I liked Simon Jenkins’ article challenging the way the Government has handled the Baby P affair.
If you totally screw up a bank a Labour minister will grant you a pension of £700 000 for life. If you screw up a social services department, a Labour minister will sack you without compensation. It has taken a decade for the government to mimic Animal Farm. As we peer in through the windows of Downing Street, we can look “from pig to man and from man to pig … but already it is impossible to say which was which”. Some are more equal than others. Politician and banker have become one…
From his time at the Treasury, Balls is used to dealing with bankers and ermine. As a cabinet minister he and his colleagues – Lord Myners, Lord Mandelson, Lord Turner and Lady Vadera – dispense stupefying sums in subsidy to banks. When he contemplates people like Shoesmith, her very name an echo of Labour’s past, he must feel like Macmillan on finding himself at a Tory conference in Llandudno: “Good God, are there no dukes around here.”
Hat tip: Alan Moore
