A question of tradition

Breaking bad

There's the mayor of Toronto.

Smokes crack. Not during official engagements, obviously.

The Co-op bank boss, and methodist preacher.

He's just cocaine and crystal meth. Not when at the pulpit (that's an assumption, I don't know the first thing about methodism).

Big fuss. How on earth did he get the post? Where's the due diligence? Then the killer "he was a political appointment".

Well, our rulers are, by definition, political appointments. Where's the due diligence, checks and balances? See Toronto.

Tradition becomes our security, and when the mind is secure it is in decay

With that thought, I have some questions:

• Why, after thousands of years experience that have proved that our democratic systems of government and rule fail to improve or change anything, is there so much resistance to any dissenting voices?

• Why, when we're skint, do we waste so much on pomp and ceremony? Do we need a Queen and expensive extended royal family?

• When footballers' pay is 'obscene', why do we still allow MPs to write their own pay deals? Where's the cap on fatcat bosses salaries?

• Same question regarding top civil servants' pay. Don't even try the 'to attract the top people' rubbish – most of them balls up everything they touch. There's loads of them on £100k+ / year that can hardly read and write.

• Where's the value in forking out huge amounts for people who've never held a scalpel or syringe to knacker the NHS and privatise it through the back door, for people who've never prepared and presented a lesson to impose their odd, evangelistic dogma on schools, for people who have never been to war to make calls on the armed forces (and so on)?