However - the Italian justice system is a wreck. Mills has two automatic rights to appeal, and there's a short expiry date on these trials - if he can delay or extend his appeals to 2010, the case ends and he gets away. Furthermore, the actual briber has changed the constitution to give himself immunity. There's little outcry because the Prime Minister controls the state TV and owns virtually all the private media (TV, radio, newspapers) left.
I really want Mills to go down, and take Jowell and Co. with him. They're the epitome of all that's soulless and corrupt about the 'Labour' Party. They don't have any points of contact with the working or middle classes in this country. Mills is a solicitor specialising in tax avoidance. With the Tories, their openly expressed ideological position is that the state is bad and the interests of the individual must take precedence over all other rights. That authorises the kind of obscene greed, selfishness and contempt for others that they routinely manifest. Once you've adopted that position, criminality is simply innovation and entrepreneurship.
Labour, however, was founded by the people to further the collective interests of the people. We're meant to see the state as the means by which to express and implement the public will. Our party has been captured (without a fight) by a cabal which explicitly rejects this vision. Once we have a cabinet of tax-evaders, directorship-seekers, bank-schmoozers, private-education supporters and above all NAKED CAPITALISTS, we have a party of hypocrites. These people don't have a sense of social justice or collective future. They openly and honestly believe in meritocracy: the concept that people successful in one field (always finance) must automatically have a superior vision of justice, education, morality, health, diplomacy and all the other branches of government. The result is a government advised and often run by unelected individualists who treat the ordinary citizen as a shameless, lazy benefit cheat while allowing the serious criminals to wreck the economy and export jobs. I didn't see many of them arguing for 'light-touch regulation' of the benefits system, but they certainly enforced it with regard to bank regulation - with brilliant results, as I'm sure you'll agree.
People: New Labour are entryists. They spent the 80s throwing the Trots out of Labour for using the same tactic, but they are simply a gang of wreckers who took the empty shell of a broken party and rebuilt it on shifty money and Thatcherite ideology.
Think on this: the Inland Revnue (HMRC) don't own their offices. They were sold to Mapeley Steps Limited and rented back (supposedly, and wrongly, to save money). Who are Mapeley Steps? They're an offshore company which doesn't pay any tax. So the body tasked with collecting tax to spend on our behalf saw nothing wrong with selling its own buildings to tax evaders. The government itself sees no problem with ripping itself of, with having no faith in the right and duty of government to fund its activities through fair and just taxation. Who benefits from this? Not the government. Not us. Mapeley Steps benefit. Who does government work for? Not us, but Mapeley Steps and all its colleagues. If even the government doesn't believe in government, what's going to happen to us all? Taxation pays for schools, health, pensions, clean air and decent housing. If they condone tax evasion, all these things will decline.
They don't have our interests at heart, even now. The question is, for whom do we vote now? I just don't know. I do know that the sorry tale of Jowell, Mills and Co. is simply a tiny little moral tale about a clique that completely lost its way, lost its moral compass and was completely captured by the glitz of the City. I'm sorry to bang on like a 1920s Syndicalist, but this was inevitable.
PS. For more on Mapeley Steps and several other equally disgraceful scandals, read Private Eye, which is more than just old jokes for buffers, and the Guardian's recent series on tax avoidance.
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