Is there rot at the top?
Ever since the Owen Paterson affair, political commentators have been accusing the government of corruption. Boris Johnson in reply assured us that the UK “is not remotely a corrupt country”. Confusingly, they are all right, says Robert Barrington. It all turns on what is meant by corruption.
State capture
Johnson, for example, might be correct, but it’s not what was alleged. It’s possible for a government to be corrupt, even if the country isn’t – although once the rot has set in at the top, we should expect it to spread and the danger is that it may become the norm. That’s systemic corruption. We can also distinguish, for example, between transactional corruption (the odd dodgy act takes place within a basically sound system) and collusive corruption (most individuals are not corrupt, but turn a blind eye when it happens); between what is strictly speaking legal and what is nevertheless wrong; between corruption proper and a general decline in standards.
It’s hard to say yet just how bad things have got. We can certainly see transactional corruption – that is the charge levelled against Owen Paterson and in other cases relating to Covid-19 contracts, and even against the prime minister over his holidays and interior decoration. We can also see that the government has colluded in permitting these things, in particular by blocking their proper investigation, denying the nature of the wrongdoing and trying to change the rules.
What may have happened in the case of the present government is “a gradual form of corruption known as state capture” – that is, when narrow interest groups take control of public policy. This is hard to see until it is already well established and may come about not as a matter of intention, but as a result when a “group of opportunists in a populist government” sets about breaking and remaking the rules, and with “reformist energy and tribal loyalty” attacks institutions usually charged with maintaining checks and balances. Johnson’s zea l to “get Brexit done”, appease or reward factions of his party, or simply his wish to move beyond an establishment mindset, may lead to corruption. There may be no motive – simply a “casual disregard for the rules”.
The danger is that all this will open the floodgates. The Covid-19 procurement and furlough scandals have been revealing in this regard, showing “how quickly fraud and corruption move to occupy the space when standards controls and scrutiny are removed”. It’s not yet too late to stop the rot.