HOW Spain’s top local politician thought she could get away with splashing millions of public money on an off-the-books purchase of a penthouse blows my mind.
Even better, Isabel Ayuso, of the conservative Partido Popular (PP), tried to claim the flash gaff (worth around €5 million) would be the ideal temporary office while her current HQ at Madrid’s central Post Office is being refurbished.
Do I need to point out to the good people of the capital that a top floor apartment is not the ideal venue for an administration headquarters?
It’s totally unsuitable for things like the digital security required for confidential government communications.
Basically, it’s a bald faced lie and a huge abuse of public office, sadly all too familiar these days in Spain.
Plato viewed corruption not merely as a breakdown of laws, but as a ‘psychological disorder rooted in the disharmony of the human soul and societal imbalance’
I’m not taking a potshot just at Madrid, or Spain. Democracy around Europe is so broken right now that people have simply got used to this sort of deceit.
Even when they know it’s complete bollocks they suck it up because it has become the norm.
Democracy is rotten and if not cleaned up, free countries like Spain and France and the UK face the threat of a dictator like President Putin.
Democracy relies on the faith of the people and if that faith is lost so is the freedom we have come to take for granted.
When politicians take a chance on getting away with something their high office allows them to do, based on the assumption they will likely get away with it, things start decaying.
Think houses with moats paid for by parliamentary expenses in the UK, or employees of the Junta in Andalucia setting up bogus companies simply to rob the €350,000 grants paid to them from Brussels.
The entire western world is already ‘tooling up’ against Russian aggression but if we don’t have leaders we trust, our way of life will be destroyed.
We have all become lazy, expecting everything to be okay and this slack attitude has made us weak and our leaders criminals.
I don’t have all the answers but the idea of career politicians matched with a free market where profit is the goal is a big problem.
Maybe Plato has more right than wrong?
