Despite its Japanese setting, Gilbert & Sullivan\u2019s Mikado is shot through with lines which could only be about England. \u201cModified rapture,\u201d the wandering minstrel Nanki-Poo cries in a line dripping with Gilbert\u2019s silvery-light Edwardian self-deprecation. The joke is that there is, of course, something absolute about rapture. Modification sits as well with it as does the idea that you can be almost pregnant or a little bit bankrupt.<\/p>\n
In Britain nowadays there is talk everywhere of the need for openness and transparency.\u00a0 Yet modified transparency is all that is on offer. Those in power pay lip service to openness but their ventriloquist lips open only so far.<\/p>\n
It is tempting to wonder what the quizzical Gilbert might have made of a National Health Service in which a manager is sacked for prioritising emergency care over routine ops \u2013 and then is gagged with a confidentiality clause as part of a hush-money pay-off. \u00a0Or a BBC which promises to publish all the Pollard review documents into the suppression of Newsnight\u2019s<\/em> investigation into Jimmy Savile \u2013 and then blacks out damning parts of the testimony.<\/p>\n Or he might have arched an eyebrow at the coyness of the confessing cardinal, Keith O\u2019Brien. Accused of making homosexual advances to his own priests, Scotland\u2019s senior Roman Catholic abandoned his usual bold and brutalist rhetoric in favour of fey references to \u201ctimes that my sexual conduct has fallen below the standards expected of me\u201d.<\/p>\n It was Gilbert who first coined the phrase \u201clet the punishment fit the crime\u201d. He would have seen none of that in the decision by Liberal Democrat MPs to back Tory proposals for secret courts to hear cases that touch on sensitive issues of national security. And this from politicians whose party conference previously voted against a system in which the defendant is not allowed to be present \u2013 nor even to know the specific accusations being made against them. Secret courts will create a set of rules to which only the state has access. A secret law is no law at all. \u201cThe Law has no kind of fault or flaw, And I, my Lords, embody the Law,\u201d as Gilbert had his Lord Chancellor opine in Iolanthe<\/em>.<\/p>\n And how Gilbertian parody would relish the paradox of hearing that the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war has now been given unprecedented access to private conversations between Tony Blair and George Bush \u2013 but may not be allowed to quote them in a report because of repeated attempts in Whitehall to refuse the inquiry permission to print what it has read.<\/p>\n It\u2019s transparency only up to a point, it seems. Yet the point about transparency is that it should be for others to make decisions on it. The Pollard documents had to be censored, a BBC mandarin told me privately, because much of the most scathing stuff came from people like Jeremy Paxman who was \u201cjust grandstanding about a complex management situation he would never have been able to manage himself\u201d.\u00a0\u00a0 Maybe so. But if we had all the evidence we could make up our own minds, thanks very much.<\/p>\n Then we\u2019ve had the NHS boss Sir David Nicholson accepting that he was \u201cpart\u201d of a leadership that \u201clost its focus\u201d so that hundreds of patients died unnecessarily in Stafford Hospital. But then he told us he\u2019d learnt his lesson and decided he was now the best person to ensure such a scandal did not happen again. It is, surely, for us not him to make that judgement.<\/p>\n Transparency can be a pretence too, as with Cardinal O\u2019Brien\u2019s partial confession. It apes contrition but between the lines it reveals that, right to the last minute, he had hoped that he could bluff it out by dismissing as \u201canonymous\u201d the accusers whose testimony showed they had struggled with blighted lives for decades longer than the departed cardinal must now endure.<\/p>\n Modified transparency is the tribute that vice pays to virtue. It is what allows the Whitehall defenders of the Iraq war to disclose all manner of damning documents and then resist their wider publication. So that the general public may never know that Downing Street was told by MI6 that the US secret service was \u201cfixing\u201d the facts to fit George Bush\u2019s antipathy to Saddam Hussein \u2013 or that his Treasury Secretary, Paul O\u2019Neill, once disclosed that an attack on Iraq had been planned as long back as Bush\u2019s inauguration as US president.<\/p>\n What unites all this \u2013 from Iraq to the secret courts and the Catholic Church to the BBC \u2013 is what the gagged NHS administrator described as \u201ca culture of fear, a culture of oppression of information that\u2019s either going to embarrass a civil servant or a minister\u201d. Or a cardinal. Or a BBC high-up.<\/p>\n In all these byzantine organisations \u2013 riddled with hierarchy, secrecy, privilege, careerism, intrigue, personal jealousies and political powerplay \u2013 one Machiavellian principle dominates. It is the notion that elites know better than the rest of us.<\/p>\n I think we should be the judge of that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Despite its Japanese setting, Gilbert & Sullivan\u2019s Mikado is shot through with lines which could only be about England. \u201cModified rapture,\u201d the wandering minstrel Nanki-Poo cries in a line dripping with Gilbert\u2019s silvery-light Edwardian self-deprecation. The joke is that there is, of course, something absolute about rapture. Modification sits as well with it as does […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[190,40,37,38],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7798","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-coalition-britain","category-ethics","category-politics","category-society"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7798","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7798"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7798\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7799,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7798\/revisions\/7799"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7798"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7798"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7798"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}