Afterword from the Editor

This tome was published after the author was sacked from the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham in May 2024 for synthesising and relaying his thoughts, at the time and by writing this blog, about how the influence and manifestation of greed has affected his duty to perform his office in local government.  He has little regret for his actions, buoyed by the words of BBC journalist, George Orwell, “If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”  They didn’t and he no longer has a voice.  Still, for him, it has been an ethnographical opportunity, and educational, to study an institutional culture unaffected by an outside world.

I believe that this is the first work ever published on the subject of greed in local government.  It is timely and opportune, I think, to understand how local authorities are falling foul of managing budgets and retaining trust from the residents who they serve and who pay for those services.  Of great advantage both to the language itself and to those studying it is that a little report on the people who inhabit that remote workplace be available after their times and also that some little account of the learned smooth Doublespeak which they used should be available.

This document is exactly as I received it from the author’s hand except that much of the original matter has been omitted due to pressure of space and to the fact that improper subjects were included in it.  Still, material will be available ten-fold if there is demand from the public for the present volume.

It is understandable that anything mentioned here concerns only Hammersmith and Fulham Council and it is not to be understood that any reference is intended to the Greater London area in general; Hammersmith and Fulham Council is a distinctive place and the people who work there are without compare.

It is a cause of jubilation that the author, Paul Clarke, is still alive today, safe in exile from ever being employed into public service again and, therefore, free from the miseries of life.  I do not think that his like will be there again.

The Editor, Flann O’Brien, The Year of Want, 2024

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