Wednesday 20 July 2011

Corruption starts slowly .

Having spent most of yesterday glued to the television I am now trying to be dynamic.! I have been striding through the long grass muttering to myself but my mind keeps returning to the events in Parliament. I am told its all being televised again today and I will find it hard to concentrate on anything else.
After the karate blow delivered during yesterday's hearing I fear that nothing will come up to that moment but unless Cameron really does grasp just how much trouble he is in then I fear we may be subjected to some appallingly banal moralising.

The bottom line here is surely that the police, the journalists and regrettably some MPs have been corrupted by huge wealth. The promise of sumptuous holidays, of houses in the country, of classic cars have all been too much for them to resist. Corruption is pervasive....it carries before it all those who imagine that they might just as well jump on the gravy train since everyone else seems to be doing it.
It is a matter of great personal regret that some of those who were found guilty of fiddling their expenses were people known to me...and it illustrates all to clearly just how easy it seems to be to fall from grace.

And it can creep up on you very slowly at first.
When I was a teenager I was pressed into being the treasurer of a club I was in.
There never seemed to be the right money in the pot and getting my money and their money mixed up was very easy indeed...I constantly made up the missing amounts when ever I had to show the accounts. That one experience has prevented me from every getting involved with finances in any organisation since.
So paranoid am I about this that since entering the church I have never claimed expenses of any kind..after having had an incumbent who claimed mileage for a ten mile trip to the next parish, I could see the dangers looming all too clearly.

It is all too easy to get it wrong almost by accident...and if you then succeed after making the first mistake the temptation to go on doing it must be enormous. I can imagine that the path to absolute corruption must be a slow but inevitable progress, adding a little here, feeling that you are following a well worn path so it must be Ok until one day you wake up to find that you are in the thick of it.
I try never to judge any of them...but its hard not to after all the revelations we are being treated to right now.
Must get back to the TV....

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