Time for a state capture inquiry in Britain

ne of the traumas of my early years was realising, when I lived in Britain, that the Brits were pretty ordinary. Just like in almost every other nation, a few of them were exceptional, some were unpleasant, but most were nice, ordinary people. So how was it, I wondered, that they had managed to have the run of Ireland for 823 years?

As I’m Irish born, it felt embarrassing to me that we had allowed a nation of ordinary people to dominate our lives that long.

I sought shelter in the notion that, over hundreds of years, the few exceptional Brits, plus the order-taking majority, had created institutions that gave Britain extraordinary powers.

Of course, by the time I’d hit upon that thought, I hadn’t realised that those powers had slowly begun to unravel some time between World War 1 and World War 2. In the past 40 or so years the unravelling has sped up.

Now it seems to me possible that history will look back on 2024 as the time that any pretence of a Great Britain was finally laid to rest. And how ironic that the death blow should come from one of those wonderfully understated institutions that, for much of the past 300 years, had helped to make Britain great the Post Office.

The jaw-dropping 24-yearlong story behind the recent, apparently excellent, ITV drama Mr Bates vs the Post

OOffice pretty much describes the death throes of Great Britain. It is the story of crony democratic capitalism, with an elite, and frequently inept, band of politicians, civil servants and corporate executives rallying to protect interests that rarely overlap with those of the British people.

The ITV network describes its huge hit as “the extraordinary story of the greatest miscarriage of justice in British legal history, where hundreds of innocent sub-postmasters and postmistresses were wrongly accused of theft, fraud and false accounting due to a defective IT system”.

Like millions of other people, I’d come across the story in various news outlets over the past several years. I’d assumed it had been resolved.

If the many promises made in the wake of the series are kept, it’s possible all the subpostmasters and postmistresses will be financially compensated by year-end. But it’s hard to imagine anything compensating them for the trauma they suffered.

The commitment of senior politicians and civil servants to protecting at all costs the Japanese IT firm Fujitsu, which had produced the software, is all the more bizarre given the damage the company had previously helped to wreak on Britain’s National Health Service.

Remarkably, even after a damning Post Office-related high court ruling in December 2019, Fujitsu managed to peg down an additional £4.9bn of work from the British government.

It turns out that former Fujitsu UK CEO Michael Keegan is the husband of education minister Gillian Keegan. He picked up a cushy role in the cabinet office in September 2019, soon after he left as European head of Fujitsu.

The list of directors who oversaw the Post Office during this scandalous period is awash with names of people who have slipped seamlessly from the corporate world to the government and back again.

Though extreme, this is not a one-off example of the toxic mix of government, business and regulators that ensures the elite are rarely held accountable for the damage they wreak on citizens. There are still serious scars from the fallout of the 2008 banking crisis; the worst that seems to have happened to the guilty parties is the loss of some title or other.

Privatised water monopolies have been dumping sewage into Britain’s rivers for years, while paying generous dividends. But, as the British railways and energy providers prove, the problem is not privatisation so much as the inevitable failure to regulate effectively when you’re dealing with cronies.

Former chancellor George Osborne’s company has been pulled in to persuade regulators that the United Arab Emirates government should be allowed to acquire two stalwarts of British media The Spectator and The Telegraph. Recall former prime minister David Cameron’s dalliance during Covid with scandal-ridden finance company Greensill Capital?

And then there’s the brassneck stuff, such as that perpetrated by Baroness Mone, who became a Conservative life peer in 2015 after a colourful business career and used the “VIP lane system” during Covid to secure two personal protective equipment (PPE) contracts worth £200m for a company owned by her husband.

The VIP lane system (former health minister Zweli Mkhize might be interested to know) was available to people with links to politicians or government officials, enabling them to recommend suppliers of PPE gear without any competitive tenders. About £122m worth of the surgical gowns turned out to be unfit for purpose.

Could it be Great Britain was unable to cope with democracy? It’s time for an inquiry into state capture of the former colonial power.