Power, Privilege and Wealth

 Perhaps no scandal conveys the rot in our world more than the Jeffrey Epstein affair...

For this isn't a story about left and right: it is a story about right and wrong.More specifically it is about power; about how the rich and powerful of all political persuasions live by a different set of rules from everyone else, not just in America but throughout the western world...

The story we like to tell ourselves is equality under the law... But this fairy tale has now become an object of derision for millions of "ordinary" people  - me included and perhaps you too.

Justice and Divine Vengeance Pursuing Crime
Amy J. Curr  (active 1885-1894}
Photo Credit: Aberdeen Archives, Galleriy & Museums [Public Domain] 

How could it be otherwise when dozens of vulnerable children were trafficked, abused and threatened by Epstein and other rich men but not a single one of those men has been brought to justice beyond Epstein himself? The only person serving time is Ghislaine Maxwell, the others who enabled, participated or pretended not to notice... are still protected by a system that has little to do with justice and everything to do with power and privilege...

Equality before the law? Don;t make me laugh. In the Harvey Weinstein case the real story was not his belated conviction but the way that he used civil settlements as a shield, intimidation as a sword and non-disclosure agreements as a mechanism to suppress evidence, all while being enabled by a coterie of extravagantly paid enablers (ie, accomplices)...

As Rousseau observed not long before the onset of the Terror: laws are always useful to those who own and harmful to those who have nothing.

And let's be frank: this pathology extends far beyond sexual abuse; it's about a system rigged in favour of the rich and powerful. Britain has its own genteel version of the same disease: honours for donors, a cronyistic house of Lords and a culture of "VIP lanes" that long pre-dated Covid and protracted inquiries designed to cover up the truth rather than expose it. In the Post Office scandal hundreds of innocent sub-postmasters were ruined while senior figures have escaped consequence so far...

I am not a man of the left, and this is not a left-wing newspaper. But it is surely time to confront the most glaring pattern in the world today; how ever more grotesque concentrations of wealth and power are creating a culture of impunity. Lord Acton's warning was not a slogan; it was a timeless observation. Power tends to corrupt - and absolute power corrupts absolutely...

Look at Trump's America as this squalid President deploys power to further enrich himself and his friends. Look at how he finds new ways to gratify his ego, most recently announcing that the Kennedy Center has been renamed the Trump-Kennedy Center by a board stuffed with his allies. Congress, supposedly the principal check on executive excess, has become supine, the cabinet sycophantic, the Supreme Court feeble...

The [French]Revolution... was not driven by envy but by moral outrage: by the sense that society had been divided into those who were accountable and those who were untouchable. That is the fundamental warning Epstein leaves behind - a world in which the rich and powerful come to behave without compunction for a simple but devastating reason. Because they can.

(Matthew Syed, The Sunday Times, 2025) 

Whilst acknowledging that not every rich or powerful person fits into Syed's scheme of things, it is true to say that many of the rich and powerful in our society, whether it be in  Western Europe, America, Russia, China and Africa, are untouchable. Power and privilege will always top justice. We are not all equal under the law because the system is rigged in favour of the rich and powerful.