Capitulation costs us very, very dearly - Honesty in our public life

JUST as America continues to pay an inordinate and irrational price for its bizarre beliefs around citizens’ right to own and use military-grade weapons we pay an equally high, though less bloody, price for our absolute capitulation on openness, transparency or accountability in public life.

It is as if we imagine that these principles are a threat to our society rather than the kind of proactive honesty needed to sustain and protect it. It is as if we think these fundamental principles are something other than a way of differentiating between reality and perception, a way of winnowing delivery from promise. They are the checks and balances that might have prevented Putin’s Russia becoming a dangerous kleptocracy, the kind of honesty that might have prevented, or at least constrained, the self-delusion that has done so much to bring Greece to the tragic juncture it finds itself at today.

Just take a look a the evidence of recent weeks. We have the banking inquiry, earnest and determined, trundling through its hearings which are now more to do with history than justice. Nevertheless, it exposed incompetence at the highest levels in our regulartory systems and civil service, shocking incompetence that had no consequences for the cabal of senior civil servants who were, as charity and the vernacular decree, asleep at the wheel.