The infected blood scandal exposes the toxic mendacity of our ruling class

Britain’s unspoken vice is elite secrecy, but we are waking up to how long we have been taken for fools

There is an unspoken phenomenon that quietly threatens the position of the British establishment. It might be described as “perma-gate”. That is to say, the endless string of elite scandals – both cold case and contemporary – that are shining a light on the corrupted machinations of the state. Taken in isolation these national outrages, from the infected blood disaster and the Post Office disgrace to the pandemic response, elicit an impotent shiver of revulsion from a deferential, if disillusioned, nation. Taken together, they are dynamite.

Across the pond, faith in democracy and the ruling class was exploded by Watergate, a single episode that exposed American statecraft’s amoral, expletive core. In Britain, the suspension of our disbelief in the system is more painstakingly, yet no less profoundly, unravelling, as we steadily gain a partial but in parts astonishingly detailed artists’ impression of the rancid paternalism that pollutes the state’s every tentacle, from the dingy IT offices of the postal service to the laboratories of backwater haemophilia centres.

With the release of the Infected Blood Inquiry’s report, we are left to process the revelation that the NHS is not so much a sacred institution as a corrupted priesthood. That in its paradoxically paternalist zeal for “clinical freedom” it allowed doctors to follow unsafe treatment policies and practices, with some exploiting this so far as to experiment on children. That as the horrific fallout became clear, our hallowed health service refused to acknowledge its errors, instead retreating into a basilica of lies, obfuscation and destruction of evidence. If there was something seedily mafia-esque about the subterfuge that characterised the Post Office scandal, the cover-up surrounding the biggest treatment disaster in NHS history has whiffs of impudent zealotry.

We must come to terms with the revelation that for years successive governments and the Civil Service disseminated fake news. With a bland militancy it maintained over several decades, it stuck to the mendacious narrative that the blood infections were a tragic and regrettable development, which occurred because of a lack of understanding of the risks.

The inquiry’s report details how false orthodoxies (albeit described in the arid language of officialdom as “lines to take”) entrenched themselves. “Dogma became a mantra. It was enshrined. It was never questioned.”

Politicians frame the blood scandal as a historic “injustice” with their platitudes about a “shameful” episode that is “hard to even comprehend”. In this attempt at psychological distancing, we the public are partially complicit. Delayed justice has become a grim ritual of a country which loves authority just a little too much.

But ultimately something about these historic scandals resonates with us to the point where the past collapses into the present. Our hearts seize at grainy pictures of victims who not only didn’t live to see justice but suffered horrible and shameful deaths, enduring the cruelties of public stigma. Our minds inevitably wander to those faceless doctors and civil servants, instrumental and complicit in their unnecessary deaths, who are by now happily retired, living on gold-plated public pensions.

True, it is welcome that criminal prosecutions may follow today’s report. But it is likely that too many will go unpunished. As the families of victims protested in the sweltering summer heat on Westminster’s College Green yesterday, I couldn’t help wonder what the report’s “someone in the Department of Health” who probably deliberately chose to mark incriminating files for destruction was doing at that moment. Perhaps tending their begonias in some corner of the suburbs, living a life of discreetly arrogant splendour.

What makes such inquiries more powerful is how they are exposing pathologies of the British state that are not historic but eternal. The past treatment of haemophiliacs speaks to an enduring culture of cover-up that officials have warned is still endemic in the NHS, with hospitals still hiding evidence of poor care.

The thing that this inquiry really hits home is that the British culture of elite secrecy is without parallel in the Western world. It is a national puzzle that one might call the British Question.

An archaic ruling class code based on Victorian club governance has barely changed since it was established in the 19th century. The elite’s culture of honourable secrecy and patronising impunity has proved bomb-proof, surviving not only democratisation, but recent attempts to build better mechanisms of account into the system. Via a darkly brilliant process of “systems thinking”, an ossified bureaucracy has “learnt” how to preserve itself from democratic scrutiny – burying errors under layers of obfuscation planted by generations of civil servants who stick to an “authorised account of events”.

Elected ministers in young democracies such as Japan were far more effective at holding civil servants to account and getting to the bottom of similar blood infection scandals. Indeed, a succession of public inquiries reveals to us that our more mature liberal state’s secrecy is so prolific, so compulsive, so endemic that it threatens to effectively render Britain a failed democratic state.

Such a claim may seem implausibly strong, but the fact remains that the state is technically failing, as it lacks a plausible system of democratic accountability and ministerial responsibility, with the only recourse to truth being the pantomime of public inquiry. These are as much a gravy train for lawyers as they are the public’s only vehicle, beyond elections, to hold state power to account. Even with their enhanced coercive powers, as we have seen from the blood scandal to Horizon to the Covid inquiry, they are systematically bogged down by subtly uncooperative officials.

Britain’s crisis of institutions is becoming dangerous. It is impossible to ignore the fact that an archaic, entrenched, corrupted bureaucracy – the origin of which predates our democracy by a century – shows little compunction over lying to its people. The ruling class’s favouring of closed government over democracy, of loyalty over objective truth, of order over freedom, saving face over the preservation of public trust, have emerged so strongly as recurring themes that they surely cannot continue to be a niche preoccupation of Leave voters and lockdownsceptics, but a burning outrage that unifies the nation.

Delayed justice has become a grim ritual of a country which loves authority just a little too much