The Stench of Corruption
Multiple scandals show how our institutions are crumbling
Towering Columns
In The Times, Juliet Samuel argues that many of our politicians cannot resist the allure of wealth and status.
These types are lured by histories or TV dramas into the political arena. Some of them make it to “the top” and suddenly see it isn’t the top. Layers of elites stretch into the distance above them — and they think they’ve joined the club. There they are at Davos with the special badge, being flown around and asked for advice, handed cash and holidays. And while they are in office, the donors can usually be fobbed off with the odd conference call. They don’t get to dictate specific policies (a rude awakening for some) even if, as a class, they have some power over the direction of travel. But this can give the politician the illusion that he himself is the sole author and owner of the life he’s living.
Then, they leave office. Some, like Theresa May or Gordon Brown, are only too happy, even relieved, to retire into the milieu they know. But others see in the world of globally hobnobbing oligarchs, dictators, financiers and heirs a game they desperately want to keep playing. Often, it’s a game on a scale they didn’t even know existed before.
The problem is that to do that, even just to remain as relevant “staff” for the top echelons, they need very, very large sums of money. And in a relatively non-corrupt society like Britain, politics is not a good field in which to make money. In fact, compared with many other fields an ambitious person could go into, like finance, business, law or even media, it’s uniquely risky to make serious money from politics. Even worse, in a democracy, leaders have only a limited window in which to parlay their brief status into the wealth needed to gain permanent membership of the super-elite.
Not everyone can be a Tony Blair (though one wonders what we’d find if caches of BlackBerry messages had existed earlier). George Osborne has so far collected various advisory roles without too much controversy. Boris Johnson has had some minor run-ins but has enough celebrity to work a lucrative speaking circuit. But David Cameron’s attempt to lobby for Greensill, the collapsed lender, snookered his career after office. Various senior civil servants, including Sir Simon Fraser, Sir Andrew Cahn and John Suffolk, have sold their services to Huawei.
What currency did Mandelson have? His best assets, such as the ability to help out with passports, to influence policy or to share privileged information, declined fast once out of office. This explains why he appears to have routinely taken the incredible risk of directly forwarding sensitive, market-moving government emails to a finance guy convicted of child sex offences.
In UnHerd, Mary Harrington argues that the global elite have become morally detached from the rest of us.
Now, whether it’s the influence-peddling or the snapshot in his scanties, the game seems to be up. Now, the once apparently unassailable “Prince of Darkness”, already fired as Keir Starmer’s man in Washington due to Epstein ties, has resigned from the Labour Party and declared that he won’t be returning to the House of Lords. Starmer, ever on the communications front foot, responded to this statement by indicating he does not think Mandelson should sit in the House of Lords.
So that’s all fine then. Except it isn’t. There is no suggestion that Mandelson was implicated in sexual abuse. But the girls were never the main action anyway. For what’s also clear is that Mandelson was just one actor in a sprawling, incestuous web, that will outlive Epstein, and in which I suspect the household-name celebrities and public figures currently making headlines (and headaches for the Prime Minister) often counted for less in power-broking terms than those less high-profile but seriously influential in politics, finance, or law. For some in this group, raping trafficked children may have been a fun diversion. But the real frisson — and Epstein’s real work — lay in the subtler and more varied trade, in things that money can’t buy.
The nihilistic overclass of transnational kleptocrats and their hangers-on Epstein catered to in this occult marketplace operated, and still operates, at a level where political principle simply does not feature, let alone the moral or spiritual kind. There’s only whatever you want, and whatever strings you are willing or able to pull for someone else, in exchange for it. This was the real feast; those poor violated girls were just the amuse-bouche.
In The Times, Gerard Baker says that Epstein is a window into the everyday corruption of globalisation.
It was ever thus, you will say. That’s how business has always been done at the top — and that’s true. But two things are different about the way this has worked in the past 20 years: the sheer scale of the wealth and opportunity unleashed by the globalisation of finance especially (it’s why Americans and Brits dominate these lists of names — they come from the two leading financial capitals of the world); and the absence of any real regulatory framework to restrain it in the ascendancy of the neoliberal economic order. The rewards to be had from making the right connection, untrammelled by legal restraint.
Most of this is perfectly lawful — that’s the point of an unregulated system. But the advantages gained from a connection available to no one else mean the playing field isn’t level. It can be manipulated by invaluable information the network provides you.
And some of what goes on is probably neither fair nor legal. We only know now about how Mandelson is alleged to have shared valuable information with Epstein because of the latter’s criminal depravity that led to his exposure. How many other exchanges are taking place daily that will never come to light?
The irony is that the populist revulsion at this network of mutually back-scratching elites resulted in the rise to power in the US of someone who was once a member of them and who still essentially acts like one. (It’s not true, by the way, that the Epstein story has had little fallout in the US. Many an American titan has been felled by the revelations. The endless search for the smoking gun on Trump himself is probably futile: whether by fortune or judgment, he does seem to have ended his connection with the man after his conviction in 2009.)
Yet as the network gets more money and more power — and those outside it lose more and more ground — a real populist backlash is surely inevitable.
In The Telegraph, Trevor Phillips writes how our legal system has been corrupted by the rich to silence their critics.
Legal bullying now threatens many who are not rich and privileged. The UK Anti-SLAPP Coalition, co-founded by Index on Censorship, has documented SLAPPs brought against survivors of sexual violence by their attacker after the criminal justice system failed them and they went public to warn other women.
We have reported on former patients of cosmetic surgery who posted negative reviews to inform others considering going under the knife, only to face legal actions and damages claimed at £10,000. We’ve seen a victim’s advocate threatened by the very crypto-fraud they had lost money to, just because she didn’t want others falling into the same trap she had.
And even success against a SLAPP can carry a cost. Nina Cresswell who successfully beat a legal action brought against her by the man who sexually assaulted her told us that the SLAPP “took three years of my life fighting and I will never be the same again.”
The Government has promised to tackle SLAPPS. But to date we only have flawed and narrow protections in the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act, which only cover reporting on economic crime and depend on an excessively restrictive definition of SLAPP, which can easily be side-stepped.
For The Times, Jonathan Ames argues that we must protect our juries from external pressure.
Juries can be mercurial. There is no better illustration of this than the verdict at Woolwich crown court in London this week in the prosecution of six Palestine Action members.
The activists were accused of causing more than £1 million of damage to an Israeli defence company’s British factory, and leaving a female police officer with a fractured spine. After deliberating for more than 36 hours, the jurors acquitted the six of aggravated burglary while failing to reach verdicts on counts of criminal damage, violent disorder and assault occasioning grievous bodily harm. A retrial is now a possibility.
Many who have seen the video of their arrest, which was entered in evidence, will consider that verdict perverse. Astonishment is a fair reaction. But it should be remembered that a two-minute video clip cannot be equated to sitting through hours of evidence presented during a criminal trial.
Still, the latest verdict will recall the furore over the 2022 acquittal of four protesters accused of criminal damage by throwing a statue of Edward Colston into Bristol Harbour.
There is clearly public disquiet. But what the trial of the Palestine Action activists highlights is the need for criminal trials to be held in appropriate circumstances free of potential outside influences. The judge at Woolwich was forced to remind jurors to ignore the noisy commotion caused by protesters outside the court building.
For The Telegraph, Rory Geoghegan documents how we have stopped protecting police officers from violence.
In the past week, it has been reported that no one was convicted following a break-in by Palestine Action protesters at an Elbit Systems factory near Bristol in 2024. This was despite a police officer being hit with a sledgehammer, fracturing her spine.
This was not a minor scuffle. It was an attack capable of causing life-ending or life-changing injury. We also heard from Ned Donovan, a former special constable who intervened while off duty to apprehend a thief on Westminster Bridge and was violently assaulted.
His case sat gathering dust for four months, as the DNA went unprocessed and CCTV images uncirculated. The glacial pace of the investigation and subsequent failings prompted him to pen an open letter to the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Mark Rowley, laying bare the failings and demanding better. These are not isolated cases: they just happen to be high-profile ones. Even when assaults on police officers do make it to court and defendants are convicted, outcomes are often derisory. I remember the first time I was assaulted as a serving officer. A seasoned colleague advised me not to expect much – the going rate for having a crack at a copper was widely understood to be a £50 fine. He was right.
In The Times, Melanie Phillips writes that liberal universalism has warped Britain’s foreign policy.
In the conflict between Israel and Hamas, Powell has been lobbying for Hamas to keep some of its guns. This is to break the deadlock in which the Islamist group is resisting President Trump’s demand for “demilitarisation” before the next stage of his Gaza peace plan can be reached.
This has echoes of the Northern Ireland peace process but using the Good Friday Agreement as a kind of global counterterrorism template is a category error. The IRA wanted a united Ireland. Unlike Islamic jihadis, they did not want to destroy Britain and kill or conquer everyone there.
Powell denies the desperate unwisdom of negotiating with people who have fanatical, absolute and non-negotiable agendas. But Islamists or Chinese communists don’t suddenly become convinced of the benefits of pragmatism. They become convinced instead of the endless gullibility or amoral cynicism of western diplomats bent upon making concessions which these implacable foes rightly perceive as weakness.
Powell’s world view — shared by Starmer and the attorney-general, Richard Hermer — is shaped by the liberal universalists’ perfect faith in negotiation, compromise and legal process, based on their arrogant assumption that everyone in the world thinks like the West and is accordingly governed by self-interest.
The idea of actually defeating bad people with absolute agendas, which might involve things like “principle”, “victory” and “surrender” and even require people to fight and die for freedom and justice, are to be dismissed as evidence of inferior intellect and moral deficiency.
In The Telegraph, Philip Johnson spotlights the growing sectarianism corrupting our electoral processes.
Once again, the spectre of sectarianism is stalking British democracy. At the last general election four candidates standing on a specifically pro-Palestinian platform won seats in parliament.
Sectarianism is a new departure for elections in England, if less so in other parts of the UK such as Northern Ireland and Scotland where divisions between Catholics and Protestants have for decades determined voter preferences in some seats. Liverpool, with its two cathedrals, was the one English city divided along similar lines but it has largely moderated.
Decades of immigration from the subcontinent has seen pernicious new ethnic and religious tribalisms emerge, the antithesis of the assimilation needed to forge a national identity. They are exploited by ideological Islamists in an unholy alliance with the far-Left with whom they share little, other than a desire to undermine our institutions and our way of life.
Yet at this perilous moment, the Government is preparing to reveal the outcome of its lengthy consultation on what constitutes so-called “Islamophobia”. The draft wording was disclosed a few weeks ago, defining “anti-Muslim hostility” as “harassment and intimidation whether physical, verbal, written or electronically communicated, which is directed at Muslims or those perceived to be Muslims because of their religion, ethnicity or appearance”. Such hostility would also include the “prejudicial stereotyping and racialisation of Muslims, as part of a collective group with set characteristics, to stir up hatred against them, irrespective of their actual opinions, beliefs or actions as individuals”.
It has taken a committee a year to come up with this definition and ministers have promised an announcement shortly – presumably before the Gorton and Denton by-election in a bid to win some of those Muslim votes back.
And for The Telegraph, Robert Jenrick questions the Prime Minister’s decision to pursue our soldiers in the courts.
Of course, improving his own lot at the expense of his country’s long-term security is nothing new for this Prime Minister. His legal career was founded upon so-called human rights claims that undermined our Armed Forces. He claims he was obliged to accept such work but as The Telegraph revealed this week, he worked with the disgraced solicitor Phil Shiner for free.
His work “challeng[ing] the government over the reach of its anti-terror legislation and taken on the British military”, according to The Guardian, led to his appointment as Director of Public Prosecutions and subsequent political career. The question is, will Starmer be allowed to repeat the trick of enhancing his own career at the expense of his country’s interests?
To boost our country’s growth and living standards, the Prime Minister doesn’t even need to fly to Beijing to offer himself as tribute. One of the fallacies of globalisation was that manufacturing could be outsourced to the East, but Britain could remain a powerhouse of innovation. The idea was that companies like Dyson could make their products overseas, but bright sparks here could continue to design them all thousands of miles from the production line. It doesn’t work like that. The two are too inextricably linked, as every Western economy has now learnt to its cost.
Wonky Thinking
New research from Onward has found that people already claiming Universal Credit are getting £10bn in additional payments and free services on top of their benefits, reducing the effectiveness of the system as a means of incentivising work. The report calls for “radical rationalisation” and returning to the guiding principles of Universal Credit, particularly encouraging independence and resilience.
An expansive menu of extra payments and freebies for those already receiving benefits is weakening work incentives at a staggering cost of £10 billion. Working age benefit claimants negotiating this sprawling system are met with incoherent rules fragmented across over a dozen different schemes. This paper is the first systematic review of the costs of all benefits passported through receipt of Universal Credit and their average value to those claiming them. Alongside discretionary local schemes, this paper reveals how they collectively total over £10 billion in additional working-age welfare on top of Universal Credit payments.
From its inception, the purpose of Universal Credit was to create a simplified benefits system where people were always better off starting work, taking on more hours, and progressing in their careers, rather than staying on benefits. It promised to consolidate payments into a simpler single award, smoothing out the cliff edges that saw support sharply withdrawn once you worked a certain number of hours or earned a certain amount. It was meant to save taxpayers’ money too.
But, thirteen years on since the rollout of Universal Credit began, it has become anything but a single, universal payment. The benefits system for those of working age has ballooned in size, scope and cost. Reform that was meant to streamline multiple income-replacement legacy benefits has instead carried over and expanded multiple sub-schemes that are accessed by virtue of already being a claimant. These are collectively known as “passported benefits”: benefits for which eligibility is conferred via another benefit for which eligibility requirements have already been met.
A two-tier benefits system has been created: one in which savvy claimants can gain thousands of extra pounds a year, but those with the least awareness or capacity still miss out on support. Jagged cliff edges have been carved, whereby being on benefits grants access to a wide array of top-ups, but reaching certain earnings levels risks suddenly losing these too. For everything from children’s meals to energy bills, there is an associated concession largely or exclusively for benefit claimants, almost half of whom are not required to look for work at all. In turn, passported benefits have created a deeply unfair two-tier state, where many of those just beyond benefit eligibility are fundamentally worse off than many claimants.
To avoid political fights, successive governments have ended up double-handling certain living costs through passported work-arounds. Policy failures have been mitigated with more bureaucracy, rather than addressing the drivers of the high prices that affect everyone. Worse still, pervasive passporting has made it more rational to remain a client of the state rather than struggle through the jobs market, risking losing bonus entitlements once in work. Paternalism has triumphed over aspiration, undermining the core purpose of working-age welfare reform.
This paper exposes the value of these schemes to claimants, the cost to taxpayers and consumers, and the cumulative effect on incentives for claimants to work at all and to progress in work. It proposes a radical reshaping of this area of state support, creating a welfare system with greater certainty, consistency and simplicity for claimants, and better value for the taxpayer.
On the Prosperity Institute’s Substack, Alexander Baker discusses the 200-year decline of our jury system and the need for the Right to not just defend a failing status quo but put forward genuine measures to fix it, including strengthening juror qualification.
The role of the jury in Britain’s legal system is grounded in centuries of practice and can arguably trace its roots back to Magna Carta, if not further. Many have traced its emergence over the past thousand years of English history—Ed West has an excellent primer on his Substack.
Yet the system has already previously undergone major reform along the lines proposed by Lammy. At the start of the nineteenth century, trials for most criminal offences, including all felonies and serious misdemeanours, involved a trial on indictment before a jury.[2] The most common indictable offence at this time by far was larceny, with a court return from 1838 showing that of 23,094 persons committed for trial, a total of 15,915 or 69 per cent had been charged with some form of larceny.
However, growing case numbers were starting to put serious pressures on the justice system— a problem not too dissimilar from our contemporary woes. The preference for pre-trial detention over bail meant that more suspects were being detained for longer periods of time. The expense of criminal trials was also rising, with counties paying one-fifth of the country rate (a partial precursor to Council Tax) to the payment of prosecution expenses in 1834. By the late 1840s the Treasury, which had taken over covering these costs, was spending an eye-watering £400,000, roughly one percent of the total expenditure of the state.[3]
Unsurprisingly, pressure grew to transfer some of the burden from juries to judges in the Summary Courts. Yet despite the above defects being widely acknowledged, proposals to transfer jurisdiction met with stubborn opposition. The arguments were manifold. The quality of justices varied, with many qualifying by virtue of property ownership and having no legal training. There was also a perception that justices favoured harsher sentencing practices, known as the ‘Justices’ justice’. To address these concerns, reformers suggested that expanding summary jurisdiction include several safeguards, such as ensuring that the power of the Summary Courts should only be exercised by two or more magistrates, or that penalties imposed by justices could be limited to six months imprisonment.
Legislative reforms also contained provisions allowing a defendant to object to a summary trial. Provisions in the Criminal Justice Act 1855 required a justice to specifically ask a defendant whether they objected to a summary trial, a system which evolved into our modern category of ‘either-way’ cases (crimes triable in either magistrates’ or Crown Court).
Despite opposition, and the fear that, in William Blackstone’s words, “the new and arbitrary methods of trial… may in time imperceptibly undermine this best preservative of English liberty”, the Criminal Justice Act 1855 passed.[4] A year later, committals for trial by jury had dropped by 25%, with most of the decline being due to a drop in committals for larceny. Between 1855 and 1900, annual committals for trial more than halved.[5]
The legal scholar Douglas Hay noted that “from being the epitome of English criminal law in the eighteenth century, the jury trial became the little used symbol of it in the nineteenth”.[6] The decline in the use of jury trials has continued to present day, with around 90 per cent of all criminal cases now being handled by the magistrates’ courts.[7]
What should contemporary conservatives make of this historical precedent? The broad tone of opposition to the Justice Secretary’s proposed reforms today (proposals in step with frustrated party ambitions dating all the way back to the first Blair premiership) is that they are an unprecedented assault on ancient rights, and merely the next step in a thirty year project of Blairite constitutional vandalism. Yet this position is hard to sustain given that the biggest blow to the widespread use of trial by jury was struck not by David Lammy but by Lord Palmerston.
One is of course free to argue that the mid-nineteenth century criminal justice reforms were a reckless act of Whiggish innovation, and that we must turn the clock back to restore a judicial settlement which even most of our great-great-grandparents were not old enough to have known. Stranger reforms have happened. But no one is served by ignoring the fact that jury trials have not merely been in decline since 1997, but since the mid-1800s.
Podcast of the Week
Professor Dieter Helm discusses how several key industries have fallen back to production levels last seen in the 1950s. Helm argues that the UK needs to focus on three big areas: competitive business taxes; affordable and globally competitive energy prices; and major investment in skills if we want to get back on track.
Quick Links
A new campaign has been launched to scrap carbon taxes on electricity.
The government is accused of spending millions on ‘massaging’ NHS waiting list figures.
The government has pulled the Chagos Island treaty legislation for the second time.
The Prime Minister proposes joining the pan-European defence fund for a second time.
A former Labour MP is arrested on suspicion of rape, sexual assault and upskirting.
Reform u-turns on two-child benefit cap to spend more money on saving pubs.
The Prime Minister is reported to have called for the ECHR to be used to prosecute British troops when he was a lawyer.
The Health Secretary plans to offer resident doctors an even bigger pay rise to stop strike action.
The number of police officers has fallen by 1,300 under the new government.
The government has redesigned the ‘Lesser Arms’ crest for official communications.