Hypocrisy.

It’s a powerful word. It has the feel of a silver bullet. A coup de gras. A final kill. You feel good when you use it. He’s such a hypocrite. That’s it. Nothing more is required. The argument is over.

But that, surely, is wrong. It’s not okay to stop there, to say, I know you’re a person whose actions and whose words are at odds. To say: you hypocrite.

The suggestion is that you can simply leave the hypocrite to fester in his own moral decrepitude, along with other souls lost so far behind their own reprehensible self-justifying walled gardens – people like Judas – people who cannot be rehabilitated.

And then, the trouble is, when faced with institutional dishonesty, you wonder whether anything done or said by policy makers is not hypocritical in one respect or another.

Which brings me to Jack Straw.

I’m sorry, I should address him properly: The Right Honourable Jack Straw, MP.

The title is interesting because the mere use of it implies hypocrisy. Like other arcane uses of titles like: Regina –v- Villainous Scumbag. Or HMP – Her Majesty’s Pleasure (Prison) – Her Majesty, of course, having nothing whatever to do with either the prosecution of the Villainous Scumbag nor the hotel where the convicted Villainous Scumbag is incarcerated.

Honourable. A word – as the great Geoffrey Hill (poet) says of the word (name) Offa – honourable is a word to conjure with.

This Right Honourable Member of Parliament has become the most outspoken anti-claims industry speaker in the UK. His speeches litter all forms of media with their trenchant criticism of whiplash claims and the profiteers – lawyers and all the rest – who manufacturer income from whiplash claims. He – it should not be forgotten – the Honourable Member – the man on a moral crusade – personally moved the bill (which failed to become law) which sought to criminalise the payment of referral fees.

Just let’s remind ourselves of the Honourable Member’s pedigree. He was the man in charge of the Ministry of Justice from 2006 to 2010. I think that is right. If not perhaps someone will put my facts in order.

Between 2006 and 2010 there was a boom in the claims business. The boom resulted from changes in legislation introduced by Jack Straw. The boom was driven by referral fees and intermediary businesses – claims management companies. The boom is now accelerating towards bust – not in small part because Jack Straw decided that the process he gave birth to is infact a demon dressed up in a spiv suit.

It would be a reasonable expectation – perhaps – that the man who expresses such uncompromising opinions, the man who urges the legal profession – and the ancillary quasi-legal businesses, and ancillary businesses which are not quasi-legal but no less glued to the legal profession – it would be a reasonable expectation that such a man – an Honourable Member – would himself be unblemished by any possible complaint of exacting personal profit.

Certainly, I would think so. Indeed, I would expect so.

I would think that a man who stands before rooms of lawyers (and others) telling them (us) they need to change, to clean up their act, to put back into its box this reviled social mores which is the “compensation culture” – this man, this Honourable Member, would himself be clean, uncontaminated by any hint of profit, especially profit linked to the reviled world he vilifies.

The truth – a dangerous word – the truth – and I shall be careful not to be libellous – the truth is, the Right Honourable Jack Straw, MP, is a profiteer, a man earning a very good living from his self-righteousness, a living paid by the business(es) that he wishes to demonise.

The trouble as I see it, is that he is an elected and paid Member of Parliament. He is a paid representative of the people. His role is to work for the people – okay, we’re not a republic, but what other role is there for a person elected to represent “the people”? And his pay is not bad either, especially if you take into account the extra bits + the pension (guaranteed).

Below is a table of recent payments made to this Right Honourable Member which are in addition to his earned income as an MP.

I have taken most this information from the Guardian – here’s a link to it.

I’ve also checked the information on the House of Commons own website.

The information set out below is clearly in the public domain.

28th September 2011	Speaking engagement for Crashworth Ltd – the new(ish) business of Chris Ashworth, a former big deal at Drive Assist Ltd, a very successful accident management company now  – one of the quasi-legal parasitic businesses glued to the legal profession.	Fee £4,000
12th October 2011	Speaking engagement for Inclusive Media Ltd publishers of Post Magazine – one of the insurance industry insider magazines (comparable with The Lawyer, or the Law Society Gazette) – the speech was at The Claims Event.	Fee £4,500
29th October 2011	Speech for I Love Claims conference – this is a media circus business marketing itself	Fee £5,000 paid by the motor insurance industry
1st November 2011	Speaking engagement for Auto Bodies Professional Club (ABP) – an association that exists to market/lobby/coordinate the bodyshop business	Fee £4,000
10th November 2011	Speaking engagement for Mobile Doctors Ltd – Mobile Doctors Ltd is one of the businesses that burst into the big league through a profitable tie up with Claims Direct Ltd during the late 1990s and early 2000s – now a respectable medico-legal business – which means one of the numerous parasitic ancillary businesses making profit from the “whiplash claims” industry	Fee £4,000

It should be noted that Crashworth Ltd, ABP, and I Love Claims are interconnected through their websites. The Post magazine is effectively the insiders journal for the insurance industry.

Just for a moment I’d like to take a brief gander at one or two of those bodies/companies/businesses that the Right Honourable Jack Straw has been paid to speak to.

I don’t want to seem overstated here – but frankly there is something uncomfortably self-serving about the language used by Crashworth. They have a “vision” – their website says so, so it must be true – a “vision”. And, and, and – oh dear they are……. Passionate about claims.

Yes, this is what they tag to their name. They are Passionate about claims.

What’s that supposed to mean? Please make a claim because we’d love you to, because we know we can make money out of it…. What else?

Passionate about claims.

Who – in God’s name – is passionate about claims? Are claims a good thing? Is it good in our society that things go wrong, that financial recompense is the solution?

This business (Crashworth – the worth of a crash? Eh?) paid Jack Straw £4,000. Whether Jack Straw likes it or not, he’s endorsed that business. He’s given his name to it.

And what about I Love Claims?

Need I say more? Is the name flippant? Or just dim? How can a business which calls itself I Love Claims be held in anything other than – well – held at a distance with sharp a jabby knife? Because, frankly, you don’t want it to touch you, lest you’d ingest its toxicity.

Jack Straw endorsed them too.

And – again, just to remind everyone – this is pretty much a carbon copy of the Straw-structure for Claims Management Companies – he put in place the authorisation process, which enables CMCs to waive the flag of institutional endorsement by saying they are authorised by the Ministry of Justice, despite the authorisation process being a feeble rubber stamp (to be polite, that is). So here he is, up to his old tricks, apparently oblivious to the unintended consequences of his actions.

No doubt Mr Straw, the Right Honourable, will say that he is perfectly entitled to earn a living from making speeches, he is a man who has a wealth of experience in Government, a track record of fighting for social justice, being a member of CND (pro war, perhaps oddly) etc etc….

This would – predictably – miss the point.

He is capable of earning what by anyone’s standards is good money just because the claims business has been profitable – just in case you might forget – this is the same claims business he’s publicly holding in contempt.

If he was consistent, if his aim was as he styles it, he’d tear strips off the mendacious parasitic middlemen, and the intermediary and non-intermediary businesses, without taking the king’s shilling for his acid words. What he is paid as an MP would suffice – afterall, that is surely his actual role here, to represent the interests of the people, not to earn the cream to go into his own pocket.

But the truth is he’s simply a man riding the crest of a wave supplementing his income as an MP in whatever ways he can, whilst holding himself out to be a man of the moment, a man who is entitled to preached of the need for change.

In short, he is no less of a profiteer than the businesses in the whiplash claims system he now holds in contempt.

The word hypocrisy comes from a Greek word hypokrisis – my etymological dictionary illustrates the meaning by saying it means “the acting of a part on the stage” – which is, of course, what Jack Straw, and most MPs, do – they perform for money, for expediency, for short term policy, for electoral gain, and personal gain. This was the message of the expenses fiasco. What’s new?

John Holtom

The image used for this post is another James Gillray. This time I have borrowed the high resolution image from a website that is called Liberty Fund which has outstanding resources which appear to be genuinely openly available.

The image which is apposite to the political class of which Jack Straw is an exempla is called More Pigs than Teats.

Article posted on Wednesday, February, 15th, 2012 at 11:37 am

Tags: Claims, Honourable Member, Jack Straw, Profiteer, Whiplash

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