How best to help the wealthy and powerful evade responsibility
The Ink offers an all-purpose statement to speed the process of explaining why no disaster is the fault of anybody in charge, ever.
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The Barrie Hudson Column
Barrie Hudson is a known quantity when it comes to writing words. Sometimes he even spells them correctly. In fact he has been writing words in the Swindon area for more than two decades. First of all for the Swindon Advertiser and then for Swindon Link and now for The Ink. Here are some of his words…
No point in drawing out the process of saying nothing is anybody important’s fault, lessons will be learned and so on
Are you a wealthy and powerful person in some position of great authority in an important public or private organisation with immense responsibilities to ordinary people?
Have you reached your position in spite of being about as much use as a set of juggling clubs to a sea slug?
About as much use as a three-months-dead aardvark in the prima ballerina role in a performance of Swan Lake?
About as much use as a 1963 Morris Minor Convertible in the Indianapolis 500?
Are you and just about every one of your fellow senior personnel only in your roles because of nepotism, sucking up to the right people, knowing where certain bodies are buried or some ghastly combination of all three?
Perhaps as a result of your utter uselessness, there has been some sort of entirely avoidable calamity which has brought horrific misery to vast swathes of innocent people.
Perhaps, for example, you are in charge of a public utility which has discharged hundreds of tons of raw sewage into a river, poisoning anybody who so much as went for a stroll on the bank.
Perhaps your cost-cutting for the benefit of corporate shareholders had the inconvenient effect of electrifying the ground under a petting zoo, causing thousands of volts to surge through the cute and fluffy creatures living there and detonating them like grenades in small clouds of fur and feathers.
Perhaps you are in charge of a building company which came up with the revolutionary idea of swapping boring old bricks and concrete for an innovative and economical ‘solution’ such as building a motorway bridge out of broken biscuits or the crumbs from the bottom of bags of Monster Munch, and the whole lot collapsed while people were using it.