The Saturday Read Feature: The rotten state
How corruption and chumocracy are pulling Britain apart.
Good afternoon. Welcome to the latest Saturday Read Feature. This is Harry, along with Will and Pippa.
We will have the main email with you on Saturday. Ahead of that, we wanted to send you this week's cover: “The rotten state” by Will Dunn. Over 2,800 words let him tell you the story of how political grift went mainstream. He had me at the title – inky blots and rotten parchment bonds.
The piece begins below. Click through to read in full. If you would like to receive the main email alone you can adjust your settings on Substack. If you do not wish to receive emails from us you can click to unsubscribe at the end of this email.
Behind the football club on the outskirts of Calmore, Hampshire, on the eastern edge of the New Forest, there is a patch of waste ground – one day, it will be an Aldi supermarket – and beyond that, there is a small caravan site and a scrapyard. At the back of the yard more than 1,000 pallets had been piled up, two or three deep, in the open air. In places their wrapping bulged and split, and their contents – thousands upon thousands of bales of plastic medical aprons – had begun to spill out, blowing away into the neighbouring nature reserve.
When the BBC and national press caught up with the story last summer, the “PPE mountain” was said to have been dumped or fly-tipped, but that wasn’t true. As I discovered from a yard worker and a series of government contracts, it was being stored by a local plastics company commissioned to produce aprons for the NHS in 2020 in a deal worth more than £26m. Pictures of the site were enough to rouse an angry public, however, for whom it embodied the profligacy and opportunism exposed by the Covid pandemic.
The aprons are gone now, turned into plastic bags. PPE Mountain should perhaps have been preserved, as a national monument to fiscal carelessness. Ministers and private secretaries could have been made to climb its disintegrating flanks as a training exercise. No matter: we have plenty of reminders of how far the integrity of the state has fallen.
We have the Future Fund, established in 2020 by the then chancellor, Rishi Sunak, at a cost of £1.1bn to support British start-ups. The taxpayer has lost more than £300m on the Future Fund, which has given money to the businesses of Sunak’s centimillionaire wife, Akshata Murty, the Cabinet Office minister John Glen, and one company now being investigated by the Insolvency Service. We have a Foreign Secretary, David Cameron, who appointed Michelle Mone to the House of Lords in 2015 and, when out of office, lobbied the government on behalf of Lex Greensill, whose company is now being investigated by the Serious Fraud Office. In Grant Shapps we have a Defence Secretary who promoted a get-rich-quick scheme under the name of Michael Green and today spends a lot of time promoting his personal brand (as Shapps) on the Chinese social media platform TikTok.
Sunak entered Downing Street promising “integrity, professionalism and accountability”, in contrast to the cranks and crooks that had captured his party: the partying prime minister, the chancellor who avoided paying millions in tax, the health secretary whose neighbour, a pub landlord, received a contract to produce medical equipment for the NHS. But there is little evidence of change.
On 30 January the UK sank to its lowest ever level on Transparency International’s index of corruption perceptions, sharing 20th place with the Seychelles, a tax haven. The head of the National Audit Office (NAO), Gareth Davies, told MPs on 16 January that our government wastes tens of billions of pounds a year on shoddy contracts and poor management, and the British public increasingly suspects this is more than just incompetence. In a recent poll released by the Anti-Corruption Coalition, politicians were the group that the public thought most likely to be associated with economic crime. Kleptocrats – thieves by definition – came second.
There are strong echoes of the sleaze years of the 1990s, when Conservative politicians were exposed as having procured prostitutes for arms dealers and taken envelopes full of cash as bribes, among other corrupt actions. The difference is that the risks and rewards are now so much higher: since 2010 the volume of government outsourcing has almost quadrupled, from £64bn a year to more than £220bn. Britain’s chumocracy has never been so lucrative, but with government borrowing at a 60-year high, the cost of allowing it to continue has never been so great.
How did we get here? Margaret Hodge, whose career of more than 50 years in politics included five years as Public Accounts Committee chair, told me that in the course of a generation Britain has lost its status as one of the most trusted jurisdictions in the world.
For Hodge, the change began with Margaret Thatcher’s programme of privatisation and deregulation in the 1980s, and its continuation by both Conservative and Labour governments. The “massive deregulation” of private enterprise, especially financial services, was the engine for economic growth but required in return an ever more permissive environment in which to operate.
Have a good week, and catch you on Saturday for the main email. Thank you.
It rather looks as if the rotten state is not going to be reversed by starmer if he wins the next election. Today's announcement by Rachel Reeves that she will looking to ease thr regulations on the City mean that ''the rotten state'' will continue.