Corruption continues apace

4 March 2011

The latest casualty in the cancerous corruption being exposed in our society is the London School of Economics.

The director of the London School of Economics has resigned over its links to Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi.  Sir Howard Davies said the decision to accept £300,000 for research funding from a foundation run by Gaddafi’s son, Saif, “backfired”, and he recognised that the university’s reputation had “suffered” and he had to leave.  There will also be an investigation into claims that Saif Gaddafi plagiarised his PhD thesis which was awarded by the LSE in 2008.  Dr David Starkey said on Question Time that the LSE “sold degrees”, invented useless degrees which they could sell to overseas students, to which he added the charge of “intellectual corruption”. 

Pressure upon University funding is straining moral probity, and there may be more sweaty palms in other University Senates.  However, even if this is a solitary example, it is but part of the pattern being revealed throughout our society.  Our consumer society became a debtor society, then corruption set in as people without principle struggled to find a way to make ends meet and politicians promised to continue a hand-out society.  It came to a head in 2007 with the unscrupulous profiteering in the US subprime mortgage crisis which recklessly disregarded the consequences of their schemes.  This was encouraged by the incompetence of international banking, fuelled by time-serving politicians who let them have the freedom to stoke up risk at the tax-payers’ expense.  Then the MPs’ expenses scandal diverted attention from the bankers, but only as long as it took the bankers’ to lose their shame and begin reclaiming their massive bonuses.  The £1.1billion loss made by Royal Bank of Scotland neatly matched the £1.1billion paid out in bonuses to its bankers.  Just as the banking shares are recovering after coming through the doldrums, there is talk of selling the bank shares “to recoup the taxpayer’s money”, but really to give rich pickings to the money men as bank shares move northwards after this long depression.  This will be the next scandalously bad decision, like Gordon Brown’s selling the UK gold reserves at its low, while gold is now flying high.

Not to be outdone by bankers and politicians, the media which usually maintains a cartel of silence about its own wheeling and dealing, briefly surfaced to reveal the shocking extent of illegal phone hacking in the News of the World, which was probably not confined to them but was possibly par for the course.  LSE funding from Libya is just another example in a growing litany of shameful exposure of a net of corruption revealing itself through the whole of our unchristian society.  Are we witnessing the result of the death of Christian conscience in the boardrooms of Britain over the past few decades?