Our political discourse brought low by ugly ambition and false pride….

Mr George Osborne states that the actions of one man exploiting a financial system to his own personal advantage regardless of his moral duty to the wider society ought to occasion us to debate the Welfare State and the Benefits System.

I might observe that Philpotts self-serving lack of moral judgement is not different in kind or scale to the lack of moral judgement of Mr Osborne’s friends in the City of London and those that have for thirty or more years been dominant in the culture of our Banking industry and energy companies and on beyond .Indeed the very qualities of recklessness; insincerity; selfishness; and bullying amorality Philpotts displayed to tragic consequences for his children were the same qualities we have rewarded, lauded and praised over the last forty or so years. Indeed Philpotts even thrived on the culture of cheap celebrity that feeds fat on these excesses. What possessed Anne Widdecombe to make a film with such a man – the cult of Media celebrity which judges anything that attracts popular attention as morally worthy of attention. Then Ms Widdecombe uses her misjudgment as a cause for a further running commentary upon Philpotts when she might more usefully reflect upon her own vain foolishness in confession . God save us from Catholic converts – full of sound and fury and meaning nothing.

If we are to debate the sad events in Derby in moral terms then it is the gods of monopoly capitalism who must be called to the dock of public opinion.

For the example of greed unmediated by self-restraint or any sense of the common weal or common good has long since been lauded in Mr Osborne, Mr Cameron, and Mrs Thatcher’s Conservative Party as much as by the Republican Party of Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush and Mitt Romney. Capital markets unrestrained by law, unfettered by inconvenient regulations and stranger to common decency is the golden calf that Mr Osborne and his rich friends have placed in the public forum for the crowds to worship and to wonder at.

Should we wonder that Mr Philpotts takes what is on offer and manipulates ends to means when our bankers and their culture of bonuses and golden farewells and golden handshakes has infected the whole financial and political structure of the polity with Avarice’s fetid poison. The desire and indeed the sense of moral entitlement of the rich to be ever more wealthy is only different in scale and not in kind to Philpott’s moral compass. They both point to the magnetic north of human greed.

I can only gasp at the venal insolence of  George Osborne –  a man who purports to be worthy of a great office of state; that our Chancellor of the Exchequer could stoop so low as to use this misfortune, which has left six children dead, as an occasion from which to seize party and political advantage, that is itself eloquent commentary on how we have lost our moral compass in contemporary politics.

Osborne might be ashamed of himself but clearly as his words demonstrate that is a decent sensibility to which indecently he is a stranger.