Tuesday 13 March 2012

Conflict and Interest...

There seems to me to be a fairly obvious and very dangerous dichotomy between the idea of providing services such as health care, justice and basic policing for all and the idea that these services be a platform for profit-making for private companies. And this isn't about the NHS although that is a prime example of an idea under just such a threat. I just cannot understand how this government (ha!) can continue to violently dismantle every institution left available that has yet to be completely transformed from a public body designed to serve the human beings that need it into a market, re-drawing it in the shape of the financial bodies that have so badly failed themselves and everybody else left trapped in this para-existence of their making. Farming out contracts to perform police procedures to a set of shadowy highest bidders at a time when the Met's reputation with the general public is as low as it is is frankly breathtaking.
Nearly a year on from watching while politician after politician irresponsibly and patronizingly refused to address anything approaching an astute or intelligent analysis of the London riots, we are to be faced with a true Orwellian nightmare. What channels would a News International Security Corps™ squad have had to go down to arrest Rebekah Brooks today? I believe there is a simple phrase that applies here, and it is conflict of interest. For a government otherwise obsessed with both these words, I am amazed they have failed to spot either here.