Why on earth would Scotland resign? Her job is quite safe, along with her noble title, her pension and a lucrative future. Only a few months to hold out, now...
Her boss won't sack her, not as long as he keeps a grip of his strangely immoral compass the needle of which consistently homes to 'Political Advantage'. If he does decide to hang her out to dry (not a practice to which he has ever been congenitally averse) it will be for wholly pragmatic, party-polling reasons, driven to it by the prospect of the deafening public outrage which will otherwise engulf him and drive Labour even further down in the polls.
As for the old-fashioned notion of honour, Lady Scotland's no different from the rest of Brown's 'government' of thieves, liars, placemen, greasy-pole-dancers and bullies. They are strangers to honour. With Labour in power, the still-clinging-to-office 'noble' Baroness is among friends.
No, having declined to resign upon the instant, Patricia Scotland is revealed as just one more bent nail in the coffin of honourable politics. Flowers may be sent care of the Funeral Directors, Blair, Brown and Company.
As for respect for the law of which the Lady is our chief guardian, what a role model she is for the young lawyers people who will govern this country in generations to come.
You broke the law, Attorney General. A law which you yourself ruthlessly made and enforced and which you designed to punish (heavily) even unknowing infractions. Being a Labour minister who went straight from law school to politics and never held a job in the real world where the little people live, though, we'll take it as a given that you have fuck-all sympathy for the struggling small businesses ('bloody capitalists') bombarded by your pétard: the offence which you have committed is, by your own diktat, an absolute offence, that is, one for which there can be no defence. You broke the law, Attorney General. You have no defence. You are in the same position as a small restaurant employing a scullion who showed the chef a forged passport. You broke the law, Attorney General.
Resign, or both you and your Dear Leader should brace yourselves for sustained and deserved vituperation. A politician with any moral sense would have no hesitation.
If you don't resign, Lady Scotland, we will understand precisely what sort of lawyer and what sort of politician you are. A LABOUR lawyer. A LABOUR politician.
"Being a Labour minister who went straight from law school to politics and never held a job in the real world where the little people live"
ReplyDeleteActually she spent over 20 years as a practising barrister, and a very good one at that, before holding any political position.
Not that that changes a thing. If her infraction of the law does not justify resignation, her part in framing a law that is so easy for someone of her strong intellect to break certainly does.