Government and civil service corruption goes deep.

Dodgy Dave’s antics are the tip of the fatberg.

We’ve heard a lot of talk about “sleaze” and “cronyism” of late, and a lot of innuendo about these things, which is such a British way of dealing with events like this, glossing over and sort of hinting at what we really mean. Let’s call this what it really is: corruption. Not Tory sleaze, Tory corruption. Not cronyism, out and out self serving, back scratching, hand shaking, criminal corruption. No one says this, but in my opinion this is the ONLY way to credibly talk about this stuff. So, now it’s out in the open, let’s delve in.

This isn’t a story about David Cameron, or this government, or even just Tory governments, it’s a story about consistent and brazen corruption at the heart of the British establishment for as long as any of us have been born, under governments of all stripes (some worse than others of course). There’s a good deal of British exceptionalism at play, with cries of “we aren’t like this” or that somehow this is an 11 year aberration from a good record on cronyism, but the reality is we’ve never been special, and our state has always been the plaything of a self serving elite; we aren’t special, in many instances we’ve been worse.

David Cameron isn’t sorry for what he did or how he did it, he’s sorry he got caught with his hand in the cookie jar. Formal rules on paper adhered to or not, no one with their head screwed on can look at his post Downing Street career path and say “ah yes, absolutely fine, no conflicts of interest there”. This is a guy who was born to rule, no talent and no ideas, came to power (with the help of the goddamn liberals) and absolutely destroyed vast swathes of the country in a zealotic way that would have made Thatcher proud with a punishing hard line austerity policy, called a referendum, got a 52% middle finger to him and his campaign, and buggered off to leave us all to work out the cataclysmic mess he’d made of Britain in 6 years.

So this man, who previously window dressed as some sort of answer to the sleaze and corruption found within the excesses of New Labour, came to power, ran the country, got these private sector individuals into No 10 to devise more middle man financing schemes that enrich themselves and the private sector at no benefit to the public pocket, and then in his post PM career, Dodgy Dave decides to become a fully paid up lobbyist with £20 million in stocks on the line, camping with journalist butchering Saudi elites, and desperately lobbying a government of his own party through private channels, wielding his connection, and getting hours upon hours of facetime with officials across the Johnson government.

Make no mistake, this utter car crash is quite literally the tip of the fatberg when it comes to this sort of stuff; this is likely the minor end of the stuff that goes on, unspoken, every day in the corridors of power at OUR expense and to our collective detriment, and the enrichment of a privileged few who were born to rule. The Johnson administration is probably pretty happy to throw Cameron under the bus and get one up in an intra-Tory feud, but their record right through this pandemic is one of increasingly brazen corruption and sleaze, a record they need to (and hopefully will) answer for. All the eyes on the situation may uncover things damaging to officials in government, and we may yet see some resignations to celebrate (absolute best case scenario is that the rising star of Dishy Rishi is put out by some revelation or another).

The civil service have shown themselves up as well in this. It shows us at the very top of the civil service, there is a political elite, with a law unto themselves, who see fit to bring people into government without the consultation of ministers, and to pursue their own agenda to the detriment of the public, and unbeknownst to the government. The government’s phoney war on civil servants was absolutely a populist distraction that went no further than harsh briefing and bullying people just doing their jobs, but there's room for a serious conversation about what to do regards a self perpetuating bureaucratic elite that defies elected governments to follow its own neoliberal agenda at the heart of the British state, and will put up resistance to anything they ideologically oppose (a democratic socialist programme, Brexit, etc). This is the reality of the “deep state” less satanic cults, more ideological individuals overseeing the running the British state.

Labour seem to have settled on the line of “Tory sleaze” and are hammering and hammering and hammering it. Message discipline here is to be commended, but it has to be said, the big issue here is the public (often rightfully) responding to this with a shrug of “it’s all of them” and this scandal just making them less likely to vote, rather than likely to switch their vote from HM government to HM opposition. That being said, it worked in the 90s, and anything to dent this Teflon government’s popularity is a good thing for Britain politically.

However, Labour has a lot to answer for in government (and now under Starmer’s opposition) for deciding not to disclose big money donors under after the leadership election, taking money from some really dire types, keeping the Forde report hidden, running Labour like a mafia cartel, and in government for any number of PFI rip offs, cash for access scandals, and the general brazen corruption we currently see from this government. It’s a cross party issue, an issue of the British state, and one any progressive government is going to have a job on tackling; but tackled it must be.

The job for the left here is to dispel complacency, push back on the antipathy of “they all do it so why get angry”, to highlight the brazenly corrupt nature of the British state, and to show Britain it deserves so much more from those it intrusts with government.