https://metro.co.uk/2019/10/31/10000-grant-given-boris-johns...
IE, Torrie/Boris corruption is the only topic. Whether it's a British DARPA, new sewage plant, or change to the tax code, the only thing to say is "They're corrupt. This is just another pilfering."
I'm sympathetic to the focus on corruption. Corruption is bad. That said, I don't think the UK is at the point where everything is just corruption and nothing more. There is room to talk about things other than corruption too. Besides, this particular flavour of corruption is almost always present. Whether it's the VC's boyfriend, bank manager's mistress or political boys clubs. Insiders get insider access. I don't like it either, but where/when is this not the case? It's not a coincidence that so many of your (or american) parliamentarians went to school together?
I am sure knowing people at DARPA, being married to a general or whatever is a big help too.
Americans are worse than you guys on these fronts, and they're not the worst either.
Only because he's so enthusiastic and shameless about it. Open corruption is corrosive in a democracy, they deserve to be hit on the head with it until they stop.
And there's no point lamenting these poor (!) tories. If you were around when a bunch of ministers and high-ranking politicians were sacked, some of them thrown in jail, for using public funds for their benefits, you know they did not get away with it. Both media and public opinion were relentless, and that was under New Labour. And the sums were much, much smaller than these phony contracts to old mates.
A key moral principle for a democratic government is to maintain public trust in democracy and its institutions. By pilfering public funds to enrich themselves and their friends, this government (and Johnson himself) has broken that principle, and until that has been remedied with resignation or impeachment, and ideally jail, it’s reasonable to talk of nothing else.
Except of course in this case we might also want to discuss this government’s appalling record elsewhere: allowing more of its citizens to die than almost anywhere else, per capita, by prioritising “the economy” and ignoring its own scientists; or destroying tens to hundreds of billions of pounds in wealth and tens to hundreds of thousands of livelihoods through their extraordinary scorched-earth Brexit.
Applied as it is hear, unless I'm missing something, your take means that there's no point or legitimacy to any conversation (EG a HN post) about any new UK agency (or sewage plant, school, energy plan, etc.) besides "they're corrupt, look at their other dealings."
I'm sympathetic to the moral principles. In particular, some have made the case that salacious shamelessness itself is the problem. It's corrosive.
But... Are you really at a point where you're calling quits on politics as a whole until this corruption stuff is sorted? Isn't this corrosive too?
I'm not saying that you can't put anticorruption first. It's definitely relevant here. This is a way of distributing money and contracts, after all. It is designed to not be accountable in conventional ways. Anticorruption is relevant and it's good to have people making that their top priority. But anticorruption is not the only thing at stake in anything and everything government related. There's also whatever the hell the thing is supposed to do.
Being uncorrupt, but failing to produce useful technology is also be bad. Maybe not murder bad, but I didn't think this is a useful way of thinking about it.
Long term we need transparency from whoever is in charge.
Up and down this thread though, it seems that British HNers are insisting that it's the only topic. IE, they're against this agency (and presumably everything else that spends money in any way) because corruption.
Is this true for roads? No new schools, parks or research agencies until corruption is gone? It seems over the top to me. The "Boris' girlfriend gets a £100k grant" storyline is salacious, but I don't think it's unusual. Insiderism exists. It existed yesterday, last year. I'm sure Winston Churchill's girlfriend also did well out of the deal. c'est la vie
I'm definitely interested in ideas about insiderism, any solutions to it... but are you really at a point where you're against everything that the government does on the assumption that it's all going to Boris' girlfriends?
If someone were proposing building a sewage plant immune to FOI requests, I'd be feckin' terrified, much less worried about corruption. And I'm pretty blase about corruption in various activities (such as the ever-popular road construction and maintenance) in the US.
So the objection is to that specific clause and based on very real facts about recent and ongoing corruption. Priti Patel is another example and there is a very long list if you want one of abuse of public office from the current cabinet, this is not an abstract concern or one without foundation.
Nobody on this thread has said that everything the Conservatives do is bad, just that they are proven to be corrupt and therefore a FOI exception is a bad idea in this case.
Also, remember that FOI isn't some magic tool for stopping corruption. Blair brought it in, and has said several times that it needs to be changed. FOI isn't public oversight.
The Conservatives are not proven to be corrupt. This self-evidently not true because no-one has proved it.
No, there are a ton of things the US et. al. do in secret, it's normal.
There needs to be oversight, public is better, but an independent council can work.
But yes, there's going to be a problem with graft.
They believe there is massive levels of corruption because, unfortunately, the media is largely composed of neuralgics too and they are quite happy to feed the beast. The past twelve months or so has gone from: Brexit is stupid to there are huge levels of corruption, all these people are evil, and should be in jail. It is alarming, although not surprising, that untruths have been swallowed so eagerly (to be clear, this is 100% about Brexit, not corruption).
So: under Labour the same stuff happened, when anyone asked for polling or consulting (the latest issue de jure) it inevitably came from people connected to Labour (McKinsey's London office in the 2000s was largely composed of people with political connections, they worked closely with Blair), this is normal because (shock) if you are in politics, you have certain ideas and aren't going to hire people who will try to actively sabotage you.
In terms of public contracts, what isn't made clear to the public is that the UK has several bodies who examined all of these contracts. The public believes that because they were fast-tracked, there was no scrutiny. No, the NAO looked at all the contracts, and found no evidence of corruption (there is a substantiali report on this topic). There is a certain publicity hungry lobbying group which has repeatedly claimed there was no corruption...the actual evidence of this has, still, not been found (and they have moved on from their earlier claims to yet more "shocking" new claims of corruption that they will still likely be unable to prove...unsurprisingly, they are raising significant funds to reverse Brexit...which is presumably their angle with all this).
So I would say: this isn't "corruption" in any global sense of the word. Most of the things that people attribute to "corruption" are bad govt. For example, PFI means some companies do very well but the issue was that civil servants and govts signed these deals, and paid no attention to the terms. There is massive scrutiny of govt purchasing in the UK. If you are corrupt, the risks are infinite and the return is zero. What does happen is: people choose to buy things from people they know and who agree with them (the latter being very important in politics), it is someone knowing someone else, this happens in business. Talking about "corruption" in British politics is, however, ludicrous.
This sort of thing doesn't seem even a tiny bit questionable to you?
I'm surprised NAO have investigated them all, could you link that report/or a compendium? They didn't have problems with consider who has never delivered PPI getting multi-million pound contracts; nor the prevalence of associations to Tory hierarchy?
