Britain's Corruptocracy
The corruptocracy behind Britain’s claim to supreme democracy
Incompetent, mean-spirited, feckless, adulterous, ugly… are all feasible descriptions of our incumbent Tory Government, and almost certainly pertain to the Prime Minister. However, in perceiving the rottenest elements of our leadership, all of these descriptors miss the point: we live in a corruptocracy, and when the ship sinks we'll all go down.
The wrecking begins like this: riding into high office in the wake of HMS Brexit, members of the ‘Leave Government’ have relied on fable and historical mistruth. The United Kingdom, these faux-nationalists tell us, has a supreme claim to democracy. In this Genesis myth, Britain with its dark satanic mills ploughed forward into modernity, sprouting a new middle-class and an exploited understrata. Then, as the story goes, representation of the understrata became a necessity for stability – only we understood this of course, and hence our uniquely enfranchised political system. This ahistorical assertion that Britain ‘does democracy best because it’s the oldest’ is compounded by imperial claims, depicting democracy as our proudest export. Finally, grand ideas that we uphold principles of fair play, equality of political action, and freedom of speech are supported by references to an unbiased BBC, a competitive journalistic arena and incorruptible political institutions.
Contrast this narrative to conversations about populist, fake-news America or Cold War-esque invasive Russia, and our politics comes out looking like a Crufts’ prize poodle. However, this mythology creates complacency about the health of British democracy and conceals the poodle’s prize shite on the carpet, left in the front room of executive power.
The corruption behind the story is three-fold. The inherently cabalist nature of a Government that perceives itself as insurgent, means that loyalty and unity become the primary criterion for a leading role. Job selection is the prerogative of the Prime Minister, however, to appoint individuals who lack experience, aptitude, and then to support these individuals no matter what their mistakes, takes personal preference to the next level of nepotism and corruption.
Take the rise of government-role monopolist, Dido Harding. Harding’s credentials include not only a lucrative career as a business consultant, but a CEO position at TalkTalk when it received a record £400,000 fine for a massive data breach. She studied at Oxford with David Cameron, is married to the Conservative’s anti-corruption champion (!) and oversaw, in the track-and-trace system, one of the largest infrastructure failures in British history. And the sanction? This took the form of an appointment to interim chair of the National Institute for Health and Protection, of course. Although Baroness Harding has been described as ill-equipped and her appointment evidence of cronyism, you cannot fault her durability as a professional. ‘I did not apply for the role’ she has admitted: begging the question, was her expensive tenure as TalkTalk chairman that impressive, or is she merely the beneficiary of high privilege and profitable connections?
The extent to which skewed appointments damage the public interest is enormous. The decision to award a £122 million PPE contract to PPE Medpro is amongst the most questionable. Only having been established 44 days prior to the bid being tendered and boasting a shareholding of a mere £100, the firm – owned by Tory donor and associate of Baroness Mone – secured the contract. Similarly, the deal secured by Henry Mills (senior advisor to Department of Health) for Ayanda capital, worth £256 million, resulted in the dispatch of faulty PPE. And again, UK logistics company Uniserve, was awarded PPE contracts valued at £186 million – its owner is listed as a speaker for the influential pro-Brexit lobby group Prosperity UK. Compounding these individual cases was the release of a report by the National Audit Office, the government spending watchdog. The report concluded that suppliers with favourable political connections were directed to a ‘high priority channel’ for government contracts, increasing their chances of success by ten times. Caricatures of Conservatives as backslapping, pocket-lining, ‘looking out for a mate who was in their brother’s boarding house at school’ is too superficial an analysis to describe actions of this Government during the pandemic. The siphoning off of public money at direct expense of human life is clear corruption – and in its most malicious form.
A third product of Johnson’s parasitic existence as PM is the failure to hold ministers and officials to account. A precedent set by the previous Prime Minister, Theresa May, was the promotion of incompetence. The installation of Chris Grayling into the Department for Transport was amusingly punctuated by his awarding a £50 million channel crossing contract to a firm with no ferries. Johnson has riffed on this Tory tenet of bad governance and refuses to remove high ranking staff, even if they have broken the law. The resignation of Johnson’s advisor on ministerial code, following the suppression of the conclusions of an official report into Priti Patel’s bullying, indicates the legal carte blanche he affords his closest allies. This truth is epitomised in the failure to sack Dominic Cummings following his infamous holiday in Durham, seriously undermining government guidance on safety during the pandemic. The only redeeming element here is watching how the parasite cannibalises itself and any political capital it once had. As senior advisors fall by the wayside and any whiff of legal integrity dissipates, we can sit back and watch the bastards collapse, coughing and spluttering while Tory donors pocket millions flogging dodgy masks.
To call this Government merely incompetent implies an honest motivating backbone hosted by a weak, flabby torso. Instead, the Government suffers from moral scoliosis. This is a Government that has profited in the polls from concocted notions of British identity. Its members and alumni have co-opted a cause and ideology to shell out the institutions they falsely claim to revere. This corruption is of course inherently self-defeating, however when the Captain sinks the ship, we will all drown.
Words by Jamie Miller
Illustration by Andrew Craig