When will the Public decide that enough is enough?
Libby Purves is on first class form in the Times today. She picks out what she calls the Government Disrespect agenda and she gives it a dam' good kicking:
The tone amounts to a national Disrespect Agenda: sanctimonious, scolding, applying standards only to little people. Tessa Jowell’s husband can be thick with Silvio Berlusconi and dodgy fake loans prop up politics, but down in the everyday world cumbersome new “money-laundering” regulations force pensioners to identify themselves three different ways to a bank manager they’ve known for years, and make it illegal for an estate agent to market your house without taking your national insurance number.
John Prescott can with impunity assault people and demand sex in his office, but a harassed teacher who lays a restraining hand on a child’s shoulder risks ruin. The Home Office can mismanage dangerous prisoners, yet roll its eyes up in pious self-justification as it libels the innocent. Health and police posters can berate us as malodorous wife beaters while actual police ignore burglaries and NHS Direct takes four hours to ring back.
This is spot on - but I am afraid that she misses the wider point. It is axiomatic that where politicians believe that Government is the answer, that they will believe that THEY are the answer - and that as the solver of our problems and agent of salvation they are above the laws and benisons that they allow us.
This belief is the keystone of all left wing government. It is the moral code of all Big Government "Liberals". It is the mantra of the social worker, the outreach officer and the student activist. It is the policy of fools and the comfort of the indolent. It is the modern Divine Right of Kings, and the nicene creed of the Guardianistas.
It is completely and utterly unacceptable.
The tone amounts to a national Disrespect Agenda: sanctimonious, scolding, applying standards only to little people. Tessa Jowell’s husband can be thick with Silvio Berlusconi and dodgy fake loans prop up politics, but down in the everyday world cumbersome new “money-laundering” regulations force pensioners to identify themselves three different ways to a bank manager they’ve known for years, and make it illegal for an estate agent to market your house without taking your national insurance number.
John Prescott can with impunity assault people and demand sex in his office, but a harassed teacher who lays a restraining hand on a child’s shoulder risks ruin. The Home Office can mismanage dangerous prisoners, yet roll its eyes up in pious self-justification as it libels the innocent. Health and police posters can berate us as malodorous wife beaters while actual police ignore burglaries and NHS Direct takes four hours to ring back.
This is spot on - but I am afraid that she misses the wider point. It is axiomatic that where politicians believe that Government is the answer, that they will believe that THEY are the answer - and that as the solver of our problems and agent of salvation they are above the laws and benisons that they allow us.
This belief is the keystone of all left wing government. It is the moral code of all Big Government "Liberals". It is the mantra of the social worker, the outreach officer and the student activist. It is the policy of fools and the comfort of the indolent. It is the modern Divine Right of Kings, and the nicene creed of the Guardianistas.
It is completely and utterly unacceptable.
posted by Floreat Aula at
9:23 am
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