Government should be there to manage things for the common good of the people, be it law, infrastructure and public provision or the economic well being of the nation as a whole. Government, in essence, is about managing the collective needs of society as a whole, so that we are spared a chaotic piecemeal approach which would give rise to an uncoordinated mess differing from hamlet to hamlet, town to town and city to city. To put it in the most simplistic terms, this management process ensures that a spanner that does a job in a small rural house, will do the same job in the biggest city skyscraper, all other circumstances being relatively the same. Government is about coordination and a system wide approach to collective living for the benefit of all.
Above all, government should be accountable to the people it ‘serves’.
There can be no question that managing the collective needs of a nation is huge and complex process which also requires delegated local government to manage at the local level.
Are we not up to the job? Vast resources go into studying the processes of government, it requires oversight and checks and balances, it requires the best and brightest minds (one would hope) to ensure it works and it needs to be both proactive and reactive, capable of being sensitive to the needs of society at every level.
How hard can it be? At times it is likely to be incredibly hard, perhaps even pushed to it limits, as in the case of a disaster. But if we are not up to it, then it will fail, because there’s no other creatures alive to stand in for us to take over the job. If we, the people, are not up to the task, then one has to wonder how we got this far in the first place?
However…
If any government places the interests of one section of society over another, then it is an illegitimate government and corrupt. It has failed the basic precepts of good governance.
If a government falsifies its intent or disguises its true intent or betrays the manifesto promises on which it was elected, it renders itself illegitimate by its own actions.
If the process of government becomes corrupt for whatever reason, then the effects will inevitably be wide spread and toxic for the country as a whole, affecting millions of lives. And if corruption is tolerated, it will, inevitably, cut ever deeper, threatening the entire structure of society. If there is no accountability then despots and tyrants can, and do, rise, to the detriment of the many. History is littered with examples and as learning creatures we should pay critical attention to the histories we have amassed on our journey to today.
Right now, in Britain, we are undergoing a dramatic and traumatic period of change. Britain is one of the richest nations in the world, the City of London is still regarded as the financial capital of the world, and, as journalist, Roberto Saviano, observed, it is also the most corrupt place on Earth and we have a government, with its ‘free market’ ideology, which is in bed with that corruption.
But there is another force at play in Britain which is increasingly being called to account by the people. The media. In measured tones of reasonableness, or not, lies and spin and corruption are given a voice which is rarely honestly and bluntly challenged, and some parts of the media, controlled by unaccountable oligarchs, are fully complicit in the most sordid, corrupt, practices imaginable.
Britain is currently still on the descent into ever greater corruption by self serving elites who have abandoned even the basic precepts of good governance for despotism.
The tipping point for this recent wholesale corruption was the global financial crash which saw the greatest heist in history of the wealth of nations and since then the UK government has pursued that agenda brutally and relentlessly (via its vile and deceitful austerity pogrom) to extract and transfer the wealth of the people into the hands of the corrupt financial markets and corporations and the right wing media does everything in its power to further that agenda, demonising and vilifying anyone who speaks out against it.
The problem for the government and the media is that they are losing their comfortable hegemony, in their arrogance and greed they assumed our continued passive participation in their self serving status quo. They are being forced to eat their own words and actions. Increasingly, people have had enough, try as they might to dismiss us as yobs and mobs, scroungers and leftist agitators (add any other derogatory names which emblazon their headlines), and are demanding a reckoning. They accuse us of politicising catastrophe, as if these things happen in a political vacuum, as if somehow these are mere accidents of nature in the general course of events. There is always a price to be paid for corruption, there are perpetrators and victims, and when their targeted victims decide they have had enough, the price transfers to the perpetrators and the simple fact is, they don’t like it up ’em. They are great at dishing it out, but when the tide turns they are the ones who immediately scream like stuck pigs and cry foul play.
I am pretty sure that the vast majority of people want a ‘strong and stable’ Britain with a ‘strong and stable’ government, but that is never going to come from those who put the interests of money over the well being of people. And that’s a fact.
KOG. 20 June 2017
https://www.cityam.com/261819/london-holds-off-new-york-keep-its-top-spot-worlds-number
