Fremtidige internasjonale skandaler

Matthew Parris har en oversikt i dagens Times om fremtidige internasjonale skandaler. Her gjengir jeg noen av de viktigste og mest relevante for oss i Norge.
Mye på denne listen er verdt å lese for enhver som ønsker å tenke nytt om politikk, enjoy:

Many prison officers are complicit in the supply of drugs within prisons. How else do I reconcile what’s common knowledge — that drug use is rife in prison — with the almost abusive security checks I’ve undergone when I visits friends in prison? Among the reasons for these checks must sometimes be the protection of a monopoly.

Nothing like a real competitive market exists among banks or energy suppliers. They are classic cartels, robbing their customers.

Many sporting records that still stand — and not just in cycling — have been fuelled by performance-enhancing drugs. Have you noticed the plateauing or even dropping off of many winning times, including in my own former sport of long-distance running? This is because of anti-drug enforcement. There will be more and much bigger stories here than have yet been told.

The policing of the criminal law is riddled with corruption. The Crown Prosecution Service and the police, not statute, are the real determinant of punishable behaviour. Wide discretion has to be exercised in selecting the tiny minority against whom proceedings are taken. If money has been accepted by corrupt Met officers from the one media corporation on which the spotlight falls today, how many more officers in how many other forces have accepted, and are still accepting, and from whom, how much more in exchange for who can say what?

The easing of credit that ministers are now pushing so hard, coupled with bizarrely low interest rates, will — as we speak — be drawing millions of our countrymen into debts and mortgages that will strangle them when interest rates rise.

he way that British ministers and mandarins can proceed, within a few years of retirement, to take up positions on the boards of companies in the fields that they have until recently supervised is an absolute disgrace. We’re not talking shades of grey here. It’s outrageous.

So is the “government-relations” lobbying industry. We are heading for an American situation in which a whole class of expensive leeches interpose themselves between the government and the citizen.

When all is told there will have been some shocking war crimes in Afghanistan. A purpose of war is to kill people. This has been a horrendous experience for many servicemen. Normal human sensibilities will have been degraded. Awful things will have happened and been “covered up”.

Euro-MPs’ expenses. Enough said.

EU budgeting. Enough said.

Lawyers. This is a coming storm — coming, I do hope, in my lifetime. MPs have bitten journalists; journalists have bitten MPs; now judges, who hate the media, are about to bite journalists. Sooner or later comes biteback time. That the practice of law in England has for centuries been a stitch-up to enrich a professional monopoly at vast public and private expense is perfectly well known — not least by lawyers, who subliminally know that theirs is not quite a gentleman’s calling. Hence their rather desperate pomposity and self-regard. It must crack.