Trabantastic!

Well, well, well, who would have thought it? Giant company fiddles statistics to fool the public into buying their stuff. As the VW scandal gets into finger-pointing mode it is only natural that suspicion falls on those who may have colluded in what is now suspected to be much more widespread fraud. Naturally, while the holier-than-thou types are pontificating, the hierarchy of large organisations everywhere are contemplating spending the weekend at the shredder. There is, naturally, also the accusation that officials have been ‘coerced’ into turning a blind eye and of course there’s no better method of coercion than syphoning some of those profits into unmarked brown envelopes.

Corruption; it’s everywhere. It’s everywhere because it is human but nowhere more so than when the state intervenes. It’s one thing to keep a secret from your customers and competitors for a while in an open market, but it takes the threat of sanctions that only whole states can muster and police to keep those secrets forever. In the bad old days of Soviet Communism jokes about the scale of corrupt ineptitude regularly did the rounds. Comrade Corbyn’s championing of uncapped benefits and rent controls brings us a nostalgic whiff of those heady days when dissent may easily have been followed by disappearance and official statistics could be tortured until they told you whatever you needed to know.

If it ever came about, in Corbyn’s Britain the state would regulate everything in the interests of fairness and the official record would reveal no evidence of collusion between any of the Mao-suited comrades... unless that is what they want the record to show. Everybody will understand the rules and obey them and every single car will be properly scrutinised by incorruptible (code for ‘it’ll cost you’) party apparatchiks for conformity before being released to the scrupulously fair (code for ‘it’ll cost you’) waiting list.

I bring you a vision of that noble future:

A man saves up his $Newbles for half his working life and is finally able to buy a car - the wonderful new Corbant model - in the Glorious Republic of Sovereign Socialists (In GRoSS the queen will be stuffed and mounted as a symbol and sinister reminder of a bygone and foresworn age). After he pays his money and swears on oath that he will not brag about his new-found status as car owner he is informed that he will have his car in three years. "Just three years?" he asks, joyfully "That is marvellous, brother. In what month?" The clerk consults a ledger (nobody dare keep information on a computer in the future) and tells him that the car will arrive in August.

The heroic new model - the Corbant - the people's car

The man claps his hands and enquires, "August? What day in August?" Another consultation and it is vouchsafed that the day of delivery will be the second of August. The man is beside himself with excitement; he can hardly believe his luck. But he has another question to ask. “The Second of August, you say. Morning or Afternoon?" The clerk looks up from his book and says "Afternoon. Why do you need to know?" Our man replies,"The broadband is being fitted in the morning."