1:00pm Friday 1st January 2010
THE year 2009 was rather undistinguished in many ways. Or, put another way, it was a year that can be distinguished from other years more by its negatives than its positives. Not that there weren’t some positives. Barack Obama’s first full year in office after being given a mandate by the same electorate that gave the world eight years of George Dubya showed a definite coming of age tendency in the USA and one that couldn’t have been envisaged even a few years earlier.
The early signs are promising. His efforts to make health care more widely available for all Americans illustrates that even more clearly at a time when in the UK free health care for all is steadily becoming more difficult to achieve. And Joanna Lumley’s efforts on behalf of the Gurka’s rights were inspirational, when inspiration was sadly lacking in public life generally.
It is the bleaker human qualities of greed, selfishness and duplicity that seem to have been stirred up by the recession. There was the unedifying spectacle of our MPs making expenses claims that varied from the randomly banal and derisory (dog food and porno films) to a sophisticated form of pillaging the public purse that would have been the envy of many a corrupt warlord, many of whom had moats and got them cleaned for free by the peasants – us in this case. Their casual approach to vacuuming up our money betokened a contempt for both us and the system that they had set up for themselves. Then there were the bankers. And what a lot of bankers they were, especially Sir Fred Goodwin who led The Royal Bank of Scotland into a financial mire so deep that millions of us would have lost all our money had the Government not stepped in and all but nationalised the bank. Instead of slinking off a shamefaced failure, Fred the Shred (as he became known) dug his heels in about his pension and only after enormous public pressure surrendered part of his multi-million-pound pension pot. He is making do on £342,500 a year, after practically bankrupting the rest of us. And then, almost as an abiding symbol of the year, there was Tiger Woods. I’ve always had a suspicion about golf. It’s not a game that serves to encourage teamwork or a need to consider those around you.
Let us hope that the impending decade produces more Lumley moments than Woods and Goodwin ones.
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