Skip to main content

Sorry, Archbishop, you're wrong on this one...

Proving once again just how in touch with public opinion he is, the Archbishop of Canterbury yesterday warned against the 'systematic humiliation' of MPs.

His line seems to be that after the recent expenses revelations, we've kind of got the point. No need to carry on beating MPs over the head, because if we do, democracy will suffer.

What a load of old cobblers.

Every individual elector has the right to know whether his or her own MP has put in claims for moats, duck houses, bookshelves etc or 'flipped' their primary residence to claim excessive expenses. The Telegraph's coverage is not merely an exercise in establishing the general principle of greed and dubious moral standards. It is a chance to hold elected representatives to account for their dodgy decisions and ethics.

I'm no theologian, but I would have thought that Christianity was quite strong on the idea of people taking responsibility for their actions. And if, as a result the revelations, democracy emerges tarnished in the eyes of the public, so be it. The anger that people feel will hopefully be translated into radical reform.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Becoming a Twister board

I spent yesterday evening in an old factory building off Brick Lane playing kids' games with an organisation called Fun Fed. The idea is that a bunch of adults get together and act like children for a couple of hours. We played tag and stuck big coloured discs on ourselves so that we could become human Twister mats. There was an awful lot of running around and I was thinking that I ought to get to aikido a bit more often. Being a child is very hard work.
1 comment
Read more

Buttahz

Belatedly made it to the excellent Evolving English exhibition at the British Library. When I arrived, I found a curator talking to a large group of inner-city London teenagers who'd come with their school. "How do you spell Butters ?" he was asking them. The kids volunteered different spellings of the slang term. Museum man then posed another question. "But you don't actually say it like that, do you?" He was referring, I think, to the glottal stop that replaces the t in London English, although phonetics isn't my strong point. The youth were sent off to record slang in a booth for posterity and my attention was drawn to another class. This group was much younger and seemed to attend an exclusive private school. "Joanna! Come over here and listen to a bit of Romeo and Juliet!" The precocious little kids ran hither and thither, listening to samples of regional dialects on a superb interactive display or speeches from statesmen such as JFK and ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Captain Birdseye and other people of rank

Regular readers may recall that I once doubted the existence of Yeo Valley. I'd never heard of the Yeo mountain range and I therefore rated the likelihood of there being a valley at somewhere between 0 and 5%. Of course, I had yoghurt all over my face when I discovered that the place really does exist. Somewhere in Somerset, I seem to recall. Today, having read an article in the latest edition of The Marketer magazine, I'm astonished to discover that there really was a Captain Birdseye. Well, I need to qualify that just a little. There was a Mister Clarence Birdseye who invented the fish finger back in 1955. The avuncular, uniformed figure who dominated our TV screens for about thirty years may have been an invention of over-eager advertising creatives, but he didn't blow in on a trawler during a squall. There was actually some connection to a real human being. These revelations about fish and yoghurt are causing me considerable disquiet, because I'm wondering h...
3 comments
Read more