Bent

Corruption. It’s everywhere. The potential for it is in all of us and the notion of the incorruptible official belongs in a fictitious past where the good guys always won and crime never paid. Britain once had at least the semblance of moral propriety, for a while, with its musty-suited quiet men of bureaucracy carefully oiling the mechanisms of state and making sure every detail was minutely attended to. The pride in a job done well, the thanks of a grateful nation, then retirement to a graceful and comfortable obscurity; the British public servant was once, whether true or not, the archetype for incorruptibility.

We, rightly, looked down our nose at upstart nations and dark, despotic strong-arm regimes for their ill-concealed enthralment to getting ahead at any price. ‘Government for sale’ we cried, ‘justice for all who can afford it’ and most important of all: if you are going to be bent, don’t flaunt it. It’s ‘just not British’. Nowadays we can’t even employ the phrase ‘Play the white man’ because: a) it’s racist and b) it’s just not true. The message we receive from the utterly corrupt, expenses-defrauding, gravy-train-riding chancers in Westminster is ‘lap it all up, boys, there is nothing they can do about it’.

And it’s true isn’t it? Whatever the ordinary British electorate finds issue with they have no voice in any forum which has the will to listen or the power to act. Whether it is the unfettered, economic suicide of importing unemployable, monocultural ghetto-dwellers or the BBC’s no-whites employment policy, the lack of housing, the forcing of senseless and damaging ‘green’ policies, the running down of our armed forces or the kow-towing to various vocal minorities while trampling on the free speech rights of the majority, the wishes of most of our citizens are ignored. Is it any wonder that conspiracy theories abound?

So it seems a little odd that David Cameron wants to talk about corruption, to actually draw attention to it. With an astonishing lack of self-awareness he glibly references the corruption of Johnny Foreigner yet ignores the stunning display of outright venality in every EU scare story. To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticise, said Voltaire. In All The President’s Men, the informant Deep Throat said “Follow the money”. And in The Wire: "You follow drugs, you get drug addicts and drug dealers. But you start to follow the money, and you don't know where the fuck it's gonna take you". Few people on the ground floor of British society have never wondered who is really pulling the strings.

You don’t have to be crooked to be corrupted. Many of the problems of the last couple of decades have been caused by the deliberate corruption of minds, young and old to fly the flag for issues which affect so few people as to be irrelevant, yet somehow serve some purportedly noble aims. The human rights grievance and reparation industries have managed to successfully bushwack the national psyche and turn even the most level-headed into gender fluid intersectional warriors for social justice... to what end we can only speculate.

David Cameron's pants smoulder...

One thing is for certain and that is that western governments no longer even put up the pretence of serving their citizens. The circa fifty percent who appear to support them do so mostly out of a fading sense of loyalty; a default, rather than a conscious choice. The rest of us watch, aghast, as corruption as clear as any in Nigeria or Afghanistan sweeps democracy aside in favour of megalomanic, self-congratulatory power blocs. David Cameron wants to talk about corruption? I wonder who’s paying for it...