Excuse me. Do you sense that the whole infrastructure of our country has collapsed? That it no longer supports the people it serves – the ones who pay for it? That it has gone haywire? That we are living on a giant slab of rotting cheese crawling with des

Excuse me. Do you sense that the whole infrastructure of our country has collapsed? That it no longer supports the people it serves - the ones who pay for it? That it has gone haywire? That we are living on a giant slab of rotting cheese crawling with destructive micro-organisms on which a pernicious fungus is growing - the fungus of corruption, deception, incompetence, greed.

Look! It is reaching down into the cavernous well-lined pockets of Members of Parliament.

How embarrassed they are that their concealed tradition of theft of public funds has been revealed in a spotlight of moral and ethical opprobrium.

Corruption these days is pandemic. Who can you trust if not your local MP? Yet who, in some cases, more poignantly exemplifies what this country is about and what has happened to it: collapse of its banking system. widespread bankruptcy.

Rising unemployment. Failures of social workers and children's hospitals. Traffic chaos. Insidious highway robbery by private enterprise of national institutions like the Post Office, the Royal Mail.

We are experiencing a national burndown. We are picking over bones and ashes.

The nation is out of control. There is no leadership. A philosophy never existed. It has been a general free for all. A parliamentary trough in which snouts of all parties rooted for bounty.

We are looking at political theatre. A great blood-letting has begun. There is a self-righteous aroma.

It is the end of an era which began with an Empire created through colonial beligerance, self-aggrandisement, violence and greed for the benefit of a privileged minority - elements which persist today to our collective detriment.

Regardless of collective Sorrys, elements in politics have surely breached the law.

We are witnessing revelations of daylight robbery on a grand scale.

Like normal people, the privileged superbeings some MPs believe they are must now be brought to book - not through the instrument of internal investigative procedures but through forensic investigation in the transparent light of day.

Mitigating circumstances notwithstanding all culpable parties must face the music they themselves composed.

Stealing from the national kitty, like stealing in any form, is inexcusable.

Barry Bermange

Alexandra Park Road, N10

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