Passing the buck has become order of the day across society

Many people and organisations named, but gey few sufficiently shamed to own up to their role in that tragic night. One cladding firm was still insisting its material was safe and legal at the end of the week when it was palpably neither.

As a former firefighter bitterly noted, they might as well have stuck firelighters around the building. Let’s hope when, if ever, the polis get around to charging those responsible with corporate manslaughter or criminal negligence or both, they finger the collar of whoever authorised the use of a highly inflammable material by way of “protection” for the building. A building which was only being renovated, allegedly, because other locals deemed it unsightly.

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People keep saying that the judicial process couldn’t start until the publication of the inquiry, but nobody seems to be asking why. Now they’re talking about 2026/27 which, in the case of the latter date, would be a whole decade from what the inquiry chair called 72 entirely avoidable deaths.

An outrageous and “entirely avoidable” time lapse in my book. Which brings us to the endless Operation Branchform investigation. The buck, in this instance, seems to be residing with the Crown Office and Prosecution Service, none of which explains why an operation which began three years ago only got lobbed to these desks last month.

Of course, it’s a political hot potato. But all the more reason not to delay while the Scottish elections are coming along like a runaway train.

But delay is the name of the buck-passing game. Think of the people who died waiting for justice in the Post Office scandal. Think of the lives and reputations ruined. And, but for the tenacity of a largely one-man campaign, that’s how it might have remained. The state finally gave him a knighthood; a bauble from the same chancers who tried to silence him.

Meanwhile, nobody from either the then PO hierarchy or the software company involved has so much as fetched up in a police office let alone behind bars. They are joined in disgrace by everyone who dodged any blame for the importing of infected blood. You might suppose that, given these supplies came from the US prisons, somebody, somewhere might have thought to check.

Passing the buck is what makes the political world go round.

The art has been perfected in Scotland where blaming Westminster for all and every ill is a national pastime. (Sometimes justifiably.) What about thinking why we endlessly moan about the injustice of it all, but don’t get off our knees long enough to think through a strategy which isn’t doomed to failure?

What about blaming the fact of a flawed Union masquerading as a partnership and from which, as a nation, we’ve serially lacked the guts to get out from under a coercive and controlling arrangement?

All this softly, softly catchee monkey stuff is beyond tedious. Sure, we need to bring along the doubters and the fearful, but you do that with facts-based campaigning.

We also pass the buck when pretending you can tackle poverty incrementally. The Child Payment scheme showed us what we can do when we think a bit bigger. Baby steps will never hack it.

How many times have you heard one party or another saying they’re the guys who are finally going to crack the anomaly of tax evasion and avoidance? Yet there are literally millions stashed away in overseas accounts devised by the kind of sharp-elbowed lawyers only the very wealthy can afford.

The kind of lawyers who know all about fancy trust funds and fiscal regimes where it makes sense to have your capital taxed rather than your income. Instead, successive governments chicken out of confronting the very people who are likely to give them a pre-election bung which can be filed under substantial.

The cliché trotted out when yet another chief executive pockets a salary and bonuses running into millions is that you need to pay top dollar to attract top talent. When did naked greed become a prerequisite of ability? Why does a FTSE boss need to get more than 100 times the reward of an average worker to prove his (usually his) worth?

Somebody much more arithmetically gifted than me worked out that the top bosses get an average of around £1170 an hour. Or, put another way, between three and four times as much per hour as a one-off winter heating allowance.

(Image: PA)

Anas Sarwar (above), the newly crowned MSP of the Year courtesy of Holyrood magazine, promised that under a Labour administration, we could kiss austerity goodbye. Unfortunately he misread the lips of the new Chancellor of the Exchequer.

It seems we think it’s somehow preferable to go after the little people; people who work at least two jobs but still can’t manage to feed and clothe and heat their families. We have an army of people tasked with rooting out so-called benefit fraud, and a tiny platoon devoted to finding the loot which never makes it into the treasury pot.

It was Leona Helmsley, the billionaire real estate magnate, who famously opined: “We don’t pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes.” A certain Donald Trump proved an able student of that tax-dodging school. Among many revelations about his legendary habit of reneging on payment was the revelation that he had paid no federal taxes at all in 11 of the past 20 years.

According to its assorted Cabinet leaders, the new UK administration is devoted to making “tough choices” to get the economy back on its feet. Fixing the foundations, it calls it.

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Yet these foundations will always remain shoogly while we think it acceptable to let the rich get fabulously wealthy, while the poor bloody infantry pay the cost.

The former Tory MP Matthew Parris and the late Scottish campaigner Kay Carmichael both took a timeout from their own real lives to understand what it might be like to live on the meagre incomes of a benefit claimant. Matthew lasted a week. Kay spent three months in Glasgow’s Lilybank.

Both had the advantage of returning to comparatively comfortable lives at the end of their experiment but had little else in common. Matthew became a columnist for The Times and Kay was a lifelong activist on behalf of all manner of minorities. Including, ironically, gay rights, from which Matthew ultimately benefitted. (In fairness, he did write constantly about what an awful PM Boris Johnson would be.)

How you long for a politician who will tell it like it is, regardless of any perceived damage to their career. Yet whether it’s arms for Israel or Ukraine or, for that matter, any issue even slightly contentious, they are schooled from parliamentary birth not to say anything which might find them in the Daily Mail’s daily hall of infamy.

As it happens, the right-wing press is also owned by some of the wealthiest people around; people who would certainly not countenance their editors displaying anything which might be construed as soggy liberalism. Or, worse still, overly woke.

No mention of the fact that lunch at one of their favourite watering holes would write off an entire week’s benefits. And no mention of the fact that just one domestic disaster, like the death of an appliance, would sabotage the most careful budgets.

Instead, they recycle the myth that if it isn’t hurting, it can’t be working. Without suffering in any way themselves, naturally. And the myths that cutting taxes and shrinking government are the passports to growth.