In the Jon Snow blog he refers to a sense of one law for the poor and one law for the rich. If you live in one of the poorer areas this will be blindingly obvious to you, but if you are one of that bunch of privileged parasites that make up our political class and the corporate world, you will be unaware of that. You will expect the law to protect your haul and the means by which you procured your loot. You will expect the law to keep the riffraff well away from your locality and from your little empire. You will expect it to keep the place safe for you to continue your looting career. Many of the cheating MPs, when found out, simply handed back what they had stolen and that was that, will the individuals that took part in the riots be given the option of handing back what they have stolen and that will be that??? SNOWBLOG is worth a wee read.
There is a sense in Britain too of a widening gap in both wealth and law – that there is a that there is one law for the elite and one for the poor. Take the MPs’ and Peers’ expenses scandal. A tiny handful of the expenses abusers have gone to jail. The vast majority have been allowed to pay stuff back or retreat to the political undergrowth. How many of the looters will be allowed to bring their plasma screens and running shoes back in return for their freedom? And yet it is the very unpunished abuse of the state by its elected and unelected elite which many argue is part of the landscape that the recent riots played out across.
We are told thousands of rioters and looters have been arrested. Hundreds have been charged, some have already been punished – many cases are still in train.
Many have pointed to the reality that an even smaller handful of bankers have faced the law even than those politicians who have been prosecuted. No British banker is in jail for what happened in 2008. And as financial upheaval cascades before us all over again, almost no serious measures have been taken to stop the same people from doing it to the people all over again.
