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Monday 18 February 2013

Britishness "dying of Greed"?


Here is an interesting article from the pen of Joyce McMillan which appeared in The Scotsman on the 8th February. 

Joyce McMillan: Shamed nation dying of greed

The NHS and banking scandals reflect the corruption and moral vacuum threatening the heart of the UK, writes Joyce McMillan

IT’S A strange experience, to open the newspapers and see the word “shame” blazoned across the headlines on both of the leading stories of the day; shame in the National Health Service, and shame in the world of finance, as the twin scandals at Mid Staffordshire hospitals, and in those upper echelons of the banking industry where the Libor borrowing rate was fixed and corrupted, are finally exposed to public gaze.

Those responsible, of course, still seem largely shameless, in the manner perfected by the 21st century British boss class. In the aftermath of the Mid Staffordshire scandal – in which up to 1,200 patients are thought to have died unnecessarily, in conditions of thirst, hunger, filth, isolation and misery which almost defy description – no-one has been prosecuted; and almost incredibly, the man who was then in overall charge of the West Midlands Hospital Trust, Sir David Nicholson, is now head of the entire English NHS, with no intention of resigning.

As for the bankers – well, despite their egregious role in almost bringing the entire global economy to its knees in 2008, no banker has yet been imprisoned in the UK for his role in this orgy of irresponsible and fradulent trading.

In both cases, there is neither punishment for the individuals responsible, nor a significant dismantling of the systems which spawned them; and to say that this situation is morally and socially unsustainable is barely to hint the depths of public anger and disillusion that these abuses have brought in their wake.

So what is it, we have to ask, that underpins this growing culture of impunity, among Britain’s business leaders and top public managers? In essence, they all seem to have entered a world where, despite recognising the existence of concepts like decency, honesty, compassion and legality – and perhaps even trying to express them in their private lives – they have felt permitted and even encouraged, in their professional environment, to ignore, or even directly challenge those values, in pursuit of a set of goals defined entirely in financial terms.

The report into the Staffordshire scandal should make fascinating reading for anyone interested in the importing of inappropriate sub-business language into British public services over the last generation; apparently managers “put corporate self-interest and cost control ahead of patients and their safety”.

Yet even in the private sector, it seems, a bottom-line approach ungoverned by any sense of legality, or ethics leads rapidly to chaos. A major bank may not have the same overwhelming duty of care and compassion as a hospital trust, but it still has an obligation to operate within the law, and to avoid fraudulent dealings; and it needs to have this kind of decent and lawful behaviour written into its organisational DNA, from top to bottom, if those at lower levels are to feel empowered to do their jobs properly – just as a hospital trust management needs to send out signals that patient care comes first, if nurses and ward managers are to feel empowered to deliver that care.

And it’s because the cultural shift involved in this collapse of ethical behaviour has been so profound – starting at the top of our society, and filtering down to the lowest levels, in the form of casual workplace cynicism, and the taking out of violent and abusive feelings on the very weakest – that all the measures proposed to counter it seem so pathetic, and in some cases so laughably misconceived.

Faced with an English NHS corrupted over decades by the risible idea that it is a “business”, for example, David Cameron’s best proposal for restoring some heart and compassion to the service is apparently to make good treatment of patients the subject of performance-related pay; thereby reifying the very notion – that nothing matters or motivates people, except money – that is causing the rot.

Faced with a banking sector in which almost every senior player seems implicated, at some level, in condoning or failing to prevent corrupt and irresponsible behaviour, it seems the best the government can do is to whimper from the sidelines about ­ring-fencing some aspects of banking activity.

Well, enough; and under these circumstances, it is hardly surprising that ever-larger numbers of thinking Scots are tempted by the idea of a fresh start in a fresh nation. Yet in truth, there is no mainstream party, at either UK or Scottish level, that will finally call this corrupt and self-serving elite for what it has become, or will name the frightening process of splitting and denial which sets in, when modern bosses convince themselves – like so many apparatchiks of some old Stalinist state – that in order to do their jobs properly, they have to suppress their own natural moral sentiments, and trample over everyone else’s, in the service of the prevailing business ideology.

For you can split the human psyche for a while of course; long enough to pocket the thick end of a billion quid as personal wealth, if you are a lucky player in the banking sector. But when it comes to constructing a society with the strength and resilience to survive shocks, to maintain its institutions, to look towards a credible future – well then, you need to put the psyche together again, to balance freedom and ambition with security and justice, individual opportunity with the need for a strong and decent convivial life.

To trade honestly, to care for the sick, to meet crime with justice, to do as we would be done by; these are the cornerstones of any civilisation. And it is therefore difficult to feel anything but contempt for the market-dazzled generation of politicians who decreed that we could afford to put these values on the back-burner, while a bunch of blank-eyed business school graduates, taught to pride themselves on their emotional and civic dysfunction, told us how to run our lives and our institutions.

For in their seduction by a creed so obviously wrong-headed, and their sheer lack of practical political wisdom, those politicians have gradually conspired to bring almost every institution in British life into increasing disrepute; and the nation itself – given another year or two of shame and impunity on this scale – to what may be the brink of dissolution.


http://www.scotsman.com/news/joyce-mcmillan-shamed-nation-dying-of-greed-1-2779834

 Joyce McMillan is theatre critic of The Scotsman, and also writes a political and social commentary column for the paper. She has been involved in many campaigns for democracy and human rights, both in Scotland and internationally, and has been a freelance journalist, based in Edinburgh, Scotland, for more than 25 years. She was a Visiting Professor in the School of Drama and Creative Industries at Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh from 2006 to 2010. 

13 comments:

  1. 'For the love of money is the root of all evil....'. Unrestrained secular appetites are harnessed and driven by powers and principalities entirely at odds with our hard won Christian moral society. The author is entirely correct, rampant individualist ideology of 'communities' 'diversity' and concerted efforts by neo liberalism and the internationalists that have infected the English institutions are causing desparation and denial to breed.

    The law must be applied and upheld equally or we are all lost.

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    1. Russia Today has just been showing the problem of weapons in schools in the UK. It would seem that gun and knife crime are predominently a problem of diversity and communities. The gentleman they spoke to, a youth worker, owed his heritage and his accent to the West Indies where the murder rate in Jamaica is the highest in the world. This is the accent, a sort of anglicised creole, which is destined to replace the cockney accent in 20 years as its speakers are destined to replace the cockneys. Cape Flats, Chicago, London, Birmingham, Manchester, Nottingham. The reporter said the problem afflicts deprived inner city areas here. I think that is coded speak for something else.
      Such inner city violence and rioting in the American style was just as Enoch Powell predicted; but then what did he know?

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    2. The English language must be revived as a New English derived directly from Old English if the nation is to survive. As George Orwell believed, our language has become corrupted and debased with its reliance on foreign words which only serve to hide meaning. As he wrote in an essay, "Why antirrhinums for what used to be snapdragons?"
      With the spread of the reduced 'Laandan' creole dialect, reminiscent of New-Speak', matters can only get worse.
      (the words "new" and "speak" are actually pure English - In reality, it would have been more likely to have been given the name Nova-Oration, or some such lifeless name, derived from Latin or Greek, by the bureaucrats of Orwell's 1984)

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  2. This is the collapse of European Christendom, encouraged and hastened by the banking elite and their Marxist useful idiots. It is not just the bankers and senior management that have this I'm all right Jack and the devil take the hindmost attitude. It runs through the whole of society. The values that we were brought up with in the 1950s and 1960s were dismissed as namby pamby as was the whole moral ethos by the Marxist students and hippies of the 60s and 70s whose motto was do your own thing. The most sickening example I have seen was "Teenage Joy of Sex". Here in my small town in the back of beyond the pupils from the local secondary school - sorry we must call them students now - go around the town throwing down litter eveywhere. When a friend challenged them she got the reply "somebody will pick it up for me". The groundsman at the school has to pick up their trash also on grounds of health and safety i.e. the little darlings might get hurt picking up their own detritus. No responsibility and no discipline but this has been encouraged by the Marxists as a way to bring western civilisation down so they could impose their Marxist one world revolution. However, it was not ever always perfect. But greed and corruption were mostly restricted to the political class in decades gone by. We did not lose our ralways because of Beecham, we lost our railways because of Ernest Marples the transport minister who wanted the freight on the roads to benefit his road haulage business. This is the same Ernest Marples who was later done for fraud and fled to France.

    However, one other problem is that for the last 50 plus years we have been importing people from the third world, notably the Indian sub-continent, where corruption is endemic. There is even another form of reverse assimilation going on. There is going to be increasing conflict as Asians, as is their wont, begin to become the entrepreneurs par excellence and become increasingly wealthy; they like and are very good at making money. This is not in the psyche of most ordinary English. Money is power and that is where the conflict is going to arise.

    And now we have Mr Cameron inviting India to make England an economic colony as well as being free to further colonise our actual territory. There is a reverse Raj process going on; except that Indians differ radically from the English in their level of corruption and their obsession with making money. Was this another part of the one world plan? To make the English metal bashers for everybody? And now we hear that we have become too dependent on foreign gas and our electricity prices are set to rocket. Thank you Mrs Thatcher who ensured that the coal we could have use to make gas and electricity is locked in the ground. As our countryside is built over due to mass immigration we will soon be dependent on other countries for our food as well as energy and oil. They will have us well and truly by the short and c......!!

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    1. Sorry that should have been Beeching not Beecham.

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  3. Robin, why has the English Democrats been so silent over the disgrace that is the Mid Staffordshire scandal? Why are the EDs not providing a voice for the people of Staffordshire?

    It seems that in recent months you have completely taken your eye off the ball to curry favour with the far right.

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    1. I think that those responsible should be prosecuted. We have not been currying favour with the far right. We are however getting ourselves better organised and better focussed on the financing of politics. The increasing attacks are a sign of the increasing anxiety of our opponents.

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    2. I hope I am not alone in being confused at and depressed by this expression "The Far Right". It was invented by the far left to describe any Europeans, the vast majority, who never chose to have the mass immigration of non-Europeans foisted on them. They still do not want it but are too paralysed by the fear of being called "racist", the Marxists' avowed tool to bring them down, to protest. We must stop being afraid of being called racist - a term never applied to any other race who, even if it was, wouldn't care - if we are to survive.

      Russia Today informed us yesterday that Marine Le Pen had been invited to speak in Cambridge. She was greeted by "Anti-Nazi" demonstrators. That will be the fascists of the Left who do not permit free speech. In interview she sounded remarkably like Nigel Farage or even the supporters of this party. She wants France out of the euro and the EU and its restoration as a free, independent country like the "radical right" or perhaps that should be the old consensus here. She wants to preserve France's national identity by putting an end to immigration. This is understandable as the indigenous French are to be outnumbered by Africans and muslims by 2050 and their muslims are heading towards 15% of the population, threatening the Jews who are leaving, living in no-go areas and introducing halal meat and sharia law. Her visit to Cambridge was not mentioned here as far as I am aware; perhaps another D notice. I would have thought the BBC would have relished seeing UAF putting the boot into the old Nazi. Watch Russia Today to find out the truth but then Father John Peck, a convert to Orthodoxy has said that post-Marxist, Christian Russia will save the West. That is now becoming obvious as nobody else will.

      The Left has been waging a war of attrition against the West since the War, if not before. They have been very successful, shifting the political consensus right over in their direction so that all three main parties here, as elsewhere in Europe, are culturally Marxist, wedded to the multiculturalism which will ultimately spell the end of Europeans, their culture and civilisation in their own continent. No other race is being subjected to this.

      I have been privy to information which suggests that this European genocide and the outbreeding of Europeans has been deliberately planned to benefit a few. But as with the gas chambers of Auschwitz we will never know until it is all over. If it is the case then nothing will ever be allowed to surface in the media. Marine Le Pen merely speaks of economic causes i.e. capitalist globalization for the benefit of a small global plutocracy, certainly not for the masses who are merely ciphers, pawns in their game. However, I am sure she knows what the Left are up to.

      We are now at the eleventh hour for Europeans. We need to demand to sit down and discuss the futures of our countries with the political elites in a calm and reasoned manner. But neither the Left nor globalizing capitalism and its political servants will allow us to do that. All we can do is to vote for parties - if we dare - deemed by our politicians to be "Far Right". Eventually it will all collapse in bloodshed like a house of cards. Had they listened to the people in the first place rather than silencing them with their terror campaign all this mess could have been avoided. Presumably the person who wrote your piece on mass immigration is to be labelled a fascist, a Nazi and of the "Far Right". Most of us actually liked our countries the way they were. They weren't broke so why fix them.
      The were cohesive, stable, peaceful, largely free of crime and corruption and civilised.

      If nothing happens and Europeans and their culture and civilisation disappear with the subsequent disastrous consequences for mankind - the third world is thus for a reason that cannot even be spoken about - will I be allowed to shed a tear or will I just be screamed at as being an inveterate Nazi, a pariah of the "Far Right"?

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  4. Keep calm and carry on. The more vociferous the nay sayer the more deep the wound. The tags of racist and fascist are losing their sting week by week as more and more are thus labelled.

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    1. Keep calm and carry on was the motto from the War. I have even read a comment that the famous British/English stiff upper lip is mere cowardice, a way of burying your head in the sand. The English are now keeping calm and carrying on, burying their heads in the sand and muttering into their beer for they have no other option. They are terrified of the law and of official condemnation.

      But the War we are fighting now is even more deadly than the last and the first casualty of this war is truth. You don't get that from our politicians and media. This war is a war of constant attrition to wear us down, knock the fight out of us and then dispose of us as none of the above believes that England and the English are worth saving. Even a friend in UKIP has said that they want the English gone. They being the globalists, the anti-nationalists of the New World Order. But this war is worse than the last because our enemies are no longer across the Channel or the North Sea, they are here amongst us, our politicians, our banking elite, our financiers, journalists, Common Purpose, who want our country and its people wiped out in the name of globalism. As for the immigrants themselves we never know whether deep down there is a hatred of us within them. Certainly it applied to the three terrorists on trial. Many want to rob us, kill us or blow us up. Most of them probably want to make large areas of our land their own. We are on the run this time. The Nazis might have subjugated us but they would never have driven us out of our own country. They actually liked the English and didn't want them exterminated. My UKIP friend has suggested I listen to Churchill's speeches to keep my spirits up. This is the same Churchill who in 1920 spelled out who was behind the Russian Revolution, not the Russians themselves; but that is beyond the scope of this website.

      The truth is coming out bit by bit. There is an interesting letter in our local paper today regarding the continuing uproar about plans to build houses all over our beautiful county. The writer informs us that through the Lisbon Treaty, which some countries voted against but were circumvented, all countries signed up to Agenda 21 which planned to allow in millions more New Europeans, i.e. millions more third worlders into Europe. Now the totalitarian EU is in place the race is on to fully multiculturalise it without Europeans being able to protest at the risk of being judged to be far right hate speech makers and thrown into a gulag. But we know, don't we, that this is a further acceleration of the third world invasion that has been engineered since the War. Europeans and their civilisation must be wiped out at all costs. But at least somebody has spelled it out. She asked the main parties and local mps what they were going to do about it. The answer will be nothing even though England is being, as she says, overwhelmed. Meanwhile in America Russia Today tells us that thousands are protesting against gun control. Defenceless they will then rapidly be reduced to a minority in a multicultural mirror-image of the totalitarian Marxist EU so that America can become brown; for nearly all those protesting against gun control and there is a 50/50 split of opinion, appear to be white; whites now being about 70% of the population, under 50% for children. They fear the totalitarianism on the horizon and the fact that Obama has said that America will be a better place with a white minority.

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    2. A pertinent fact worth remembering about ethnic minority status and its demand for special treatment is that caucasians, specifically europeans have always been the minority when considering the world's population. Before the fratricidal disasters of the the two world wars caucasians formed about two thirds of the total population, I believe. After the world wars that figure dropped to about eight per cent - and falling. So when someone claims they have ethnic minority status and are a deserving cause - remember it has been and increasingly will be, you.

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    3. I think a friend told me about 20 years ago that his son had learnt at school that whites were about a third of the world's population about 100 years ago. I think two thirds might be a bit high. However, as I have stated previously the population of India has tripled in 60 years and that of Africa may have done the same. And Afro-asians are due to double again - before falling back, oh yes? Whites have remained static or dropped since the 1960s as we heeded advice to control our population as the world was overcrowded; whereas everybody else, bar the Japanese, just continued to breed like rabbits and would have starved, without our help.

      One thing that puzzles me is that no other race seems to possess our inventive genius, forged due to the harsh northern climate. Not even the Jews with their supposedly higher iq. I cannot think of a single Jewish invention. The Chinese and the Japanese admit that they do not. The bulk of inventions of the last four hundred years, let alone the time of the Greeks and Romans, are down to the British, the Germans, the French and the Italians and other smaller European countries and settlers overseas. So when whites are gone and the world is left to the Jews, the Africans, Asians, Chinese and Japanese where is the world headed? Interesting that on Russia Today there is no sign of cultural enrichment and their muslims are seen as a problem rather than a benefit to society.

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    4. Sorry I should have included the Russians who have come up with quite a few inventions. I would be grateful for an answer to this truth from the globalist social engineers.

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