Michael Meacher writes:
Why if you can’t get a job and are 5 minutes late
for a job interview or work programme do you get ‘sanctioned’ and have all your
benefit (for which you’ve contributed all though your working life via national
insurance contributions) taken away for 4 weeks and left with no money at all,
whereas if you cheat the State through elaborately artificial tax avoidance on
an industrial scale (notoriously like Barclays Capital or indeed any big bank)
you’re not bankrupted, not disqualified from continuing in the finance sector
you’ve disgraced, and not sent to prison?
Why (a recent case reported in the Manchester
Evening News) if you have progressive retinitis pigmentosa, a degenerative
incurable disorder, and are registered blind are you then told by Atos that you
must go back to work or lose benefit, whereas if Serco charges the State
(taxpayers) millions of pounds for false electronic tagging of prisoners that
never took place, you suffer no penalty are told a few months later that you
can continue to bid for government work?
Bob Diamond, the disgraced former chief executive
of Barclays, presided over the rigging of the Libor inter-bank market (as did
at least another dozen big banks) which adversely affected interest rates for
$360 trillion contracts worldwide, was never put on trial and is now reported
to be seeking a fortune in new deals in Africa.
Neither Fred Goodwin nor any of
the leading executives of all the big banks that crashed the world economy into
the longest recession for a century through a mixture of greed, incompetence
and negligence ever been prosecuted or jailed.
Ernst & Young and its former auditor, have
never been punished after being found guilty by the Financial Reporting
Council, the industry’s independent regulator, for failing to make known (as
reported a few days ago) the liquidity and cash flow problems of Farepak, the
Xmas hamper savings club that collapsed in 2006, which led to thousands of
members of the public suffering losses.
A judge ruled yesterday that, despite
his concern at “what appears to be a potentially well-founded claim that the UK
authorities were directly implicated in the extraordinary rendition” of the
Libyan dissident Belhaj, he was nevertheless bound, because the government
claimed it would harm relations with the US, to “preclude the right to a remedy
against the potential misuse of executive power and in respect of breaches of
fundamental rights”.
In response to discovery (grace of Edward Snowden
and the Guardian) of the limitless electronic surveillance of citizens, even
the US set up a review board to examine the NSA’s data-mining activities. The
UK government has done nothing.
There has been no investigation of who
originally authorised this mass surveillance State, no checks have been placed
or are currently proposed to restrict GCHQ’s limitless intrusion into the
privacy of ordinary people, and no radical reform as is obviously needed of the
laughably inadequate ISC self-appointed by the PM to investigate his own
investigatory agencies.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes (especially since the
government’s denuding of the public sector has left realms of wrongdoing
effectively unregulated)?
In which vein, Denis MacShane ought to have received whatever sentence would have been handed down to anyone who had stolen that much in benefits. The same was, and remains, true of David Laws.
In which vein, Denis MacShane ought to have received whatever sentence would have been handed down to anyone who had stolen that much in benefits. The same was, and remains, true of David Laws.
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