Fraud.
I have seen and read of cases coming to court where the defendant was accused of something along the lines of "Unlawfully obtaining pecuniary advantage" or something like that. Maybe "Obtaining money by false pretences" would have the been the charge.
Whatever the terminology, the cases I have in mind have been people who have lied about qualifications, previous experience etc in order to gain employment in a job for which they are not at all qualified.
Well, serves them right.
But, what I have in mind just now is this: "Where are the boundaries when deciding whether a person should be charged in this manner? What is the dividing line between criminal and not criminal in these dodges and wheezes?"
The reason I am thinking about this is this:
If it is fairly clear cut when deciding whether or not to charge a person with a criminal offence if they are thought to have obtained a job, particularly a well paid job, by mis-representing their qualifications and making promises they have no prospect of honouring, when will the House of Commons be up before the beak? All 600 or so of them.
Hands up who is tired of hearing prospective members of parliament promising everything from free Mars bars to allowances to enable one-legged persons to buy new toilet cleaning fluid and then seeing those promises quickly forgotten once we have given them a job.
Make no mistake about that last phrase, "given them a job", for that is exactly what happens when we vote for a wannabe MP. The process works like this. Lots of people are taken in by a set of promises, all nicely wrapped up in some fancy rhetoric, to place an 'X' against the Job Seeker's name on a ballot form. If there enough of these 'X' marks, then the Job Seeker is given a job. If you were one of those who marked that person's name with an 'X', then you and your like minded citizens have granted that person a job.
The job is generally expected to entail doing a spot of work in their constituency and a spot of work in Westminster. The people who allocated the 'X' to that person's name quite rightly expect the winner to go off and as part of their new job, to battle to fulfil promises they made in exchange for the much sought after 'X'.
("You've got the job, based on what you have told us, so go away and do what you said you would").
Well, we all know what comes next, don't we boys and girls?
The new boy reports for work and for the first few weeks, sits and watches how the others do their jobs, hopefully learning from them along the way. During this settling in period, he or she will watch the antics of the old hands and quickly realise that there is a clique here or there to which he would like to belong.
Bugger the vacuous promises! The new employee wants nothing more than to be liked by his new mates in his new work place and will wag his tail, roll over and have his tummy tickled or whatever it takes to become accepted among the old hands.
Then, when his initial contract of employment is up for renewal, off he or she goes, back to the suckers who so willingly gave him all the 'X's needed to get the job and starts all over again.
When tackled on the question of why most, or even all, of his promises have not been kept, there will be a fantastic series of "reasons" and the blame machine will immediately engage high gear. Out will come the tired old clap trap about "the other parties" and how they thwarted new boy's efforts to introduce the free handbag exchange bill or how the speaker exercised a guillotine and cut him off just as he was about to introduce that legislation that would have seen all his constituents have their houses re-roofed in gold leaf.
"Damn the other lot! We must keep faith and maintain our pressure on the others at Westminster who would thwart our every effort to honour our pledges. Vote for me and strike another blow for freedom and democracy! Don't let's lose heart at this critical juncture; we will take the fight to the other lot's back yard".
And like lemmings, we will probably all just do the same thing we did last time. Dish out those precious 'X's and send the bugger off to disappoint us all again.
Well, I have a proposition.
For each promise that a potential MP makes during the pre-election campaigning and then fails to honour, let them be prosecuted for "Unlawfully obtaining pecuniary advantage" or however it is termed. Let us see the courts full of miscreants who have conned us (for that, surely, is what it is, a great big con) into giving them a well paid job, regardless of whether they were suitable for the job or whether they had any intentions at all to do the job with which they were tasked when hired.
Anyone who lies through his teeth in order to get a job that may pay him in excess of £200,000 per annum ought to have those lying teeth removed. Preferably by Basher Bloggs that well known man about town, currently doing a 10 year stretch in Walton for GBH.