Tagged with Morality

MPs, journalists and moral collapse

After the August riots, Ed Miliband rightly made a connection between the “me-first” culture evident in the riots and that which was displayed in the scandals involving MPs’ expenses and phone hacking. And yet, in spite of the connection that is now frequently made between those two scandals, there has been an unsurprising lack of comment on how MPs and journalists have fared so very differently.

No MP, not even those whom the Telegraph described as “saints“, escaped the general public opprobrium over the expense scandal. It didn’t matter whether you’d broken the law, broken the rules (a much larger category — not that it necessarily meant paying anything back), or done nothing wrong at all. You got as much flack in the press if you claimed for a biscuit or TV (as long as it was colour) as if you actually broke the rules. Continue reading →

Cameron and Blair both muddle-headed on cause of riots

Well, well, well. Who said “there are deep problems in our society that have been growing for a long time: a decline in responsibility, a rise in selfishness, a growing sense that individual rights come before anything else”? Cameron. And where does he think the selfishness and fixation on individualism came from, if not from Thatcher who claimed society never really existed and made selfishness and greed the cardinal aims of life? Yet still he insists that the problem was “criminality, pure and simple” and obsesses about the “moral decline of Britain” as though society and economy were not the issue, only the misbehaviour of individuals.

Blair is equally muddle-headed when he puts the riots down to alienated, disaffected youth outside the social mainstream and argues there’s no social or moral decline, only a need for intense family intervention and dealing with anti-social behaviour and gangs, as though the social and economic structures he championed had nothing to do with creating the alienation and disaffection in the first place. Continue reading →

Bankers and rioters share a common impulse: take what you can and stuff society

The Tory mantra is more to the point than many of them realise. Taking advantage, squeezing every last bit out of the system, illegally if necessary and without any regard for the effect on everyone else – because you can – is now endemic at all levels of society.

  • The bankers did it by deliberately mis-selling sub-prime mortgages to Ninja people (no income, no jobs or assets), but securitising them – trading them on around the world – allowed the bankers to make huge profits before the roof fell in. Continue reading →