KEITH BROWN BLOG: Have moral and ethical standards gone off a cliff

WITH the world still reeling from the activities of the greedy few in the banking industry, with lending and investment policies that just simply beggars belief, what has happened to basic honesty?
Keith BrownKeith Brown
Keith Brown

It has, surely, fallen in the street.

Some of our own British politicians are no better, defrauding the very tax-payers that they were voted in to serve with their bogus and extravagant expense claims.

Many respected figures of stage and screen have been caught up in allegations of sexual abuse of young and vulnerable people.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

And even some clergy are not an exception in that. And then there was the phone hacking scandal for nothing more than mere sensationalism, resulting in the selling of half truths and innuendoes. Has morality and ethics in the UK truly gone off a cliff?

To whom do the next generations turn for their role models? Who can they trust with their future?

Oh, they will be fine! They still have Lady Gaga and One Direction!

Seriously though, where are the leaders of this country who have any real integrity and honesty?

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

Even some of the world’s largest companies pay no tax back into the countries from which they earn billions.

They may have not breached any legal precedent with their tax avoidance polices, but where is the moral fibre behind that.

Those who purchase their goods and services have to pay their PAYE and VAT. What kind of message then are they giving to the next generations?

A message that it is okay to deceive, manipulate and not pay your fair share in life if you can getaway with it?

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

Young people today need no encouragement to live at extremes.

I often take funeral services for young people in their 20s, who had killed themselves through extremes in one way or another.

Alcohol abuse along with recreational drugs use is high on their ‘to do’ list, everyone does it they say.

I don’t remember anyone as I grew up who lost their life in abusing alcohol in their 20s.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

We used to have great nights out on Fridays or Saturdays for sure and too some level of excess certainly, but now there are no boundaries. There seems to be no levels to which the young will not punish their bodies in the pursuit of escapism, for that is what it surely is.

I believe there is an underlying problem, a sense of real hopelessness for many, as they face an uncertain future with no role models of integrity to look up to and model their own lives on.

How can there be a real future if a life is valued purely by what we have managed to accumulate and take from others in either material or emotional gain.

This country will probably never be great again until we have people of integrity and absolute honesty, who believe that they are elected to positions of privilege to serve those who have put them there.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

The kind of individuals that understand that to be the greatest in this life means they must be the servants of all.

Those, that put any kind of personal gain secondary to their desire to serve others, and that kind of person is a very rare one today indeed.

It will not be any kind of politician that will turn this country around.

It will be when the people, the common soul that says ‘enough is enough’.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

And that “Bull Dog” spirit, for which we were so renowned, rises up and shakes off the apathy that we all feel.

Apathy caused by many years of successive governmental and corporate abuse of privilege.

We perhaps all need to take action on a personal level to help our fellow man. Our individual serving of others will go unnoticed by many, but then that is true service. Imagine, if only a small percentage of this country, even this town, began to live for a reason and purpose that was greater than self.

So the buck stops with us, the common soul as usual, but will we serve in our generation?

To read more of Keith’s bligs click here