The moral decay of our society is as bad at the top as the bottom
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The moral decay of our society is as bad at the top as the bottom
EarthsAngel Sun Aug 14, 2011 1:05 pm
By Peter Oborne Politics Last updated: August 11th, 2011
David Cameron, Ed Miliband and the entire British political class came together yesterday to denounce the rioters. They were of course right to say that the actions of these looters, arsonists and muggers were abhorrent and criminal, and that the police should be given more support.
But there was also something very phony and hypocritical about all the shock and outrage expressed in parliament. MPs spoke about the week’s dreadful events as if they were nothing to do with them.
I cannot accept that this is the case. Indeed, I believe that the criminality in our streets cannot be dissociated from the moral disintegration in the highest ranks of modern British society. The last two decades have seen a terrifying decline in standards among the British governing elite. It has become acceptable for our politicians to lie and to cheat. An almost universal culture of selfishness and greed has grown up.
It is not just the feral youth of Tottenham who have forgotten they have duties as well as rights. So have the feral rich of Chelsea and Kensington. A few years ago, my wife and I went to a dinner party in a large house in west London. A security guard prowled along the street outside, and there was much talk of the “north-south divide”, which I took literally for a while until I realised that my hosts were facetiously referring to the difference between those who lived north and south of Kensington High Street.
Most of the people in this very expensive street were every bit as deracinated and cut off from the rest of Britain as the young, unemployed men and women who have caused such terrible damage over the last few days. For them, the repellent Financial Times magazine How to Spend It is a bible. I’d guess that few of them bother to pay British tax if they can avoid it, and that fewer still feel the sense of obligation to society that only a few decades ago came naturally to the wealthy and better off.
Yet we celebrate people who live empty lives like this. A few weeks ago, I noticed an item in a newspaper saying that the business tycoon Sir Richard Branson was thinking of moving his headquarters to Switzerland. This move was represented as a potential blow to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, because it meant less tax revenue.
I couldn’t help thinking that in a sane and decent world such a move would be a blow to Sir Richard, not the Chancellor. People would note that a prominent and wealthy businessman was avoiding British tax and think less of him. Instead, he has a knighthood and is widely feted. The same is true of the brilliant retailer Sir Philip Green. Sir Philip’s businesses could never survive but for Britain’s famous social and political stability, our transport system to shift his goods and our schools to educate his workers.
Yet Sir Philip, who a few years ago sent an extraordinary £1 billion dividend offshore, seems to have little intention of paying for much of this. Why does nobody get angry or hold him culpable? I know that he employs expensive tax lawyers and that everything he does is legal, but he surely faces ethical and moral questions just as much as does a young thug who breaks into one of Sir Philip’s shops and steals from it?
Our politicians – standing sanctimoniously on their hind legs in the Commons yesterday – are just as bad. They have shown themselves prepared to ignore common decency and, in some cases, to break the law. David Cameron is happy to have some of the worst offenders in his Cabinet. Take the example of Francis Maude, who is charged with tackling public sector waste – which trade unions say is a euphemism for waging war on low‑paid workers. Yet Mr Maude made tens of thousands of pounds by breaching the spirit, though not the law, surrounding MPs’ allowances.
A great deal has been made over the past few days of the greed of the rioters for consumer goods, not least by Rotherham MP Denis MacShane who accurately remarked, “What the looters wanted was for a few minutes to enter the world of Sloane Street consumption.” This from a man who notoriously claimed £5,900 for eight laptops. Of course, as an MP he obtained these laptops legally through his expenses.
Yesterday, the veteran Labour MP Gerald Kaufman asked the Prime Minister to consider how these rioters can be “reclaimed” by society. Yes, this is indeed the same Gerald Kaufman who submitted a claim for three months’ expenses totalling £14,301.60, which included £8,865 for a Bang & Olufsen television.
Or take the Salford MP Hazel Blears, who has been loudly calling for draconian action against the looters. I find it very hard to make any kind of ethical distinction between Blears’s expense cheating and tax avoidance, and the straight robbery carried out by the looters.
The Prime Minister showed no sign that he understood that something stank about yesterday’s Commons debate. He spoke of morality, but only as something which applies to the very poor: “We will restore a stronger sense of morality and responsibility – in every town, in every street and in every estate.” He appeared not to grasp that this should apply to the rich and powerful as well.
The tragic truth is that Mr Cameron is himself guilty of failing this test. It is scarcely six weeks since he jauntily turned up at the News International summer party, even though the media group was at the time subject to not one but two police investigations. Even more notoriously, he awarded a senior Downing Street job to the former News of the World editor Andy Coulson, even though he knew at the time that Coulson had resigned after criminal acts were committed under his editorship. The Prime Minister excused his wretched judgment by proclaiming that “everybody deserves a second chance”. It was very telling yesterday that he did not talk of second chances as he pledged exemplary punishment for the rioters and looters.
These double standards from Downing Street are symptomatic of widespread double standards at the very top of our society. It should be stressed that most people (including, I know, Telegraph readers) continue to believe in honesty, decency, hard work, and putting back into society at least as much as they take out.
But there are those who do not. Certainly, the so-called feral youth seem oblivious to decency and morality. But so are the venal rich and powerful – too many of our bankers, footballers, wealthy businessmen and politicians.
Of course, most of them are smart and wealthy enough to make sure that they obey the law. That cannot be said of the sad young men and women, without hope or aspiration, who have caused such mayhem and chaos over the past few days. But the rioters have this defence: they are just following the example set by senior and respected figures in society. Let’s bear in mind that many of the youths in our inner cities have never been trained in decent values. All they have ever known is barbarism. Our politicians and bankers, in sharp contrast, tend to have been to good schools and universities and to have been given every opportunity in life.
Something has gone horribly wrong in Britain. If we are ever to confront the problems which have been exposed in the past week, it is essential to bear in mind that they do not only exist in inner-city housing estates.
The culture of greed and impunity we are witnessing on our TV screens stretches right up into corporate boardrooms and the Cabinet. It embraces the police and large parts of our media. It is not just its damaged youth, but Britain itself that needs a moral reformation.
Tags: andy coulson, Crime, David Cameron, Denis MacShane, Ed Miliband, Financial Times, Francis Maude, George Osborne, Gerald Kaufman, Hazel Blears, justice, London, london riots, moral reformation, MPs' expenses, Sir Philip Green, Society, Switzerland, tax, Tottenham, uk riots.
David Cameron, Ed Miliband and the entire British political class came together yesterday to denounce the rioters. They were of course right to say that the actions of these looters, arsonists and muggers were abhorrent and criminal, and that the police should be given more support.
But there was also something very phony and hypocritical about all the shock and outrage expressed in parliament. MPs spoke about the week’s dreadful events as if they were nothing to do with them.
I cannot accept that this is the case. Indeed, I believe that the criminality in our streets cannot be dissociated from the moral disintegration in the highest ranks of modern British society. The last two decades have seen a terrifying decline in standards among the British governing elite. It has become acceptable for our politicians to lie and to cheat. An almost universal culture of selfishness and greed has grown up.
It is not just the feral youth of Tottenham who have forgotten they have duties as well as rights. So have the feral rich of Chelsea and Kensington. A few years ago, my wife and I went to a dinner party in a large house in west London. A security guard prowled along the street outside, and there was much talk of the “north-south divide”, which I took literally for a while until I realised that my hosts were facetiously referring to the difference between those who lived north and south of Kensington High Street.
Most of the people in this very expensive street were every bit as deracinated and cut off from the rest of Britain as the young, unemployed men and women who have caused such terrible damage over the last few days. For them, the repellent Financial Times magazine How to Spend It is a bible. I’d guess that few of them bother to pay British tax if they can avoid it, and that fewer still feel the sense of obligation to society that only a few decades ago came naturally to the wealthy and better off.
Yet we celebrate people who live empty lives like this. A few weeks ago, I noticed an item in a newspaper saying that the business tycoon Sir Richard Branson was thinking of moving his headquarters to Switzerland. This move was represented as a potential blow to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, because it meant less tax revenue.
I couldn’t help thinking that in a sane and decent world such a move would be a blow to Sir Richard, not the Chancellor. People would note that a prominent and wealthy businessman was avoiding British tax and think less of him. Instead, he has a knighthood and is widely feted. The same is true of the brilliant retailer Sir Philip Green. Sir Philip’s businesses could never survive but for Britain’s famous social and political stability, our transport system to shift his goods and our schools to educate his workers.
Yet Sir Philip, who a few years ago sent an extraordinary £1 billion dividend offshore, seems to have little intention of paying for much of this. Why does nobody get angry or hold him culpable? I know that he employs expensive tax lawyers and that everything he does is legal, but he surely faces ethical and moral questions just as much as does a young thug who breaks into one of Sir Philip’s shops and steals from it?
Our politicians – standing sanctimoniously on their hind legs in the Commons yesterday – are just as bad. They have shown themselves prepared to ignore common decency and, in some cases, to break the law. David Cameron is happy to have some of the worst offenders in his Cabinet. Take the example of Francis Maude, who is charged with tackling public sector waste – which trade unions say is a euphemism for waging war on low‑paid workers. Yet Mr Maude made tens of thousands of pounds by breaching the spirit, though not the law, surrounding MPs’ allowances.
A great deal has been made over the past few days of the greed of the rioters for consumer goods, not least by Rotherham MP Denis MacShane who accurately remarked, “What the looters wanted was for a few minutes to enter the world of Sloane Street consumption.” This from a man who notoriously claimed £5,900 for eight laptops. Of course, as an MP he obtained these laptops legally through his expenses.
Yesterday, the veteran Labour MP Gerald Kaufman asked the Prime Minister to consider how these rioters can be “reclaimed” by society. Yes, this is indeed the same Gerald Kaufman who submitted a claim for three months’ expenses totalling £14,301.60, which included £8,865 for a Bang & Olufsen television.
Or take the Salford MP Hazel Blears, who has been loudly calling for draconian action against the looters. I find it very hard to make any kind of ethical distinction between Blears’s expense cheating and tax avoidance, and the straight robbery carried out by the looters.
The Prime Minister showed no sign that he understood that something stank about yesterday’s Commons debate. He spoke of morality, but only as something which applies to the very poor: “We will restore a stronger sense of morality and responsibility – in every town, in every street and in every estate.” He appeared not to grasp that this should apply to the rich and powerful as well.
The tragic truth is that Mr Cameron is himself guilty of failing this test. It is scarcely six weeks since he jauntily turned up at the News International summer party, even though the media group was at the time subject to not one but two police investigations. Even more notoriously, he awarded a senior Downing Street job to the former News of the World editor Andy Coulson, even though he knew at the time that Coulson had resigned after criminal acts were committed under his editorship. The Prime Minister excused his wretched judgment by proclaiming that “everybody deserves a second chance”. It was very telling yesterday that he did not talk of second chances as he pledged exemplary punishment for the rioters and looters.
These double standards from Downing Street are symptomatic of widespread double standards at the very top of our society. It should be stressed that most people (including, I know, Telegraph readers) continue to believe in honesty, decency, hard work, and putting back into society at least as much as they take out.
But there are those who do not. Certainly, the so-called feral youth seem oblivious to decency and morality. But so are the venal rich and powerful – too many of our bankers, footballers, wealthy businessmen and politicians.
Of course, most of them are smart and wealthy enough to make sure that they obey the law. That cannot be said of the sad young men and women, without hope or aspiration, who have caused such mayhem and chaos over the past few days. But the rioters have this defence: they are just following the example set by senior and respected figures in society. Let’s bear in mind that many of the youths in our inner cities have never been trained in decent values. All they have ever known is barbarism. Our politicians and bankers, in sharp contrast, tend to have been to good schools and universities and to have been given every opportunity in life.
Something has gone horribly wrong in Britain. If we are ever to confront the problems which have been exposed in the past week, it is essential to bear in mind that they do not only exist in inner-city housing estates.
The culture of greed and impunity we are witnessing on our TV screens stretches right up into corporate boardrooms and the Cabinet. It embraces the police and large parts of our media. It is not just its damaged youth, but Britain itself that needs a moral reformation.
Tags: andy coulson, Crime, David Cameron, Denis MacShane, Ed Miliband, Financial Times, Francis Maude, George Osborne, Gerald Kaufman, Hazel Blears, justice, London, london riots, moral reformation, MPs' expenses, Sir Philip Green, Society, Switzerland, tax, Tottenham, uk riots.
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Re: The moral decay of our society is as bad at the top as the bottom
EarthsAngel Sun Aug 14, 2011 1:09 pm
II agree with the article, the only difference between the rioters and Gov, MP's, they made their thieving legal! The system is rotten from the top down.
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Re: The moral decay of our society is as bad at the top as the bottom
EarthsAngel Sun Aug 14, 2011 1:50 pm
UK riots: The Blitz hero who shows us what today’s Britain has lost
The gutsy spirit of wartime London has been sadly lacking in recent days.
The Blitz, September 9, 1940 - UK riots: The Blitz hero who shows us what today’s Britain has lost
The Blitz, September 9, 1940 Photo: HULTON ARCHIVE
Christopher Booker
By Christopher Booker
7:00PM BST 13 Aug 2011
Comments97 Comments
Before our attention was diverted by recent events, I was meditating on an episode from the most famous time when London’s sky was licked with flames and its streets strewn with rubble. In November 1940, when the threat to law and order was not feral children but German bombers, a gentleman named Frederick George Leighton-Morris, aged 30, was living in Jermyn Street. He had been turned down by both the police and the fire service because of a medical condition which gave him only four years to live. As high explosives rained down on the West End, he was warned by a policeman that a delayed-action bomb had fallen into the flat next door. Mr Leighton-Morris’s response was to climb down through the hole in the roof made by the bomb, which he found resting upright on a bed.
He picked it up, though it weighed a hundredweight (or 50 kilograms as we should say in these compliant times) and staggered down the stairs with it. His plan was to take it to St James’s Park, where it might pose less risk to life and property. In the street he met a policeman, who arrested him for entering “an evacuated area”. He was hauled before a court, where the magistrate told him it was “intolerable that any private individual should meddle with a bomb in this way”. “No person other than those in authority,” he went on, should do such a thing. He ordered Leighton-Morris to pay a fine of £100 (which, in those days, would have been half of a workman’s annual wages), or spend three months in prison. His response was to say, “even if I had a hundred thousand in the bank, I would rather do three months than pay the fine”. When this was reported, it provoked an uproar. Winston Churchill was questioned about it in the House.
Although the hero’s neighbours had already raised £100 to pay his fine, the Home Secretary, Herbert Morrison, intervened to reduce it to £5. Leighton-Morris said he would frame his neighbours’ cheque as a souvenir, and they all celebrated with a communal party.
This little glimpse of a bygone England might please the US journalist Frank Miniter, who writes in the current National Review Online under the heading “England used to be a country of men”. The cue for his piece was last week’s picture of a man taking off his trousers in a London street, meekly handing over his shoes and clothes to a menacing teenage looter. Contrasting the England of 70 years ago with today, Miniter’s theme was that the English seem to have lost all their old manliness and self-reliance, allowing themselves to be ruled by an all-pervading politically correct state, and by the very attitude voiced by that magistrate, with his lecture on how it was “intolerable that private individuals” should act as Leighton-Morris had done and that such matters must be left to “those in authority”.
This was much the attitude exemplified by our politicians last week, as they called for ever more powers for a police force which had so signally failed to protect the people of London, Manchester and elsewhere from anarchy. When Boris Johnson stumbled through embarrassing platitudes to a crowd who had seen their businesses destroyed the night before, he exemplified a political class that has lost any ability to engage in human terms with the people it is meant to serve. When he promised, like David Cameron, that the culprits “will be caught and they will face punishments that they will deeply regret”, it was clear his listeners regarded these as simply empty words.
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A similar gulf has opened up between the police and the rest of us. It has become a cliche of modern Britain that, when we face a genuine affront to law and order – such as having our house burgled – the police seem powerless or are nowhere to be seen. Yet when it comes to helping social workers take a new-born baby from the arms of its mother on a hospital bed, it seems they have the time and resources to arrive mob-handed.
The police are happy to hit peaceful, pro-hunting demonstrators of the Countryside Alliance over the head with riot sticks. Yet when looters rage for an hour and a half through Clapham, our constabulary simply look on.
The police, withdrawn from their proper involvement with the community, shut away behind the walls of their concrete bunkers and the electronic barriers of recorded-voice telephone systems, reflect the stance of the politicians and officials who rule over us. It was apt that last week, as havoc engulfed our cities, The Daily Telegraph reported that 20,000 public officials who last year lost their jobs in “cuts” received a total of £1 billion in compensation. One of the foremost was a senior official of the National Policing Improvement Agency, intended “to boost police efficiency”, whose pay-off was £500,000.
On one hand, we are told that we taxpayers must pay £200 million to provide compensation for the damage caused by the rioting hooligans. On the other, to compensate those 20,000 officials who have lost their jobs, we must foot a bill for five times that sum. Yet in important ways these are different sides of the same coin.
It is an ancient truth of human affairs that, if power is not exercised properly and responsibly, it doesn’t just vanish. It re-emerges in what the psychologists call “inferior” forms, to be abused, in ways which are anti-social. The power now enjoyed by our political class and the system they represent does not ultimately belong to them. It belongs to the British people. Only by collectively recovering some of that manly independence of spirit personified by Mr Leighton-Morris can we hope ever to get it back.
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Law and Order
Politics »
Comment »
Christopher Booker »
Personal View »
David Cameron »
In Law and Order
London and UK riots: 50 powerful images
50 powerful riot images
Burned out shells of cars block a road after overnight rioting and looting in the neighbourhood of Toxteth in Liverpool
In pictures: fourth night of riots
London riots: Telegraph readers' photos of the rioting and looted areas of the city
Readers' riot photos
London riots: send in water cannon to clear streets, Theresa May told
In pictures: third night of riots
London and England riots: rioters and looters appear in court
Rioters appear in court
The gutsy spirit of wartime London has been sadly lacking in recent days.
The Blitz, September 9, 1940 - UK riots: The Blitz hero who shows us what today’s Britain has lost
The Blitz, September 9, 1940 Photo: HULTON ARCHIVE
Christopher Booker
By Christopher Booker
7:00PM BST 13 Aug 2011
Comments97 Comments
Before our attention was diverted by recent events, I was meditating on an episode from the most famous time when London’s sky was licked with flames and its streets strewn with rubble. In November 1940, when the threat to law and order was not feral children but German bombers, a gentleman named Frederick George Leighton-Morris, aged 30, was living in Jermyn Street. He had been turned down by both the police and the fire service because of a medical condition which gave him only four years to live. As high explosives rained down on the West End, he was warned by a policeman that a delayed-action bomb had fallen into the flat next door. Mr Leighton-Morris’s response was to climb down through the hole in the roof made by the bomb, which he found resting upright on a bed.
He picked it up, though it weighed a hundredweight (or 50 kilograms as we should say in these compliant times) and staggered down the stairs with it. His plan was to take it to St James’s Park, where it might pose less risk to life and property. In the street he met a policeman, who arrested him for entering “an evacuated area”. He was hauled before a court, where the magistrate told him it was “intolerable that any private individual should meddle with a bomb in this way”. “No person other than those in authority,” he went on, should do such a thing. He ordered Leighton-Morris to pay a fine of £100 (which, in those days, would have been half of a workman’s annual wages), or spend three months in prison. His response was to say, “even if I had a hundred thousand in the bank, I would rather do three months than pay the fine”. When this was reported, it provoked an uproar. Winston Churchill was questioned about it in the House.
Although the hero’s neighbours had already raised £100 to pay his fine, the Home Secretary, Herbert Morrison, intervened to reduce it to £5. Leighton-Morris said he would frame his neighbours’ cheque as a souvenir, and they all celebrated with a communal party.
This little glimpse of a bygone England might please the US journalist Frank Miniter, who writes in the current National Review Online under the heading “England used to be a country of men”. The cue for his piece was last week’s picture of a man taking off his trousers in a London street, meekly handing over his shoes and clothes to a menacing teenage looter. Contrasting the England of 70 years ago with today, Miniter’s theme was that the English seem to have lost all their old manliness and self-reliance, allowing themselves to be ruled by an all-pervading politically correct state, and by the very attitude voiced by that magistrate, with his lecture on how it was “intolerable that private individuals” should act as Leighton-Morris had done and that such matters must be left to “those in authority”.
This was much the attitude exemplified by our politicians last week, as they called for ever more powers for a police force which had so signally failed to protect the people of London, Manchester and elsewhere from anarchy. When Boris Johnson stumbled through embarrassing platitudes to a crowd who had seen their businesses destroyed the night before, he exemplified a political class that has lost any ability to engage in human terms with the people it is meant to serve. When he promised, like David Cameron, that the culprits “will be caught and they will face punishments that they will deeply regret”, it was clear his listeners regarded these as simply empty words.
Related Articles
Looter: 'The longer the riots last, the more I’ll take’
12 Aug 2011
UK Riots: roll call of today in the courts
13 Aug 2011
Men killed in 'criminal act'
13 Aug 2011
Chancellor: Britain must tackle 'deep-seated' social problems
13 Aug 2011
A palpable change in the national mood
12 Aug 2011
Cameron meets Salford residents after riots
12 Aug 2011
A similar gulf has opened up between the police and the rest of us. It has become a cliche of modern Britain that, when we face a genuine affront to law and order – such as having our house burgled – the police seem powerless or are nowhere to be seen. Yet when it comes to helping social workers take a new-born baby from the arms of its mother on a hospital bed, it seems they have the time and resources to arrive mob-handed.
The police are happy to hit peaceful, pro-hunting demonstrators of the Countryside Alliance over the head with riot sticks. Yet when looters rage for an hour and a half through Clapham, our constabulary simply look on.
The police, withdrawn from their proper involvement with the community, shut away behind the walls of their concrete bunkers and the electronic barriers of recorded-voice telephone systems, reflect the stance of the politicians and officials who rule over us. It was apt that last week, as havoc engulfed our cities, The Daily Telegraph reported that 20,000 public officials who last year lost their jobs in “cuts” received a total of £1 billion in compensation. One of the foremost was a senior official of the National Policing Improvement Agency, intended “to boost police efficiency”, whose pay-off was £500,000.
On one hand, we are told that we taxpayers must pay £200 million to provide compensation for the damage caused by the rioting hooligans. On the other, to compensate those 20,000 officials who have lost their jobs, we must foot a bill for five times that sum. Yet in important ways these are different sides of the same coin.
It is an ancient truth of human affairs that, if power is not exercised properly and responsibly, it doesn’t just vanish. It re-emerges in what the psychologists call “inferior” forms, to be abused, in ways which are anti-social. The power now enjoyed by our political class and the system they represent does not ultimately belong to them. It belongs to the British people. Only by collectively recovering some of that manly independence of spirit personified by Mr Leighton-Morris can we hope ever to get it back.
Share:
inShare1
Law and Order
Politics »
Comment »
Christopher Booker »
Personal View »
David Cameron »
In Law and Order
London and UK riots: 50 powerful images
50 powerful riot images
Burned out shells of cars block a road after overnight rioting and looting in the neighbourhood of Toxteth in Liverpool
In pictures: fourth night of riots
London riots: Telegraph readers' photos of the rioting and looted areas of the city
Readers' riot photos
London riots: send in water cannon to clear streets, Theresa May told
In pictures: third night of riots
London and England riots: rioters and looters appear in court
Rioters appear in court
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