Elite is not so great and not so good...
THE keen-eyed will note I have expressed concerns that our establishment – that amalgam of official bodies that actually run this country while our politicians pretend to – has slid into self-serving bias and dishonesty. That is why I deplore the yawning gulf that has developed between the establishment and the broad masses of the people – a gulf that in part led to the people rebelling against what they were told and voting Leave in the referendum. Now a bad example of bias is waved before us.
The Electoral Commission is important – the arbiter at the very heart of our democracy. If it is not believed to be straight as a die, we are in real trouble. Yet its latest verdict is bent as a corkscrew.
It investigated complaints from three whistle-blowers that the Leave campaign had broken the referendum rules by overspending on its campaign during the run-up to the vote two years ago. Whether the aim was to cause a disqualification of the pro-Brexit side and thus annul the vote-outcome we cannot know but it certainly looks like it.
So the EC’s investigation had to be the essence of integrity. Yet it accepted the allegations without demur and found they were true. The evidence was fibrous. Vote Leave had funded a smaller body BeLeave with a few hundred thousand to campaign alongside it. Not only was Vote Leave director Matthew Elliott never even interviewed, neither was anyone else on the Leave side. So they were convicted and condemned unheard. Is that the way we now do justice in this country?
Blazing across the headlines as the EC pondered away was the example of the utter fiasco of the BBC condemning Cliff Richard by strong inference of child molestation on the basis of an anonymous informant. And look at the fortune that has cost the BBC.
Also deemed unnecessary of examination by the Electoral Commission was the £9.3million spent by the then government on a terrifying warning of the disaster of voting Leave. This pamphlet was mailed to every household in the country. And still the majority voted the other way.
The millions of tax money spent on that pamphlet were NOT classed as part of the “Stay In” campaign budget, though it was the clearest example of attempted outcome-rigging.
This sort of thing, added to selfenrichment with staggering salaries for the few at the top and blithering incompetence, never sanctioned, in high places is why the “great and the good” are now widely regarded by many among the masses as neither great nor good.
As mentioned here before, it is time for a clear-out. But which political giant will undertake it?