BBC chairman’s ties with Boris Johnson shows problem with the UK

The most heartbreaking came in the form of a warning from the Scottish Ambulance Service that more people need its services when they fall ill because they can’t afford to properly heat their homes or to eat.

Meanwhile, the chairman of the Conservative Party south of the Border is being forced to explain the details of an eye-wateringly huge tax settlement.

Nadhim Zahawi had to repay an undisclosed sum – believed by experts to be around £5 million but regarded as a private matter by the public servant concerned – due to a “careless tax error”.

READ MORE: Richard Murphy: Did Nadhim Zahawi really pay a £1m tax penalty for 'carelessness'?

Few will have much sympathy with the former chancellor’s “plight”, which he says was due to forgetting to declare he had received around £27m in cash due to family shareholdings in the polling company YouGov.

The details which have been released so far about the affair are impossible to grasp – the millions grappling to budget with far, far smaller sums.

It’s enough to know that the man who at the time questions first emerged about the missing tax was in charge of the UK’s finances. How on earth can we trust the nation’s finances to someone capable of making such a mistake? How divorced from reality do you have to be to forget you were paid £27m?

That reality, of course, is pretty grim these days and the Government’s response to the cost of living crisis has been frankly woeful.

The extra payments the Tory government has handed out shrink into insignificance when compared with the huge hikes in power charges which have seen heating costs more than double. The grim news from the ambulance service is proof that the Government is doing nothing to tackle the very real poverty into which millions of families have been thrust.

Perhaps even worse, the Government is spending money to be seen as doing something rather than tackling a system which is causing these problems in the first place.

Oil giants Shell and BP are pocketing astronomical profits, ignored by a government that prefers to fiddle about ineffectively with people’s bills rather than take money from oil companies to help those in such desperate need.

The gap between the way Westminster politicians live and the problems faced by those they rule over was emphasised again by Boris Johnson’s unseemly attempts to borrow £800,000 to further bolster his bank balance.

We may be left scratching our heads wondering why someone in his position needs bailing out but that isn’t the most important aspect of this story. That position is reserved for BBC chairman Richard Sharp.

He stepped in to introduce Johnson to one of the former prime minister’s own distant cousins, who was only too happy to step in with the much-needed cash.

And we are expected to believe that the appointment of Sharp as BBC chairman afterwards was absolutely nothing to do with his help in sourcing the money?

What Sharp and Johnson don’t understand is that whether we believe those assurances or not – and I for one certainly don’t – the point is that the whole sordid story can simply not avoid further undermining dwindling public confidence in the BBC’s independence from political interference.

READ MORE: Who is Richard Sharp, the BBC chairman facing calls for investigation?

Sharp’s inability to grasp this issue bodes badly for his role in the organisation. He doesn’t realise that bland assurances that he has done “nothing wrong” will have no effect on public perception.

The fact is that Johnson felt himself to be close enough to Sharp to discuss his personal finances, and that Sharp felt himself to be close enough to the then PM to help by introducing him to multimillionaire Sam Blyth.

That alone should have ruled Sharp out of the running for the BBC job – and if he does not see that, he has no business being in it.

To make a bad situation even worse, he had dinner with Johnson and Blyth at Chequers just three months after he took the job.

But don’t think for a moment the three discussed their earlier shared involvement in the £800,000 loan.

Perish the thought.

It was, says Sharp, a “social occasion”, although he took the opportunity to “bat for the BBC”.

The BBC cannot do anything other than emerge badly from this whole affair. Many Scottish viewers in particular will appreciate the irony of Sharp’s plea that the corporation should be judged by its output. On certain key issues, with the Scottish independence issue being one of them, that’s a questionable challenge.

What is more certain, however, is that Sharp will not resign. Nor will Zahawi, or the man responsible for appointing him (knowing of this “problem” even then), Rishi Sunak (above).

It’s not so long ago that politicians held themselves to high moral standards, and if they were found to have slipped below that standard, they left their job.

The drift away from the moral high ground began some decades ago but it’s clear that it has accelerated in recent years – in Britain, since the rise to power of Johnson and in America, during the presidency of Donald Trump. These are two men who would not recognise moral fibre if they found it in their breakfast cereal.

In modern Britain, politicians believe they are accountable to no-one – especially not the voters.

In fact, it is hard to remember a time when those elected to represent the people lived lives so completely divorced from them.

Scandals simply do not touch them, whether they involve tax avoidance, cronyism or greed. No misdeed sticks, they can imagine no behaviour heinous enough to force them out of their ivory towers.

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So protected are they that they imagine scattering a few crumbs of comfort to the masses will fend off any challenge to their authority.

The cost of living crisis has (at last!) provoked some stirrings of protest. Nurses, teachers and railway workers are among those to embark on strike action to call a halt to Westminster’s intransigence.

Strong support for those strikes persists, despite them having now gone on for months. Mick Lynch, the leader of the RMT union (who is as close to a hero as the Labour movement has at the moment), has ruled out a general strike “as we understood it in 1926”, but suggested there will be some co-ordinated action by different unions.

Westminster’s reaction has not, of course, included any sympathetic response to workers struggling with ever-decreasing budgets. In fact, the opposite has happened.

Rishi Sunak’s solution to the strikes sweeping the country? Bring in laws to take away the right to strike. Nothing must be allowed to threaten the elite.

Meanwhile, those NHS workers for whom we clapped on our doorsteps during the pandemic have been left to fend for themselves with wages unable to keep up with rampaging inflation. Nurses hailed as heroic when they stepped up to save lives are now dismissed as greedy for wanting a living wage.

This, then, is the Britain created in the aftermath of the 2014 independence referendum.

An inward-looking Brexit Britain, attempting to close the door forever on independence in order to keep its claws on our oil and renewable energy. A Britain tricking us into thinking we can’t stand on our own two feet while using our resources to subsidise the financial mismanagement which just months ago brought the UK to the brink of bankruptcy.

A Britain where multimillionaires toast the fortunes they literally cannot keep track of, where chums trade hundreds of thousands of pounds for jobs of influence and power, where already overworked ambulance crews have to rush to the aid of old and vulnerable victims left freezing, hungry and bewildered by spiralling prices.

Is this really the country we want to live in?