houses of parliament
It's no longer clear if the people we empower can be trusted (Reuters)

There seems to be a consensus of opinion that our Members of Parliament are not that truthful which is probably why I have heard so many people express the view, "Of course Chris Huhne lied, he's a politician".

That the people who make the laws we have to live by are flat out lying doesn't seem to overly bother us any more and we just seem to accept the fact as just something they do. That strikes me as strange.

It wasn't that long ago that a significant amount of politicians were revealed to be fraudulently abusing the expenses system to the tune of many hundreds of thousands of pounds and after an initial show of public anger, it has been conveniently forgotten - much to the relief of the right honourable Members of Parliament who were claiming for such things as toilet seats and duck houses.

Then there are the people who serve and protect us, the police. In recent times they have been revealed to have substantially altered statements of Liverpool fans at the Hillsborough disaster, tried to sweep under the carpet the death of Ian Tomlinson who died after he was pushed to the ground by an officer, and been heavily implicated in the hacking scandal, selling information to newspapers which have had their own share of corruption stories lately.

Over 90 journalists have been arrested in conjunction with illegal acquisition of confidential information through hacking people's phones. Britain's largest Sunday newspaper was closed down because of the scandalous behaviour of its journalists and former editor Rebekah Brooks and her deputy editor at the time of the allegations, Andy Coulson, are facing a string of charges in court.

The banks, whose primary purpose is to protect our money, have been found fixing Libor. Barclays was fined £290m in 2012 and RBS was handed a £390m fine this week. And let's not forget the PPI scandal where banks were mis-selling products and have had to pay over £2bn in compensation for conning customers.

Finally we have the big four supermarkets who were recently fined £50m for price fixing dairy products.

And so it goes on: so many examples of corrupt behaviour by the people who rule us, protect us, inform us, safeguard our money and provide our food.

Corruption, fraud and deceit seems to happen so much and so often these days that we no longer bother getting angry about it and just readily accept that the people we trust will be conning, swindling and lying to us. Just when did the British public get quite so accommodating of the liars, conmen and rogues supposedly working on our behalf?

Lucy P writes commentary on news, politics and media on her blog Falling on a Bruise

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