Jimmy Savile, phone hacking, LIBOR, and MPs expenses
Wednesday, 24 Oct 2012, 14:32
Visible to anyone in the world
Edited by Adam Jacobs, Wednesday, 24 Oct 2012, 14:34
All the recent revelations about Jimmy Savile are the latest in a long line of events where things seem to have gone badly wrong.
Remember the MPs' expenses scandal of 2009? Greedy MPs were claiming all sorts of things on expenses to which they were not entitled. A vanishingly small number were prosecuted, far more simply paid back the money. As if a normal person could obtain money by fraud, offer to pay it back when caught, and that would be the end of it. Many other MPs even got to keep their ill gotten gains.
And then we had the LIBOR scandal, in which traders at Barclays Bank were fiddling data on interest rates to make money fraudulently.
What do all these things have in common, apart from being scandals?
It seems to me that all of these scandals were, at their heart, caused by exactly the same phenomenon: a group of people in positions of power, who were not in any meaningful way accountable for their actions, and who believed (often correctly) that their power was such that they could do whatever they liked and get away with it.
There will doubtless be an inquiry into how the BBC and others allowed Savile to get away with his crimes for so long. Just like there have been inquiries into other scandals.
However, none of this will change the fundamental problem: that society creates power structures in which those at the top have so much power they can do pretty much what they like, no matter how antisocial or criminal it is.
If we leave it to our political leaders — some of the most powerful and unaccountable people out there — to fix this problem, then I'm afraid we are going to be very disappointed.
Jimmy Savile, phone hacking, LIBOR, and MPs expenses
All the recent revelations about Jimmy Savile are the latest in a long line of events where things seem to have gone badly wrong.
Remember the MPs' expenses scandal of 2009? Greedy MPs were claiming all sorts of things on expenses to which they were not entitled. A vanishingly small number were prosecuted, far more simply paid back the money. As if a normal person could obtain money by fraud, offer to pay it back when caught, and that would be the end of it. Many other MPs even got to keep their ill gotten gains.
That problem hasn't gone away, of course, they're at it again.
Much has also been made this year of the revelations that journalists at Rupert Murdoch's newspapers were hacking phones on an industrial scale.
And then we had the LIBOR scandal, in which traders at Barclays Bank were fiddling data on interest rates to make money fraudulently.
What do all these things have in common, apart from being scandals?
It seems to me that all of these scandals were, at their heart, caused by exactly the same phenomenon: a group of people in positions of power, who were not in any meaningful way accountable for their actions, and who believed (often correctly) that their power was such that they could do whatever they liked and get away with it.
There will doubtless be an inquiry into how the BBC and others allowed Savile to get away with his crimes for so long. Just like there have been inquiries into other scandals.
However, none of this will change the fundamental problem: that society creates power structures in which those at the top have so much power they can do pretty much what they like, no matter how antisocial or criminal it is.
If we leave it to our political leaders — some of the most powerful and unaccountable people out there — to fix this problem, then I'm afraid we are going to be very disappointed.