From the FT:
Jacques Chirac yesterday became the first former head of state in France to be ordered to stand trial after investigators formally charged the retired president with abuse of public funds and breach of trust during his time as mayor of Paris...
Mr Chirac, whose memoirs of his 40 years in politics are due to be published next week, is accused of creating 21 phoney jobs at the Paris City Hall for friends and political allies between 1992 and 1995... As well as Mr Chirac, two of his former chiefs of staff at the City Hall and seven others have been charged with helping to create or benefiting from the alleged bogus jobs. If convicted Mr Chirac could face up to 10 years in prison.
Right-ho. That makes about six months in prison for every phoney job. The Labour government have created about two million phoney jobs since 1997, and the Tory government had already created two million phoney jobs when Labour took over.
If six months' jail per phoney job is the going rate, then our politicians would have to be sentenced to a total of two million years.
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8 comments:
What about a further month for each spurious new law surreptitiously passed?
Excellent plan. Or one month per page of law, regulation, guidance, FAQs etc.
First we need a law. They can't be prosecuted unless they have breached the law. All that wibbly stuff like "misfeasance in public office" is all very well but it would rarely support a prosecution for anything less than directly dipping your mitts in the public till.
This is yet another field in which I ride a favourite hobby horse.
Protecting the little people from those who would treat them unfairly (whether they be other individuals of branches of the State) and the ability to keep checks on those in temporary charge of the State machine are best protected by specific laws drafted along the lines of "thou shalt not".
The MPs' expenses & allowances fiasco is a prime example of what happens when rules/laws are drawn in very wide terms. What seems acceptable one day becomes a heinous crime the next as the political wind changes. Specific rules help everyone. There's no reason we shouldn't have them.
How I long to return to the position when we could all discover easily what we were not permitted to do.
TFB, specific laws drafted along the lines of "thou shalt not".
A bit like the Bill Of Rights, which was a list of things that 'the Crown' couldn't do, rather than a list of the rights of individuals?
I'm with Terry Pratchett on this:
Neilette: 'We put all our politicians in prison as soon as they're elected. Don't you?' Rincewind: 'Why?' Neilette: 'It saves time.'
Where was it I read that there are 1,100+ Quangos costing us £90B pa ?
Most of the phoney jobs are in those, admin and professional none-jobs for the lower middle classes.
For starters get rid of those and start again, there could be one unpaid Tsar to decide whether a Quango or Fake Charity served any useful purpose; we would save a fortune and 4 million qualified people could be released to do something more productive.
Then pass a few retrospective laws to punish those responsible for setting them up. Don't bother with prison, just send in the bailiffs to take their stuff, it's what they like after all.
2 million years in prison is a long time. They will probably have evolved into something else by that time, maybe even into human beings.
Ed, good quote:)
Banned, it was probably the TPA and they understated it AFAIAC.
Ross, or maybe into scorpions?
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