Constant Conservative

As always, Melanie Phillips casts a keen eye upon the current disgraceful happenings in Great Britain’s parliament and includes a bit of perspective from the head of the Anglican Church:

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, took instead the dismal MPs-are-victims line and called for a halt to the disclosures. In his view the point had already been ‘adequately made’, and the ‘continuing systematic humiliation of politicians’ would only undermine confidence in democracy.

Well, parliamentary democracy certainly has been undermined — not by those who have shone a light on the corruption of the system, but by those who have corrupted it.

How very depressing — if not altogether surprising — that the Archbishop of Canterbury, of all people, appears not to be able to distinguish between the two.

He rightly went on to lament the loss of integrity in our wider culture, which has degraded moral thinking to a calculation of what people can get away with. But what he fails to grasp is that his own reluctance to hold people to account for the wrong they have done is part of the reason they do that wrong in the first place.

For personal accountability, in the form of paying a price for one’s misdeeds, is essential to a moral sense. It is the breakdown of such accountability at all levels in our society that has caused the values free-for-all of which our MPs have shown themselves to be such spectacular exemplars.

[emphasis mine]

Would it be too much to consider that here in the US our current national leadership would have termed all these things “distractions” from the real business at hand? Of course, we have gotten (like the British) far off course from the understanding that the role of government is to reward those who follow the rule of law (by providing them with a place for the continuation of life, the enjoyment of liberty and the pursuit of happiness) and to punish those who do not follow the rule of law.

If one cannot trust those who are running the public till to not dip into every time they feel the need for a bit of a vacation, a new barbecue set, or even a playhouse–who is properly to blame? Does one properly blame a sheriff’s deputy for the undeniable fact that one was speeding or should one (though it goes against nature) be grateful that the fact was indeed pointed out and one has nothing to do from that point but to accept the appropriate punishment and perhaps to learn that speeding was an inappropriate response to running late for one’s own birthday party?

Words are often placed into a greater context which lends them more/different/opposite meanings. Sometimes this is done to good effect, sometimes people just don’t get it:

Irony and satire are risky literary devices. As I know to my cost, some people always fail to get the joke by taking such conceits literally. In these dangerously discombobulated times, when the giving of offence to certain minority groups can be a capital offence, such a sense of humour failure can cost you dear.

The latest victim of this syndrome is the playwright Richard Bean, whose play at the National Theatre, England People Very Nice, received rave reviews — and then was denounced as ‘racist’.

[...]

Hussain Ismail, who appears to want Bean to be publicly lynched, says the play makes it seem that all Bangladeshis are into drugs or mugging and marry their cousins.

But this is not true. The play shows immigrant Bangladeshis as peaceful, law-abiding, socially conservative citizens.

The one point where the play becomes deadly serious is when it shows that their children, born and bred in Britain, are being radicalised to deadly effect by Islamist demagogues, whose impact is ignored by a British establishment brushing aside the desperate pleas of these Muslim parents to address it.

[...]

This latter point was unintentionally proved by Hussain Ismail who, after leading a walk-out from a meeting with the play’s director, Nicholas Hytner, said angrily: ‘The play creates new stereotypes about Bangladeshis that I have never heard, that we marry our cousins, which is complete rubbish. That is the Pakistanis.’

Now, there’s a bit of irony for you.

I’ve not seen the play (but now I want to). Ms. Phillips’ article makes a very good point, which has me in mind of a saying from Solomon barDavid:

He that answereth a matter before he heareth it, it is folly and shame unto him.

Particularly when the subject matter is sensitive, we all ought to be careful to not assume we know what is happening when we are missing key parts of the story.

Once again, the UK is trying to show us the future:

The Prime Minister apparently wants to stop the middle classes from dominating professions such as law, medicine and the media.

Accordingly, [former Cabinet minister] Milburn will head a review of the supposed obstacles in the way of the poor — including the work experience or internships used by middle-class parents to give their children a head start. In addition, the Cabinet Office minister Liam Byrne will this week launch a white paper on social mobility.

It is certainly dismaying that so many young people are trapped in social disadvantage. Children from the highest socio-economic group are nearly three times more likely than those from the lowest to get good GCSEs, and six times more likely to go to university.

What’s more, even fewer young people from the poorest backgrounds now go to good universities than when Labour came to power.

But that’s because, as Tory spokesman Chris Grayling rightly observed, education standards have plummeted, family life has disintegrated and the welfare state traps ever more people in dependency. The way to boost social mobility is therefore to stop the rot in education, shore up intact families and reform welfare.

This chap is going to review “work experience or internships used by middle-class parents to give their children a head start.” How’s that for really digging in to the problem at hand?

No country has a corner on stupid. The reasons for this are pretty straightforward: no country exists without people and people have a way of plumbing the depths of ignorance and depravity if given the opportunity. Ace leverages the recent excesses of the English in celebrating the New Year to for a useful observation:

If I can make a quick point: Europe forever flatters itself by contrasting itself — erudite, educated, prosperous, well-mannered, bourgeois — with America — drunken, stupid, fat, loud, obnoxious, and ill-informed.

They do this by the same trick every time: They compare their stable, well-behaved middle classes and working with our less well-behaved, less refined lower classes.

Of course this is stupid. It is comparing apples to oranges, or, more accurately, one population’s most well-behaved cohort with another population’s least well-behaved one.

Compare most of the American lower class– which, despite not having much money, tends to be industrious and fairly law-abiding — with the European lower class and the comparison changes quite a bit. The American lower class is far more ambitious and self-improving than the “No Future” drunken yobs of Europe.

If Europe sees more of our lower classes than they do of ours…. well, that’s because our lower class is industrious enough, ambitious enough, culturally curious enough, and diligent enough to set aside money… to travel to England and the Continent.

In the UK (where there is no Bill of Rights like ours), government is rapidly approaching Orwell’s dystopian vision:

The private sector will be asked to manage and run a communications database that will keep track of everyone’s calls, emails, texts and internet use under a key option contained in a consultation paper to be published next month by Jacqui Smith, the home secretary.

A cabinet decision to put the management of the multibillion pound database of all UK communications traffic into private hands would be accompanied by tougher legal safeguards to guarantee against leaks and accidental data losses.

[...]

Senior Whitehall officials responsible for planning for a new database say there is a significant difference between having access to “communications data” – names and addresses of emails or telephone numbers, for example – and the actual contents of the communications. “We have been very clear that there are no plans for a database containing any content of emails, texts or conversations,” the spokeswoman said.

Please people, I’m not stupid: “no plans for a database” doesn’t mean there won’t be one. It is only a matter of time. In fact, at the risk of sounding alarmist, I’m guessing that such data is already accessible to the UK government. From a purely practical standpoint, why wouldn’t one save the contents of messages as well as the the metadata? Hard drive space is very cheap and one never knows how it might come in handy.

Maintaining the capacity to intercept suspicious communications was critical in an increasingly complex world, he said. “It is a process which can save lives and bring criminals to justice. But no other country is considering such a drastic step. This database would be an unimaginable hell-house of personal private information,” he said. “It would be a complete readout of every citizen’s life in the most intimate and demeaning detail. No government of any colour is to be trusted with such a roadmap to our souls.”

The language may be a bit florid, but the meaning is clear. You’ve heard about not putting all of your eggs into a single basket? Sometimes, one should not pick up the eggs at all. God save the UK.

I would like to think that this is not in America’s future, but I am afraid that we have already watched the beginnings of it. From Melanie Phillips, an update on how government rewards itself for failure:

One of the wonders of the world is the way in which the public sector manages to defy the laws of financial gravity.

If a private company is found to be catastrophically incompetent by producing a lousy product, it goes bust. But when the public sector is so incompetent that vulnerable infants in its care actually die as a result, it treats this as a signal for paying itself even greater sums of public money.

And this even when belts are supposedly being tightened to cope with the financial crisis. In the private sector, people are facing a miserably uncertain future. But in the town halls, the party just seems to roll on and on.

Last week, Sharon Shoesmith was finally sacked from her £100,000-plus post as director of children’s services for Haringey Council following the Baby P scandal, in which a toddler died from sickening ill-treatment at the hands of his mother, her boyfriend and their lodger while supposedly in her department’s care.

Yet now it has been revealed that Haringey will pay almost £200,000 a year — more than the Prime Minister himself gets paid — to her successor.

This would be understandable if it was thought necessary to tempt an outstanding manager from a successful company in the private sector, where such levels of remuneration are the norm.

But it turns out that Ms Shoesmith’s successor, Peter Lewis, comes from exactly the same background. Currently the director of education, children’s services and leisure at Enfield Council, Mr Lewis has previously worked as a teacher and social worker.

In other words, far from someone who would bring a much-needed fresh perspective to the problem, Haringey’s new children’s director has been fished out from the same municipal pool of institutionalised mediocrity and outright failure.

There is much more detail at the link, should you be unfamiliar with the situation to which Ms. Phillips refers.

Government, in whatever country, time and place may be considered a watchdog. As long as it is kept within the bounds of a fenced yard, or chained to a fixed point, or somehow restrained in its influence and function to that which is absolutely necessary, all is well.

Problems arise when the beast is released (for whatever reason) and it finds that it no longer must wait to be fed and that there are no other restraints on its behavior. Instead, it demands it wherever and whenever it pleases.

I apologize if the preceding paragraphs seem a bit dramatic, but I fully believe that in UK we are seeing the result of not keeping the watchdog in check. Government is meddling in the very minutae of individual’s daily lives (and doing a very poor job of it), to the end that people are not helped but that government is perpetuated and expanded.

Let us take a lesson from our neighbors across the pond. It is time to keep the watchdog in check. If it has been getting out lately, it is time to build a fence, and quickly.