I Forgot the Italian Mafia!

In my thumbnail account of Italy's woes I for some reason left out the mafia. Perhaps it's because in a basketcase country like Italy it's hard to tell the mafia from the legitimate government so mired in corruption is the latter. Tell them apart! Additionally in effect all mixed economies are by their very nature corrupt and have more than the germ of the mafioso about them and let us not forget that the tragedy of Grenfell was caused primarily by the unholy alliance of business and state,a mongrelized 'capitalism' without any of the constraints of the free market to protect it from the vagaries of pull,gov influence,backhanders,political empire building, short term expedience and buck passing. It's nobody's fault, it's everybody's fault syndrome.

In the UK we have no need of the mafia because the government performs that function perfectly well on its own. Watch out for wholesale disaster as HS2 proceeds. Try and imagine a herd of white elephants rampaging across the British countryside and then square it.

As an aside -or is it - apparently another contender I did not put in the dock in my earlier post on Italy in the blame stakes is our good old friend Environmentalism although not having studied it closely I cannot identify what is claimed against it so may return to that later but we know lots of the pollution in our cities was caused directly by the environmentalist drive for the automobile industry to convert diesel which has turned out to be  very toxic for the athmosphere although an apology from them has not been forthcoming to date so they invariably are more vocal and influential in social political matters these days and their judgement is almost always unsound and profoundly misguided.