for being so nice to children and Christmas guest of Margaret Thatcher? You’d better believe it, but then there are undoubtedly things out there far worse than the nation’s best loved money collector. The ultra-flash Rolls Royce, the cigar, the eyebrows, the silly faces, silly outfits and silly stunts… How could anyone even like such a creep? But alas they did in their millions and they gave him their children! A very discerning nation the British. Actually it’s all very understandable. With support from the police and the mass media he could do no wrong!

Here today gone tomorrow! It’s the sheer repetition of scandal in recent years, almost on a daily basis that facilitates a climate of acceptance. We have become so used to it that nothing seems to disturb us anymore. We have been conditioned to an acceptance of rottenness by the sheer force of its commonality, rather like the operant conditioning of rats or dogs as a technique of behavioral psychology. Continue flashing the lights and people just don’t see them anymore. They accept the experience as normal. Something they don’t have to think about.

That’s the great danger really. When nastiness becomes so commonplace that people stop thinking. Then it’s only a short step away from being unable to make a distinction between right and wrong.  What is good and what is bad.

We won’t do anything to stop those people being beaten up. It’s happening all over the place anyway.

Well there’s only a few of us. We can’t do anything to help them so look away.

It’s a kind of first step. On the road to fascism and then to the Nazis.

Just a first step you are taking. Look hard. Can you see it? Well can you?

 

Truth is on the march!
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