THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY

It has been interesting, if unsurprising to watch the MP’s expenses scandal unfold slowly, tortuously, dragged out to create the maximum amount of discomfort, shame, personal humiliation, leading to a drip drip of M P’s being forced out of parliament. It has been a particularly unsavoury spectacle, greed, mendacity, venality, the shabby exposure of forms of theft, albeit scented by the body spray of bureaucratic apologia, ‘I didn’t beak the rules.’
I say unsurprising and indeed it is, I believe, merely a reflection of the world we have gradually created for ourselves. For how much of this ‘me first,’ culture, get away with as much as you can, testing the rules to breaking point, merely reflects our own lives. For how many of the journalists covering this story or indeed the indignant electorate have not claimed for something illegitimate, not stretched the rules, made the occasional buck from silence and non declaration? For once, is it not possible, that our representatives are just that, images of ourselves?
We are confronted I believe with the legacy of Thatcherism, a legacy so much embraced by the Labour Party; all life is aspiration, life merely a process of accumulation with its constant companion greed. We witness Thatcher’s final triumph, ‘there is no such thing as society,’ only individuals and indeed individual greed.

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