An occasional series about our eroding culture

I remember being amused many years ago when Arsenal’s John Radford, after a Wembley Cup Final, was overheard on live roaming TV camera saying to his fans “We did this for you, yer f**kin’ heroes”. More recently, when Sir Steve Redgrave finally crossed the line to win his fourth Olympic gold medal, a miked BBC reporter rushed to his side and asked, “Howzzit feel Steve?” Redgrave said, without missing a beat, “If I say I’m going to do this again, f**king shoot me”.

In the first case, Radford had no idea he was near a mike – and he was, after all, paying tribute to the fans. I also doubt if Redgrave knew he was on telly, or indeed who on earth the wellwisher was: the point is, he was exhausted and disoriented.

Compare and contrast this now with Wayne Rooney the Manchester United striker. Last Saturday, on completing a hat-trick, he ran to the nearest camera and bellowed into the mike, “F**k off”. Nice. The FA has responded by banning him for two games – one of which is the crucial semi-final Derby between United and City.

As a United fan of 54 years standing, I cannot explain how angry I am about Rooney’s behaviour, because if United lose to the Blues later this month, my life will not be worth living. But more generally, the behaviour is so indicative of our culture, it’s not funny. The key points here are knowingly giving offence (no consideration for others), screaming into a Sky mike (no consideration of the consequences), and professional behaving like baby (no consideration of financial loss to club).

Whether potato-heads like our Wayne learn this sort of behavioural incontinence from politicians, the media, rioters, Scouse drunks, tabloid celebs, the Manager or their parents is not of that much interest to me, if only because life has taught me it’ll be a combination of all those things. But it does highlight what our citizens need to have rewired into them: taking personal responsibility.

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One of the reasons footballers and other thought-free folks rarely need to take much responsibility is lawyers. Here again, as with bankers, I am talking about the people bankrupting the culture – not the diligent souls constantly having to give advice to ignorant JPs, or those from Doughty Street trying to control Harriet Harman’s Secret Courts Army. Primarily, I am talking about the common practice these days of creating work for lawyers – otherwise known as ‘marketing’, but previously called ambulance-chasing.

Marketing to show you can produce a better level of service is fine (apart from the fact that lawyers are incapable of delivering on it) but the Law Society should step up to the plate here and censure any firm encouraging the accident-prone to be litigious. And the Government should ban TV no-win-no-claim advertising outright, for it is a far more dangerous form of social cancer than cigarette marketing.

Just as bankers are bailout dependent and loafers welfare dependent, so too are British people in general these days blame dependent: I tripped over a cracked paving stone, sue the council, I drove into a tree, sue the park for putting it there, I got hit by an air pellet robbing a house, sue the owner….etc etc etc.

Moaners like me have argued that solicitors are ridiculously over-represented in the Cabinet and the legislature, and that the mindset of the profession increasingly these days is to grow in size and business by pursuing ‘new sectors’ of litigation. Now at last somebody has delivered the evidence to prove that we’re right.

Oddly enough, it’s the Law Society. Solicitors are now growing staff levels at 3.5 times the rate of the population at large. There are 118,000 more than there were in 1999 – a whopping 36% increase.

Ergo, if need not population is the growth factor, there are more things to get litigious about. Step forward the Labour Party, and its 37,652 legal instruments created over that time. Tony Blair the former PM is a lawyer. Home Secretary Jack Straw was a lawyer. Paul Boateng was a lawyer. Lady Scotland was a lawyer. Alistair Darling was a lawyer.

So then, what sort of nest-feathering were we to expect from this lot? David Cameron’s dad was a stockbroker. Oliver Letwin is a banker. George Osborne is from a baronetcy banking family. Nick Clegg was a Eurocrat. Theresa May was a banker. You too may have spotted that anything the banks and Brussels Sprouts do is fine by these people.

This is how it works, I’m afraid.

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The final feature of British culture to be highlighted today is our inability to learn. Here we are in Libya, just a few years after Afghanistan and Iraq, only this time with chaps who can either get killed or fired. It’s all about choice, you see. Rooney will do his FA ban, and start swearing at referees again the week afterwards. Cameron hires his mates who turn out to be duds, so he hires even more of his mates. And bankers risk everything on screwy bets…..and then start the process all over again at the earliest opportunity.

So it is with our old friend Bob Diamond, Barclays superhero and investment banker, a man uninterested in dealing with anything called society – ie, real people. The FT reported late last night that Diamond has told his fellow directors it’s time to get more risky. Just not with lending to small business, because that would need a retail chain. He wants to do this so he can hit profitability targets over the next three years. And his tier one capital ratio, he says, will be just fine at 9%.

Targets and risk, and taking risks to hit targets…..isn’t that how sub-prime got going? And didn’t Lehman go down with a 12.3% capital ratio?

What Diamond can’t tell anyone – and to be fair, nobody in the Commons has the brains to ask – is what all of this is going to achieve. I don’t mean for him and his fellow-troughers: I mean for, you know, the economy in which people need to make stuff again. The economy that, as currently constituted, can’t employ anywhere near enough people….and is employing fewer of them every year. Or the countries so deep in debt where these vultures are domiciled.

Well anyway, Bob wants to move his Head Office – allegedly. I think he should, I really do. He’s not doing anything for Britain, and he’s doing even less for America. Which, given he’s Anglo-American, perhaps highlights the key problem with globalist bankers.

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Further episodes will appear as new insanities crop up