22 May (Part 1) - Corruption everywhere
I used to think that corruption was confined to what I would condescendingly
refer to as Banana Republics when my job involved communicating with many of
them. My responsibility was India and China and, telephonically speaking,
downhill from there. Apart from South Africa under its Apartheid Government the
whole of Africa was ‘mine’.
In Africa cables would mysteriously disappear - the termites ate it, honestly,
we didn’t nick it - and so in extreme cases would their telephone exchanges.
When Lagos could not be raised one morning (in 1982 from memory) we discovered
that it was sited on the floor above the accounts department and it had to be
burned to the ground to hide the evidence of where the money was actually going.
It couldn’t happen here; but then the following year it did. BT’s (actually its
forerunner) was similarly infiltrated - but no exchange incineration.
To introduce a bit of Bexley to this blog; at much the same time, it was
discovered that the managers of BT’s Crayford Engineering Depot were flogging
off bits and pieces to third parties on a massive scale, but unless anyone
knows better, all trace of it has disappeared from the records.
I recall that in my one and only meeting with the Post Office Corporation
(pre-BT) Chairman that he was convinced that there was corruption everywhere and
I thought he must be deluded, but now I realise that in his elevated circles he
would be seeing things that I didn’t.
I didn’t come across corruption again for another ten years when I found to my
horror that the local police were far from honest and coincidentally my daughter
became involved with the Morgan family, a member of which had been murdered in
1987 just as he was about to expose police corruption.
It was still thought to be an almost unique event but probably it wasn’t. We
have very recently seen the Post Office Horizon scandal and now the contaminated
blood fiasco - if that is not too lighthearted a word to describe it. Before
that it was Hillsborough, Grenfell, Test & Trace, lobbying and MPs house flipping. It would seem that
whether it be police, politics pandemic or Post Office the ruling classes do whatever
they damn well please without fear of retribution.
The Morgan and Langstaff (contaminated blood) inquiries have one thing in common. Theresa May. After nearly thirty years
of refusal by successive, mainly Labour, Home Secretaries to consider the
possibility that senior police officers might be bent, she alone stuck her neck out
and ordered an inquiry. It found the Metropolitan Police was Institutionally
corrupt, not only in 1987 but right now. Only one police officer lost his job
over it, the one who tried to expose the shortcomings from within. Several less
than honest Commissioners are collecting fat pensions.
As Prime Minister, Theresa May was not a shining example, but as a compassionate human being maybe she
is. It was Theresa May who as Home Secretary ordered the Morgan inquiry in 2013 and as PM, Langstaff in 2017.
And now we have no spare prison places. How convenient.