Restoring *morality* to Britain - PM's double standard.

David Cameron has promised to “restore a sense of morality” to Britain [...] announcing stronger police powers to ensure that offenders are caught and made to pay for their crimes.

From here.

Ooooh. Let's have some fun with the perorations emanating from that self-righteous, pompous dickhead, shall we? It's just a matter of changing the focus from alleged criminals (awaiting charges) to a different alleged criminal, still at large in spite of mountains of evidence and one dead - how convenient, that! - whistleblower and witness.

Addressing MPs recalled from their summer break, the Prime Minister cast News Corp's repeated illegal phone hacking incidents as a “deep moral failure”, and laid much of the blame at the door of *captains of industry* whose staff took part in illicit activies.

Managers and employees alike must be made to take greater responsibility for their actions, Mr Cameron said. “This is a time for the country to pull together,” he said. “We will restore a sense of stronger sense of morality and responsibility – in every town, in every street and in every estate.”

Rejecting claims that greed fuelled the law-breaking, Mr Cameron said the root causes of this criminality were cultural, not economic. “This is not about greed, this is about culture.” He also said that illegal phone hacking must be seen as nothing less than ordinary crime. “Employees were told to engage in these criminal activities and to corrupt police officials; it wasn't about freedom of the press, it was about unchecked thuggery,” he said.

Turning to the deeper causes of these events, Mr Cameron said that abusive exploitation of workers and poor corporate management had played significant role. “In too many cases, the owners of these corporations don’t care what their managers do, as long as profits grow and their competitors are destroyed," he said.

“The potential consequences of neglect and immorality on this scale have been clear for too long, without enough action being taken.” Conservative MPs are demanding tough punishments for offenders, and Mr Cameron insisted that severe penalties will be imposed.

“These people were all volunteers. They didn’t have to do what they did. They will suffer the consequences,” he said. Addressing offenders directly, he said: “We will track you down, we will find you, we will charge you, we will punish you. You will pay for what you have done.”

Yes! More robust policing! Oh. Wait.

In the interim however, how about cutting off Rupert Murdoch's News Corp generous subsidies aka *Corporate Welfare*, which he enjoys thanks to an intricate scheme of deferred tax payments, off-shore holdings and exploitation of elaborate legal loopholes generously available to corporations but not to ordinary citizens?

In the spirit of Cameron's words, when he backed a call Friday to withdraw welfare benefits from rioters ...

People who flout the letter of the law and abuse their own readers should no longer be allowed to benefit from *Corporate Welfare* - reflecting the tough line [Cameron] has taken over weeks of revelations that News Corp managers and employers broke laws. "Obviously, that will mean they'll have to finance themselves in the private sector - and that will be tougher for them, but they should have thought of that before they started breaking laws," he said.

"If you are a corporation receiving benefits, you're getting a break from the taxes ordinary people have to pay and with that should come some responsibility," Cameron told BBC television.

"For too long we've taken a too-soft attitude towards corporations that loot and pillage in the name of commerce. If you do that you should lose your right to the sort of advantages that the public has been subsidizing."