British Chancellor of the Exchequer, Alistair Maclean Darling, a politician with a name so ill-fitting you wonder how anyone ever took him seriously and if that might be the reason why he seems so driven to condescend, has repaid his immoral expenses claim but will face no charges because ‘he didn’t really do anything wrong’.

So, why pay it back? If the rules said he could have it, what’s the problem?

After all, it was only a few hundred pounds, nothing much, barely a microbe in the pond where cleaning your moat or damp-proofing your boyfriend’s house for thousands was also ‘within the rules’, but it is still a sad indictment of the kind of people we elect to represent us, and although he is the most high profile, he is still just one in a myriad of venerable souls who all thought that they were above standard definitions of morality and entitled to fiddle the public purse as they pleased.

Dozens of them.

All elected and paid for by the average British working taxpayer.

Benefit fraud….? I suspect we’ll never know but it looks that way from where I’m standing… Outrageous? No doubt. Unacceptable? Well… you would have thought so, wouldn’t you?

Except that we will accept it, we will swallow it down like a hunk of rotting beef rather than go hungry or take action to find fresh, uncorrupted meat for the future.

After all, deep down, if ever we get the chance, wouldn’t we all do the same thing? Aren’t the trappings of wealth what we should all be aspiring too? The moat, the bespoke duckhouse, the gilt monogrammed well cover…. aren’t these all things that everyone who is rich should have?

So why don’t we all have them?

Why are we still living in a world of can-have-will-haves and can’t-haves?

What went wrong with the ‘trickle down’ economics about which we were all so optimistic/dubious, but also powerless to prevent?

Sadly I’m forced, once again, to wonder just how many of the world’s outwardly respectable leadership are no more than petty thieves and liars troughing at the bucket for anything they can get, damn their principles and their constituent voters.

After all, we, the masses, are simply too stupid, too easily led, to blind and too deluded by wealth to expect better, aren’t we?

Perhaps it’s time we read the barn wall and realised that the writing up there has changed. The sheep might bleat, ‘four legs good, two legs better’, but they would be wrong, a pig is still a pig no matter how much single malt it drinks….

All our hopes for a world built on integrity and excellence slip further into the capitalist mire by the day. One can only shrug one’s shoulders and wonder if there is anyone left to blame…..

Trickle Down Blame in the Church of the Poisoned Kind by Carey Lenehan

In the midst of ephemeral recession,
each must ask themselves why….
why is how,
for against better reason, one thing is clear;
It is we, the working classes who,
with exquisite mediocrity,
during the rampant rule of
triumphant exploitative principle,
fail to grasp the generous opportunity afforded us
by the wealthy,
to improve our impoverishment
and catch the trickles we were fed
when wealth became too great,
for the rich to hold in their hands.

Had we worked harder,
sold our souls more readily,
cast aside morality
and valued wealth over life,
as they have so long done,
some paltry portion of their richesse
would have come to us
as a faltering drip,
like phlegm from a hayfevered nose,
a taste of the other,
a glimpse of utopia,
flat screen TV’s,
greener grass to gaze at and wish fervently for

but

because value has so corrupted
and in these days of quantitive easing,
where 1 + 1 equals 5,
on a derivative scale,
instead of trickled down wealth,
we have only to receive
the trickled down blame
from the venerable sermonisers
of the Church of the Poisoned Kind.