A simmering discontent with the entire political class

[Albus]

http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/46885,opinion,will-self-mr-jacqui-smith-is-a-crap-bookkeeper-timney

Surely the thing that really rankles about Richard Timney's habits is not that he watches pay-per-view porn, but that he's such a crap bookkeeper? With keyboard-clackers losing their jobs like Tommies going over the desktop no one can afford to have makeweights on the payroll like Timney, but Jacqui Smith has been dobbing him somewhere between 20 and 40 grand a year to play the part of her 'constituency aide'.

I don't happen to think pornography is a victimless crime: on the end of that remote control button is not some free-spirited - yet entirely well-adjusted - nymphomaniac, but a collection of miserable and tranquilised emotional zombies.

But that being noted, most of us have succumbed to the lure of a fiver's worth of arousal at some time or another - hell, it's just one of the panoply of seeming-delights that we consume, without bothering to consider the consequences for their producers. Who could happily slip on their trainers if they were treated to a view of the child-labourer who stitched them for a couple of bucks a day? Or bite down on an out-of-season sugar snap bean if he was confronted with the human being who wrecked her back harvesting them? Not me. Porn - together with drugs - is just the most poisonous of the fruits of globalisation.

No, Timney is a crap bookkeeper, and his boss - together with the rest of her parliamentary cronies - is a crap legislator, because she seems to believe that it's acceptable for the people's representatives to be remunerated on an ad hoc basis. Still, let's think no more on it, the grubby, furtive manipulation of paper and hand that goes into MPs' expenses claims is only a diversion from the really bad habits of the political class. It may have been Fred Goodwin who got his windows smashed, but it's not just fat cat bankers who the British people are angry with - there's a simmering discontent with the entire political class, although it's expressed in calling only for individual resignations.

It may have been Labour in power, but there wasn't a single member of Her Majesty's loyal Opposition who saw the recession coming and reacted appropriately. Nor do the Tories have a sorbet's chance in hell of creating sustainable economic growth any faster than the incumbents - and in their heart of hearts they know it. If we take them at their own word - which maintains that government is important and powerful - then both sides of the House are equally culpable. But we can't get them all to quit - that's called a revolution - so instead we moan about their peccadilloes.

This week's G20 summit - paid for by you and me - is just more of the style-over-substance politics that's dominated the last decade. There will be a lot of posturing, a lot of strutting, a lot of mutual preening, but precious little insemination of the world economy. If I were the Commissioner of the Met, and peering into the void where my - and my colleagues' - pensions used to be, I wouldn’t bother cracking down on anarchist nutters, I’d simply lock the doors of the Excel Centre and let the world leaders stew in their own juice.

Of course, the alternative view is that far from being morally responsible for this balls-up, HMG wasn't that powerful at all - at least not in an integrated and deregulated world; therefore the likes of Smith - and Brown, for that matter - should 'fess up to quite how impotent they'd become once they’d handed the keys of the economy to the sugar snap bean merchants.