Wednesday 12 September 2012

Justice delayed

OK, so you're one of the unlucky ones. You lose a loved one in an accident deemed embarrassing to the authorities. Not only is it entirely possible that the person you've lost might have lived, but for somebody's negligence, but the body's scarcely cold before the person you've lost, along all those who died, is subject to a vicious campaign of blame-shifting, defamation and vilification.

Well, at least justice will be done. You might get an apology, twenty three years later. Not from anybody who might conceivably have been responsible for what happened, and might reasonably be supposed to owe you an apology, but from a Prime Minister who, at the time in question was a mere slip of a 25 year old party researcher in his first proper job after university, and had precisely sod all to do with what happened.

Just once it would be nice to hear a Very Important Person apologising for something that he or she has actually done (it's not as if Dave's short of things worth apologising for), rather than offering a fulsome apology in the sure and certain knowledge that he or she can never really be blamed for the Bad Thing being regretted. It would be even nicer if Very Important People who screw up, then lie about it weren't routinely able to kick the blame into the long grass somewhere on the other side of their retirement date.

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