'How Corrupt Is Britain?' by David Whyte

Corruption. Ugh, British corruption.

The other day I finished reading 'How Corrupt Is Britain?' by David Whyte, which was quite a depressing read. Learning about politics is certainly making me feel like I'm living during the End of Days, or at the start of an extremely bleak dystopian SF novel.

After a few wishy-washy chapters looking at the concept of corruption and how 'neoliberal' ideologies contribute to normalizing corrupt practices, the book moves on to specific examples of British corruption. There are three chapters on police corruption, covering the use of violence against peaceful protesters, institutional racism, and various cover-ups (killings, Hillsborough, Plebgate). This all undermines your faith in the British police, and leaves you wondering how much has been successfully covered up over the years.

This is followed by four chapters on government corruption, covering state sanctioned torture ('Cruel Brittania' by Ian Cobain is recommended for a more thorough history of British state torture), child sexual abuse cover-ups (Jimmy Saville and the BBC), the Private Finance Initiative (see previous post), and revolving door politics.

The final four chapters cover corporate corruption, examining Britain's tax haven empire (the UK, including its oversees territories, controls about a quarter of the global market for financial services), the dodgy activities of the Big Four accounting firms (PwC, KPMG, Ernst & Young, Deloitte), banking scams (pension frauds, endowment mortgages, PPI), and the normalization of obscenely high pay for corporate executives (in 1980, average pay for a FTSE 100 CEO was 18 times the average UK wage: in 2012 it was 162 times the average UK wage).

So I now have a rather bleaker view of Britain. I am wondering how Britain's corruption compares to other countries. If we want Britain to be less corrupt, how realistic, in the long term, are these goals? Power corrupts: the greedy and powerful - and possibly psychopathic - will find ways to bend the rules in their favor. What can we do when human nature cannot be changed? 

I am being too negative. Much has improved over the centuries, but the victories of the progressives seem so fragile and ephemeral. We have a bad habit of imagining history as roughly progressing towards a better society, but that is an illusion. We cannot rely on history to progress in the right direction of its own accord; we cannot rely on the liberal victories of the past being a permanent fixture on our political landscape.