I am referring to politics today, where it seems that those who are supposed to be responsible, are being utterly irresponsible on a daily basis, because they are fighting the next election with lies, half-truths and invalid statistics. They have lied, or else not done their homework properly, about the provision of materials in Afghanistan, about the way in which the health service is run; they have been totally negligent with respect to the financial sector, need I go on, the list is endless? The thing that really annoys me is the fact that we seem to have a dual legal system, in which the man in the street can be had up for libel or slander if he makes statements likely to be detrimental, while politicians have no such restrictions on either their statements, written or verbal, and their actions. Those people who were supposed to be monitoring the stock exchange and the operation of the banking system didn’t take their work seriously. A cynic might assume that possibly some of them were more interested in the rise and fall of the value of the pound, through trading, than they were in the future of thousands of people who are now losing their jobs. For whatever reason, no action has been taken against these people. If a builder is found to have flouted the safety regulations, he can be taken to court, and if as a result of an accident he can be sent to jail.
Politicians are disseminating misinformation in order to fool the public into voting for them at the next election, and it would seem that all sides are up to it, or there wouldn’t be so much retraction of proposed government policy. Surely there must be some Parliamentary tool which enables retribution to be meted out to those who have been responsible for this misinformation, which is clearly disrupting some of the most vital services and departments of our government system, and causing public opinion, and our global standing, to be debased. I have always thought that Blair should have been brought to book for the lies he was responsible for repeating, without having taken the advice given at the time.