Meaning to Life

Meaning to Life and Nolan’s Seven Principles

I inferred in my last blog post that corruption, more searchingly describable as abuse of power, is the most likely reason as to why there are next to no sign posts in the capital city of Costa Rica.

Across the water in the United Kingdom news has this morning surfaced that the Crown Prosecution Service has filed criminal charges against four individuals holding office in the highest positions of responsibility in the land: persons not only elected but also paid quite handsomely in order to represent and protect the common good. This would appear to be the culmination of an extraordinary sequence of revelations which first began last year in the columns of the London Daily Telegraph. It seems as though the Daily Telegraph’s investigation centred on a computer hard drive containing documented evidence of expense claims made between 2004 and 2009 by members of the British Houses of Parliament, the findings far from revealing very much maternal from a body often referred to as the Mother of Parliaments.

There are 646 members of the lower House of Commons and 392 have now been asked to pay back money that has been “falsely” claimed. So far just three, plus one member from the upper House of Lords, have been presented with criminal charges of… well, theft actually. The four, with boring predictably refute the charges and “robustly” too as if to make it sound like they are so far removed from guilt it is preposterous or a trumped up move by the Crown Prosecutors. It would be very interesting to know if they believe they are not guilty of a crime then would they admit to being guilty of anything: ignorance of the law, minor abuse of power or simply in the end to being an absolutely normal greedy human being which, I remind you, is exactly not what they were elected to be or paid for? Besides that what about the other 389? Would they now support a law that allowed thieves to go unpunished on handing back ill gotten gains – presumably with the proviso that only if they got caught in the first place, of course?

In 1995 the British Prime Minister must have suspected that there was trouble at’ mill because he requested the Nolan Committee examine precisely the matter of people in public life. The committee took six months to make its presentation based on the seven common fundaments of selflessness, integrity, objectivity, accountability, openness, honesty and leadership. Clearly the dictate of common sense was not enough and for a lot of members of parliament neither was the Nolan Committee’s highlighting report.

On the theme of corruption and a look at where it might be going in the future I jump right back across the pond to the United States of America where, as would befit their panache for style of grandeur, they seem to have made a decision recently of monumental proportions in their Supreme Court.

It has been pointed out to me this week in no uncertain terms by a couple of extremely learned American travellers that the Supreme Court made a decision which augurs very darkly for the future of the rights of the individual in that country. Quite simply there will be no limits on groups funding political parties. You could always argue that they are waving the flag for Nolan’s principles of honesty, openness and perhaps leadership, although I do not think the Nolan Committee was offering an à la carte menu but more intended it as a set meal.

President of the Washington-based government-watchdog group Democracy 21, Fred Wertheimer put it very succinctly, “With a stroke of the pen, five justices wiped out a century of American history devoted to preventing corporate corruption of our democracy.”

An awful lot of people in an awful lot of countries would be advised to re-read the Nolan Committee’s report on selflessness, integrity, objectivity, accountability, openness, honesty and leadership but don’t they sound like useful guidelines for living your own life even if the august among us don’t want to use them?