Britain lecturing the world on morality? That’s rich

Kevin McKenna in The Guardian

To the world’s despots and gangsters: if you think you’re bad, just look at what’s going on in Cool Britannia

 

Panama City has been the centre of the news because of revelations about the law firm Mossack Fonseca. But maybe we should be looking a little closer to home. Photograph: Joe Raedle/Getty




As ever, the King James version adds a literary edge to one of the most dramatic tales of the Old Testament. In Genesis 18:24, Abraham is appealing to God’s good nature as he attempts to save the wicked cities of Sodom and Gomorrah from the Almighty’s ultimate sanction. “Peradventure there be fifty righteous within the city: wilt thou also destroy and not spare the place for the fifty righteous that are therein,” the desperate patriarch solicits his maker. In the end, Abraham’s pleas come to naught as he couldn’t even name one good man, let alone 50, and so the cities are duly consumed by fire and brimstone.

Now, I’m not suggesting for a minute that Panama, the Las Vegas of the rich and infamous, is about to meet a fiery denouement just yet. After all, God’s ire seems to have softened since those biblical early days when He favoured a no-nonsense approach. And, as the leaked Mossack and Fonseca documents show, if Panama was to be turned to dust where would that leave the UK? As the Times declared last week: “No other country in the world maintains and indulges a network of offshore tax havens as brazen in their defence of unwarranted secrecy as Britain’s overseas territories.”

Indeed, I’m sure some enterprising management consultancy could establish a lucrative wee venture engaging with the world’s top gangsters and despots in the following blameless and entirely legal way. I’d suggest they produce a glossy brochure showing how, no matter what crimes against humanity they are ever accused of, not to get too strung up about it all. The brochure would be entitled If you think you’re bad, just look at what’s going on in Cool Britannia. A series of seven seminars and modules would also be offered to tyrants and vagabonds everywhere providing them with something money just can’t buy: solace, geopolitical schadenfreude and a good night’s sleep.

1. Hypocrisy

The UK has recently instigated a programme of benefit cuts, advocating that its poorest citizens all tighten their belts to see them through the choppy waters of economic recession. They are being told that everyone is all in it together and that the government is going to make work pay. There will be a clampdown on workshy benefit cheats. For an extra premium we will provide you with a list of all the companies using places such as Panama to avoid tax and show you how the world’s poorest countries are deprived of £240bn of income by similar practices.

2. Cynicism

Are you sick of western democracies lecturing you about ethnic cleansing and enriching yourselves while your people starve? We’ll show you how every spare scrap of land in London is being sold off to unnamed persons to build blocks of £5m luxury flats that will never be occupied. Attached, please see the DVD of the view from the Docklands train. This is called economic cleansing and is the process of removing undesirable taxpayers to make room for the proceeds of global money-laundering. And destroying the concept of social and affordable housing.

3. Graft

Political and civic leaders all preach the values of financial rectitude and putting away money for a decent pension. But every Saturday and Sunday (and all other nights when there is football on the telly) they permit dozens of unregulated online gambling outlets to prey on working men as they watch their favourite teams in action. “Please gamble responsibly,” they say, and then encourage people, when they are at their most vulnerable, to bet on every possible outcome, every hour of the day on every electrical device. Remember this when they take a dim view of Igor and Sergei, your new business partners.

4. Cheating

If you ever find yourself resentful at another chinless wonder from the British Embassy lecturing you on human rights abuses this one’s for you. In Scotland, almost half the land is owned by 500 individuals. This came about after illegal and often violent land-grabs 300-400 years ago that have been protected by dubious legislation ever since. After 17 years of so-called “left-wing” governments their land reform bill is a toothless joke. Scotland is a rich country with great export goods, good universities and stacks of churches. Tonight, though, 250,000 of its children will go without food and 5,000 don’t know where they’ll be sleeping.

5. Warmongering

Do you ever get hurt when Britain and its allies routinely describe you as being part of the axis of evil? Doesn’t it make you sick when they insist only they can be trusted with nuclear warheads? Perhaps you ought to know that this moral arbiter of what is good for the rest of the world routinely has sold £5.6bn worth of military hardware to Saudi Arabia, aka The Headless State, since the Tories came to power. During that time, according to the Campaign Against Arms Trade, the UK has sold weapons to 24 of the 27 states included on its own list of “countries of humanitarian concern”.

6. Greed

Don’t get too upset when the UK tries to excoriate you for your apparent lack of democracy. Instead, just tell them that you won’t take any lessons in this from a state that pimps its own parliament as a place to purchase influence in the laws of the land and where MPs can be bought. All it takes is a tidy six-figure cheque to Tory central office and you’re in. In fact, for the price of a few lunches at Claridge’s and a two grand a month retainer you can get any number of Tories to ensure no one looks too closely at your new bespoke torture chambers. Everything has a price, and that includes parliament.

7. Indifference

The next time you’re in London to collect your latest batch of Eurofighters take a note of every time you hear British people congratulating themselves on being the most enlightened and civilised country in the known universe. Then ask yourself why they all look the other way when this is all happening. Their passivity can be bought cheaply with a few royal babies; some gold medals at the next Olympic Games and arranging another one of their wars against another third world country.

Your five worst medical nightmares

From a doctor amputating the wrong leg, to a woman given the wrong baby, hospital treatment does not always go to plan. Luckily, though, mistakes are rare

One unhappy patient … Kenneth Williams in the 1967 film Carry on Doctor. Photograph: ITV/Rex Features

It sounds like a classic nightmare – waking up during an operation to find you can't move. But that's what happened to one patient, Sarah Newton. "I was trying to scream. I tried to wiggle my toes desperately hard but I couldn't move anything." Thankfully, "accidental awareness", as it is known, is rare. A survey from the Royal College of Anaesthetists says it occurs once in every 15,000 operations under general anaesthetic, or 153 times in 2011 – and is usually brief and painless. But what of our other medical terrors?

Wrong site surgery

Usually the cause is a catastrophic series of administrative errors, such as when Dr Rolando Sanchez, a Florida surgeon, was told by a nurse that he was amputating the wrong leg of his patient just as he finished cutting through it. Luckily, with only 70 incidents recorded by the NHS in the year 2011-12, it is extremely unusual.

Wrong patient surgery

Never mind the wrong limb. How about operating on the wrong body? Sometimes there may be a mix-up over two people with the same name. Or similar procedures. The reality may not be as scary as it sounds – recently a patient in Cambridgeshire was given another patient's lens during eye surgery, although this was soon corrected. Plus there were fewer than 10 incidents reported in the UK during 2011-2.

Retained instruments

Leaving surgical instruments inside patients occurred 161 times in 2011-12. Often it's a sponge, which can lead to serious infections. The risk arises in emergency surgery, and in surgery on obese patients, but it is still very unlikely to happen to you.

Baby mix-ups

Despite being a common storyline in films or stories, there are few documented cases of mothers sent home with the wrong baby. But you have to ask: how would they know? In Romania in 2008, Cristina Zahariuc noticed because the daughter she was sent home with turned out to have a penis. Despite a few awful stories, the risk will be lower now that most babies stay with their parents immediately after birth.

Being treated by an impostor

Well, it has happened. In September 2011, 17-year-old Matthew Scheidt was convicted, of impersonating a physician's assistant in Florida. He dressed wounds, attended surgery, examined naked patients and even administered CPR. While New Zealander Richmal Oates-Whitehead treated victims of the 7 July 2005 bombings in London, despite not being medically qualified.

Ferdinand Waldo Demara managed fairly well when he conducted a series of major operations by speed-reading textbooks during the Korean war. And a man called Gerald Barnes even managed to impersonate a doctor, and be convicted of it, five times. Thankfully pretenders do tend to get caught.