Professor Robert Barrington from the University of Sussex’s Centre for the Study of Corruption, and Deputy Director of the GI ACE Programme, summarises the findings from his recent book on corruption in the UK, Corrupted Kingdom: Britain’s disappearing integrity and how we can get it back.
Looking across the Atlantic, we see how swift the journey can be along the path from a state of mature liberal democracy towards state capture. The ingredients are now well known: a charismatic leader, a well-financed effort to get elected using popular anti-establishment messages, a determined and focussed plan to consolidate executive power post-election while the opposition is in disarray, the capturing of key institutions like broadcasters, dismantling of accountability mechanisms and targeted attacks on opponents. Meanwhile, the new leader and his circle of loyalists in politics and business can reap the rewards through personal enrichment via public contracts, subsidies, favourable laws and regulations for selected sectors and companies and the granting of effective monopolies. We may debate how far the US is on the journey to state capture, but few corruption analysts will dispute that the journey is well underway.
After the post-Cold War decades of governance and democratic reforms, the phenomenon of state capture is back with a vengeance. One of the term’s originators, Daniel Kaufmann (Co-Founder & President Emeritus, Natural Resource Governance Institute), has noted its durable nature: “…although the exact term ‘state capture’ may be a modern creation, similar notions and practices have existed for centuries, referring to the shaping and manipulation of national laws, regulations, policies, and institutions by the powerful for their own benefit at the expense of the public good.” In a world where the international rules-based order is declining and a generation of poligarchs (politicians who use their power to gain or enhance their own wealth) have learnt how to game democratic systems to their political and financial advantage, state capture is on the rise.
It is a pattern seen not just in low and lower-middle-income countries like Madagascar and Zambia, but also in upper-middle-income countries such as Sri Lanka, South Africa and Brazil, and – with varying degrees of penetration – in Europe’s higher-income democracies of Poland and Hungary, themselves following the lead of Berlusconi-era Italy. It may be tempting for the world’s longer-standing democracies to look on and think that kind of thing does not happen over here, but the second term of the Trump presidency should be putting every democracy on high alert.
Where is the UK on that journey? Since around the mid-1850s, the British have generally thought of corruption as something that happens overseas, sometimes in their own empire, rather than at home. At that period, partly stimulated by imperial scandals whose ripples were felt back in London, a long-running debate about whether holding public office should be for personal gain or for the public interest was decisively resolved in favour of the public interest. Some of this was embedded in Victorian institutions like the Audit Commission and a reformed and independent civil service, as well as anti-corruption laws and electoral reforms. At a political level, corruption had been kept in check not by rules and laws, but by what historian Prof. Peter Hennessy (Professor of Contemporary British History, Queens Mary University of London) describes as the ‘good chaps theory’ of government – that the system self-corrects, because good chaps will be in power and will ultimately act in the country’s best interests.
Yet the UK’s political settlement is starting to unravel. Kaufmann’s State Capture Index shows the UK to have been in decline over the past twenty-five years, and already starting from a much lower position than countries to which it likes to be compared. The UK’s score is much better than the USA, but distinctly worse than the Scandinavians, Netherlands and Germany, on a par with countries like Greece and Portugal – and going down.
All liberal democracies are vulnerable to a dark quartet of threats to political integrity: lobbying, party funding, the revolving door and conflicts of interest. Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig warns this can easily tip over into ‘institutional corruption’ when there is a diversion of purpose away from the public interest towards private interests.
After years of steady decline, the underlying presumption of integrity and the good chaps theory was tested to breaking point by the Boris Johnson governments of 2019-2022. Under Johnson, there were acts of corruption amongst his ministers and party, heightened levels of institutional corruption risk, and many acts – including healthcare equipment procurement during the Covid crisis – which, had they been properly investigated, would almost certainly have revealed corruption.
Indeed, when Johnson left office, there were 40 alleged breaches of the Ministerial Code which had not been investigated, and now never will be. Some of these looked like out-and-out corruption, and others more like integrity breaches. But scholars are agreed that multiple integrity breaches at some indefinable point tip over into systemic corruption, and so we can see integrity breaches are part of that journey towards state capture.
The UK’s problems extend beyond politics. Prof. Liz Dávid-Barrett (Director, CSC & GI ACE) has identified key accountability institutions which need to be in place to guard against state capture, including the electoral oversight body, the judiciary, supreme audit bodies, civil society and the independent media. All of these have been under attack in the UK, often by politicians themselves.
Moreover, alongside the accountability institutions, we can also identify a number of influencing sectors. These help to set the moral tone for the nation. How they react to corruption matters: for example, if the media consistently fails to call out a corrupt politician, then the moral authority has the reverse effect of normalising corrupt behaviours. If those sectors are corrupt themselves, their own moral authority to identify or condemn corruption is undermined. This can be seen in religious bodies – which have had a series of child sex abuse scandals – as well as sports, social media, charities, and other sectors. In each of these, the UK’s moral arbiters have themselves been found wanting.
In the wider public sector, the expectation of integrity-led behaviour embodied in the UK’s Nolan Principles of standards in public life has also been in decline. This is partly due to blurred lines after many years of outsourcing and privatisation. Is the boss of a privatised water company which pollutes local rivers obliged to follow the Nolan Principles – or just maximise the company’s return to shareholders? But beyond this confusion, petty corruption, bribery, cronyism and abuse of office are at surprisingly high levels throughout much of the public sector, including the police, border officials, prisons and local government.
A former police chief in New Orleans coined the 15-70-15 rule. He concluded that 15 per cent of cops were the driving force of corruption, while 70 per cent went with the flow and 15 per cent were clean. The battle for most institutions is to minimise the proportion of those who are corrupt, and to minimise the influence they wield over those who go with the flow. The risk for the UK is that as the proportion of those who are corrupt rises, there can be a snowball effect that happens much faster than expected as that large majority go with the flow. A robust democracy can absorb one or two institutions with elevated levels of corruption, but corruption in too many places at the same time out-runs the state’s defences.
To add to the gloom there are also a number of external threats like the influx of corrupt capital – dirty money of unknown origin whose owners do not wish the UK well – and above all the rise in organised crime. The failure of public services and the rise of inequality and disillusionment also give corruption a well-established entry point both with public officials and with citizens seeking short-cuts when the state starts to fail.
Surely, in a country like the UK, someone must be in charge of keeping a check on this and marshalling the defences? Apparently not. There are over a hundred bodies with some responsibility for addressing corruption, but they play like a blindfold orchestra, with no coordination. Even worse, there is no conductor with overall responsibility for making the system work. This means that the UK’s defences are unnecessarily weak.
This picture does not look very healthy, and by almost every available measure, corruption in the UK has been getting worse since 1990. The British sense of moral exceptionalism and complacency about corruption means that the UK itself may only realise at a late stage in the journey towards state capture that it has been happening, and with each step further it becomes harder to reverse. In a sense, all democracies are only a few steps away from starting the journey to state capture. The US has advanced further and faster than many people expected. The UK is also further down that journey than many might have believed: but the evidence that it is firmly embarked on that journey points only in one direction.
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