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Nobody will stand up and be counted RESIGNATIONS. Remember
them? They used to be quite popular — especially among the political
elite.
Prime Ministers, Chancellors, MPs — there’s a long list of
elected representatives who have bowed to public pressure and stood down
because of one scandal or another.
Financial impropriety, an extra-marital affair or plain old incompetence
were all good enough reasons to fall on your sword.
But times have moved on and so has the notion of responsibility. Thus
the Labour Party can appear to break the law on political donations, oversee
the biggest run on a bank in years and blithely lose the names, addresses
and bank details of millions of Child Benefit recipients and yet not one
senior Government figure has seen fit to move aside.
Even worse, the Labour Party’s acceptance of money from a donor
in direct contravention of regulations has been defended on the basis
that although it may have been illegal the person responsible for the
actions did not know this.
That argument is one which flies directly in the face of all legal precedence.
It has long been accepted that ignorance of the law is no defence and
the Government should know that.
But instead of taking responsibility for any of these crises Prime Minister
Gordon Brown is adopting the tried and trusted method of riding out the
storm by apologising for any error, setting up an inquiry to ensure such
a thing could never happen again and then hoping by the time it reports
everyone has forgotten what it was all about in the first place.
Which may well work. But many will feel the old way carried a lot more
dignity.
Double standards
ON the subject of resignations — is it time Bono stepped down from
his self-appointed position as saviour of the world’s poor?
We ask in the wake of his recent defence of his band U2’s decision
to move some of their vast wealth out of Ireland to avoid paying tax on
it.
As our columnist Joe Horgan reports this week when tackled on this the
singer replied: “This country’s prosperity, a lot of it came
out of tax innovation — so it would be churlish to criticise U2
for doing what we were encouraged to do.”
This is the man, remember, who has lain into the Irish Government for
failing to give enough in overseas aid to the poorer countries of the
world. And he is also leader of a rock group who have benefited greatly
from Ireland’s system of tax breaks for artists.
Perhaps Bono could take time between albums and money-raking world tours
to ponder on the theory that if, just maybe, people didn’t try to
avoid paying the same tax rates as the vast majority of the population
the Irish Government may just have a little more money to direct towards
overseas aid.
Or is that argument a little too economically complex for him? |
