Is Andy Burnham ready to confront corruption?

Britons are squeamish about using the ‘c— word’, says Robert Barrington, but to fix the problem we must first accept we have one

By Robert Barrington

The British tend not to think of themselves as being corrupt. This is somewhat belied by the history of the Empire, in which – like most empires – corruption by those in power was rife. But we have become so used to assuming that corruption does not happen in the UK, we can overlook it even when it is in plain sight.

Take the Clacton by-election as an example. Nigel Farage MP has received an unprecedented personal donation of £5 million. The donor, who is based overseas and has also donated £12 million to Farage’s Reform UK party, works in the crypto-currency business – an industry that is seeking political support for lax regulation. What would we say of other countries if such a thing were to happen there?

The questionable defence put forward is that, due to the timing of the donation, it was all within the rules. But rather than face scrutiny, Farage sought to outrun the parliamentary inquiry by calling a by-election. Until all the facts emerge, it is hard to say whether anyone has acted corruptly. But by any measure this is a gross breach of integrity standards, a glaring conflict of interest and an exceptionally high risk of corruption. Yet that is the very word that we in this country fall over ourselves to avoid using.

In reality, the only country to decline more than the UK over the past decade on the Corruption Perceptions Index was Belarus. In every major index of governance, corruption or integrity, the UK has gone down. Transparency International ascribes this to greater awareness of the Londongrad phenomenon and serial integrity breaches under the Boris Johnson regime – such as the appointment of his supporters to the House of Lords, Covid-19 contracting scandals and of course ‘Partygate’.

It is unclear whether the cavalier attitude to rules by characters like Johnson and Farage reflects personal enrichment, iconoclastic populism or capture by special interests. Regardless, political corruption is undoubtedly on the increase. There is a dark quartet of well-known vulnerabilities – political party funding, the revolving door between public office and the private sector, lobbying, and conflicts of interest – which have been weakly regulated. That is not a coincidence. The politicians who would need to put in place stronger laws are often the very people who most benefit from a lax regime. No party leader has had the political courage to force through necessary change.

The issue now facing Andy Burnham is how to prevent that dark quartet of risks from being further exploited. Voters and law-makers also need to question whether our current defences could prevent a Trump-like assault on democracy or whether we need new safeguards. The Representation of the People Bill that is going through parliament could play an important role – but it needs to be strengthened.

Labour MP Stella Creasy has tabled an amendment that would cap the amount of money that any individual can donate to political parties at £100,000 per year. There is a reasonable argument for the cap to be even lower.

Fixing Britain’s broken lobbying system should also be a priority. There are literally dozens of recommendations from recent reviews including those from the Committee on Standards in Public Life and Nigel Boardman that previous governments chose to ignore. These should be accepted by default, and not cherry-picked to provide a semblance of action while avoiding the core problem.

But the UK has deeper problems than corruption in national politics alone. The complacency and moral exceptionalism that opened the door to corruption in politics have also been at work elsewhere – including local government, religious bodies, the media, sport, and the devolved nations, as well as the police, prisons and border officials.

The former mayors of Liverpool, Tower Hamlets and Teesside have each faced extensive allegations of corruption – all of which are strongly denied. The lesson from such cases is that one-party fiefdoms with large budgets and little accountability are a recipe for impropriety.

The Audit Commission was historically able to control some of this – but it was closed down by the coalition government in 2015, leaving 520 council audits outstanding by 2023. Corruption risk should be front and centre in any Burnham plan for devolving more power to local government.

In the private sector, businesspeople and public officials have been convicted of taking and paying bribes to secure procurement contracts for Hinkley Point C, IT contracts for the NHS in Scotland and potato supply contracts to Sainsburys. These cases can take many years to come to light, and so we may not know for some time about some huge areas of corruption risk like contracts for HS2.

Let us not forget about the police nor the prison service, where corruption is reportedly thriving. It costs £400 to bribe a prison officer to smuggle drugs inside a jail. The criminal convictions of 13 people of colour were recently overturned after it emerged that a corrupt and racist police officer had fabricated evidence against them decades earlier.

Are these simply rotten apples, or symptomatic of a wider structural problem? Worryingly, all evidence points towards a rotting barrel in many sectors and institutions. The UK should be concerned about the aggregate effect of this happening in so many places at once. A robust democracy can absorb some corruption; but many UK institutions have levels higher than can be collectively absorbed. We are reaching a point where a snowball effect becomes possible.

The good news is we are approaching that point but have not yet reached it. Things can be done to retrace our steps. It starts with acknowledgement: Yes, we have corruption in too many parts of our political economy. Then we must strengthen key defences. Like weeds in a garden, once corruption takes hold, it progresses rapidly and is hard to undo. Britain is not invulnerable to these forces.

Professor Robert Barrington is the author of Corrupted Kingdom: Britain’s Disappearing Integrity — And How We Can Get It Back, available here and from all good bookshops.