Letter to the Committee Chairman

This is a belated clarification regarding myself in your letter to our Chairman Austin Mitchell MP of March 17. For I am not one of Austin’s constituents, but the organiser of a Forum that has been meeting in both Houses since 1998, as you will see on our archive site www.monies.cc. Thus it will become clear to you that my opinion is not a personal one, but that I promote the concerns of many.

In fact, our analysis is so significant that a human rights lawyer advised us to “go for Parliamentary scrutiny via the Treasury Select Committee”. Hence I’ve attended numerous Committee meetings and gave you a copy of Creating a World without Poverty by Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus.

The Committee has indeed received a number of our petitions, and we wonder when a democratic process might take them into account. However, the Committee not only set its own agenda, but also decides whom to invite for evidence. As a consequence, you are practising what my late husband would have called a “mutual adoration society”: you never invite anybody who has become a victim of the system, nor do you invite anybody who points out solutions to the systemic failures. Instead you invite those who are paid to “do the right thing”, but the reality is the exact opposite, also predicted by my husband who used to work for the Greater London Council.

For example: instead of tackling root causes, a “Ministry of Justice” has the job of supervising companies that make their living out of recovering monies from the injustice of banks having overcharged their customers. I speak from personal experience, should you require “evidence”.

More recently, you participated in a forum of the British Academy where the conclusion was that the crisis was “principally a failure of the collective imagination of many bright people to understand the risks to the system as a whole”. What a way to wash the eyes of HM the Queen!

If the system of financial and political institutions was interested in solving the crisis that it created, then I wonder

why don’t you recommend to your fellow participants at the British Academy the examples of the predictability of the crisis as cited by Dr. Thomas Palley, who obtained his economic degrees in Oxford and Yale?

My mum, who saved me from the bombings of Dresden, needs my care and attention now. Hence I cannot continue to come and admire your Chairmanship. But the web continues to allow us to communicate. So I thought I’d let you know how awareness of “the system” is growing and how there is room to save face, if only there was the political will.