OnTheWight always welcomes a Letter to the Editor to share with our readers – unsurprisingly they don’t always reflect the views of this publication. If you have something you’d like to share, get in touch and of course, your considered comments are welcome below.
This from Hans Bromwich, Cowes. Ed
Britain is reaping the price of being ruled by a privileged, self entitled, elite, many of whom have never had to roll up their sleeves and get their hands dirty.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, under this order, the Country has moved more and more towards prioritising an ‘easy money’ economy, be it as a world exemplar in laundering funny money through the City of London, or by becoming increasingly a service economy, where we produce very little ourselves, favouring the much cheaper option of getting other nations to manufacture pretty much everything we need.
As a consequence we’ve lost contact with many of our industrial roots and perhaps foolishly allowed ourselves to become a country that now finds itself with increasing vulnerabilities.
The game
The strengths and weaknesses of the current economic model are well understood and frequently exploited. To give just one example, consultants and consultancies are often amongst those with a shrewd understanding. Over the last decade many have had a field day capitalising on the inadequacies and lack of intimate knowledge of those in power.
So, when it comes to say, commissioning, the name of the game is to get politicians and Whitehall mandarins to write the brief, knowing their real life expertise, more often than not, will be severely limited, if it exists at all. Then deliver precisely what they specified within a watertight legal framework.
Worked to ‘their’ specifications
When things, surprise surprise, don’t perform to expectations, you can argue you provided the product precisely to ‘their’ specifications. More often than not you can rely on more lucrative work to address any subsequent issues, with those who commissioned the disaster becoming increasingly desperate to cover up their failings, and willing to throwing more and more money at it, (particularly if it’s taxpayers money), in an attempt to conceal their incompetence.
This gameplay can be witnessed across National and local Government, in addition to many non commercial organisations, it’s a means of plundering taxpayer coffers, and ferreting away huge sums of money, often into distant offshore tax havens.
What’s the solution?
Well that’s down to the people, and the ballot box, but a massive cultural change is clearly needed, with present day miscreants and all their playmates assigned to the dust of time.
Image: secretlondon under CC BY 2.0
