IN ANY society that even pretends to be a fair one there must be five what I would call “equalities”.
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Let me quickly list them: equality of civil rights – we all know we have them though sometimes it is hardly clear what they are.
But they have to be equal between citizen and citizen. Equality before the law – that speaks for itself though there are severe doubts about that.
Equality of the franchise – basically the vote of a duke carries no more weight than that of a ditch-digger.
Our whole democracy depends on that. Equality of access – meaning it does not matter what your dad did or where on the social pecking order you come from, if you have the talent, brains and drive you can get to the very top.
But the one rarely mentioned is equality of sanction, ie, punishment. If a truck driver behaves with insane recklessness such that he wrecks his lorry and its cargo, the law will descend like a ton of bricks.
Loss of HGV licence of course, meaning loss of career. A charge of dangerous driving, possibly even criminal recklessness resulting in huge losses to someone else.
Certainly an appearance in court, professional ruin and possibly jail. But if a banker takes insane risks with investment gambles, brings his bank to the verge of bankruptcy when they predictably fail, what happens?
The bank is pronounced “too big to fail” and billions of taxpayer money are drafted in to save it. The board is fined eye-popping sums but these are paid by the bank (or what is left of it), which means shareholder money.
The really guilty retire to their French chateaux, West Country manors or Riviera yachts, borne thither by private jet.
But they never seem to face personal sanction. That is reserved for “the little people”.
Those of us with a few miles on the clock recall the Robert Maxwell affair when a greedy tycoon raided the pension funds of the Trinity Mirror retired and working staff to prop up his ailing Pergamon Press.
Not forgetting the Lonrho affair with Tiny Rowland. And now we have the BHS collapse and its former owner Sir Philip Green.
My point is that none of these men acted alone. There were cohorts of butter-smooth City slickers in the background helping them.
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If these brokers and accountants were so dim they did not know what they were doing, the dodgy one would never have employed them.
So they knew that when Maxwell was looting pension funds they were depriving honest, loyal staff who needed every penny to retire on.
If sanctions are administered, and they must be, they should include all the aider and abettors, and they should be personal, not drawn from company reserves.
In 1757 French writer JeanJacques Rousseau was being rowed across Portsmouth harbour when he witnessed Admiral John Byng being shot on his own quarterdeck.
Why? he asked the boatman. He gave up Menorca to your lot, was the answer. All right, he replied, but why execute him? “To encourage the others,” was the reply. And no British admiral has ever turned tail since then.
If the word goes round the City that Charlie Farnsbarns was involved in a swindle and has now lost his mansion, his Bentley and the place in the Dordogne, it really does encourage rigorous integrity among the others.
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GETTYTravel misery was caused deliberately
WHEN utter misery is inflicted by governmental forces on hundreds of thousands of people the question has to be asked: incompetence or deliberation?
Since the weekend before last such misery has been inflicted on the poor souls trying to cross the Channel via Dover to spend their holidays in France and thus do enormous benefit to the French economy.
Add to them the thousands of poor truck drivers. They have all been held for up to 15 hours by increased “security” measures on the Calais side.
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There was nothing accidental about this. The French knew perfectly well that this is the height of the holiday season and the traffic volume would be enormous.
They could have drafted in extra passport checkers. Instead they have just seven booths, only three manned at most and sometimes just one.
The weekend before last there were 250,000 held with their children in exhausting lines of hopelessness.
They could not even hang a U-turn and drive home. It is not we who are exporting the illegal immigrants and terrorists to the continent, it is the other way round.
And for the record, not one intercept of a suspicious person has been made. It has all been futile. And no, it was not accidental, it was deliberate
