CORRUPTION: Chronic UK Disease Infects Establishment

Chronic UK Disease Infects Establishment Dragging country backwards

by John Wight, via RT.com: 

Just as the British government announces the deployment of troops to Ukraine as ‘advisors’, it is rapidly becoming apparent that the average Member of Parliament in the UK is as crooked as Uri Geller’s cutlery.

The most recent political scandal to engulf a country that has had more than its fair share in recent years, involves two former foreign secretaries – Sir Malcolm Rifkind and Jack Straw – offering their services as paid consultants to representatives of a fake Chinese company. Unbeknown to both politicians, the representatives were actors and the Chinese company they were representing was entirely fictitious. They’d been set up by UK broadcaster Channel 4, which secretly filmed the meetings and later broadcast them as part of the channel’s popular documentary series: ‘Dispatches’. The footage of both men – two of the most senior politicians in the country – discussing their prospective fee was as damning as it gets, casting another harsh light onto a British political establishment that lurches from once scandal to another, bringing the country’s political system into disrepute.

Of course, every nation finds itself embroiled in political scandal from time to time. And every country has had its share of corrupt politicians and public officials. But the UK seems to churn out these scandals and corrupt officials to such an extent it leaves the distinct impression that it’s the norm rather than the exception.

Both Labour and the Tories, the two main UK parties of government, are up to their necks in this particularly British disease. When politicians from both parties are not fiddling and defrauding their expenses – drawing up fraudulent invoices, claiming for this, that, and the other, including in one case a subscription to a pornographic television channel – they are pointing their greasy fingers at other countries and governments, lecturing them on democracy, international law, and proper conduct. It is akin to being told to sit up straight by a hunchback.

There is little sympathy in the UK for politicians who are found to be on the ‘make’ at a time when millions have been reduced to poverty and destitution by the policy of austerity – an extreme and disastrous response to an economic crisis caused by the greed and reckless behavior of the nation’s banks and financial institutions. Nineteenth century levels of inequality  are now entrenched in British society as a consequence, illustrative of a society that is travelling back in time.

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