Sleaze and Corruption, a Digest

Are you, like me, finding it difficult to keep up with the stream of cronyism and greed that seems to be woven into the fabric of this decaying government? As one scandal emerges a second arrives, while the first is put out for ‘investigation’ the next is uncovered, as it is put to to an inquiry the next ones emerges. It becomes a blur. The conveyor belt is not just about the decline of standards in public office, nor the decline in journalistic integrity (with notable exceptions), it is perpetuated because of the boosted sense of exceptionalism of the political elite, now drawn from a very specific demographic of the Super-Rich; and, in addition their experience of living with almost complete impunity. So not only do these people occupy a rarefied existence, they experience no consequences for any of their actions, and never have. We aren’t ruled by the gold club bores and bigots of the culturally conservative that used to comprise the Tory party, we are ruled by the mega-wealthy, billionaires and hedge-fund managers. It’s in this context that ‘Scandals’ are exposed, denied and investigated. It’s very rare that anything happens at all. Living an almost completely consequence-free existence is normal in elite circles, its just in the political arena of those circles we have to watch them get away with it.

If there might be a superficial resemblance of the end-days of the John Major regime, the actual figures of cash involved for Cash for Questions and other sleaze is miniscule next to the bundles of loot being sloshed about by VIP Lanes, Tax Dodgers, Covid Contracts and other backhanders.

Here then is a digest of some of the current scandals engulfing our political class, before they disappear …

• The Yevgeny Prigozhin Affair – as Jim Fitzpatrick explains on Open Democracy: “The UK government helped the boss of Russia’s murderous mercenary army to circumvent its own sanctions and launch a targeted legal attack on a British journalist” …

  Yevgeny Prigozhin is the founder of Wagner, the private army that the US government last week announced it would designate a “transnational criminal organisation”, allowing it to impose tougher sanctions on the group. For years it has been accused of vicious human rights abuses and war crimes in Ukraine and across the world in support of Putin’s regime …But a vast cache of hacked emails shows that, under the leadership of Rishi Sunak, the UK Treasury issued special licences in 2021 to let the oligarch override sanctions and launch an aggressive legal campaign against a journalist in the London courts.”

• 200 Children are Missing – beyond the routine political sleaze this scandal is astonishing. About 200 immigrant/refugee children have gone missing from Home Office accommodation. Newspapers report: “Two hundred asylum-seeking children who were placed in hotels run by the Home Office have gone missing, a minister has admitted. They include one girl and at least 13 children under the age of 16, the Home Office minister Simon Murray told the House of Lords on Monday.”

  The disclosure comes after the Observer reported that a whistleblower from a Home Office hotel in Brighton had claimed that some children had been abducted off the street outside the facility and bundled into cars.

  Lord Murray said 88% of the 200 children – 176 – were of Albanian origin, and he said the government hoped to phase out the use of hotels for children “as soon as we can”. This is what happens when the concerns and warnings of NGOs are ignored and when whole groups of people are routinely demonised and dehumanised by the rancid reactionary political culture nurtured by (in this case) English sado-populism and Britain’s far-right Home Office.

• Richard Sharp’s BBC Appointment – Richard Sharp is the chairman of the BBC. He has insisted he had no conflict of interest when he was appointed the chair of the BBC by Boris Johnson, despite allegations he helped secure a loan of up to £800,000 for the Prime Minister only a week earlier. There are not one but two new inquiries into the appointment of the BBC’s chairman amid allegations (blah blah blah). They love an inquiry. This piece of the scandal jigsaw is part of the reason why nothing ever happens…

  It’s worth remembering that Sharp had personally donated £400,000 of his own money to the Conservative Party. This is not normal. There is no need for any inquiry, this should simply not have been an acceptable appointment to a prominent media position.

• The Taxman and the Chancellor, Nadhim Zahawi. Imagine being detached from reality you have to ask your ethics adviser if the Chancellor engaging in industrial-scale tax avoidance was a bad idea? In a new development is appears Zahawi received £62,500 from Khaled Saïd – in his bid to become Tory leader. In fact he was the sole bidder. Saïd is personally listed in the Paradise Papers. As Byline Times explains: “Khaled Saïd is the son of Wafic Saïd, the Syrian-born financier who brokered a multi-billion pound arms deal between Saudi Arabia and the UK in the mid-1980s – at the time the biggest arms agreement ever signed by the UK.”

  As Zahawi clings to office and suppresses journalism on the matter the political class around him take a calculated view of at what point he should be thrown under the bus. My guess would be about Friday.

• Michelle Mone PPE Scandal – Back in December Prime minister, Rishi Sunak, said he was “absolutely shocked” by a bombshell report revealing that Mone and her husband secretly received tens of millions of pounds originating from PPE Medpro’s profits, according to bank documents. Nobody else was. The investigative journalist David Conn broke the story revealing that the Conservative peer Michelle Mone and her children secretly received £29m originating from the profits of a PPE business that was awarded large government contracts after she recommended it to ministers, documents seen by the Guardian indicate.

  Lady Mone’s support helped the company, PPE Medpro, secure a place in a “VIP lane” the government used during the coronavirus pandemic to prioritise companies that had political connections. It then secured contracts worth more than £200m. We now know that:

  PPE Medpro and partners made as much as £100m profits
  Mone’s husband donated £170,000 to the Conservative Party months before the contract was awarded
  At least £70m from PPE Medpro contracts taken offshore
  Jet, yacht and racehorse purchased after PPE deal
  Michelle and her husband now selling yacht and properties
  Mone takes leave of absence from Lords and may leave UK

  The UK government has since commenced legal action to recover more than £100m from the company that was awarded two large PPE contracts after Mone recommended it to ministers.

  Remember there is no Magic Money Tree.

  

Oh yeah, the privileges committee investigation into Boris Johnson is still continuing.

What did I miss?

This article will be updated and used as reference as the facts of this public disgrace emerges (if it ever does).

‘Abuse of power comes as no surprise’ is the slogan of the American artist Jenni Holzer, and its true, political power has always been the centre of corruption. To view our current ‘leaders’ as more corrupt is itself a form of nostalgia. What is different is the scale of social inequality; the advanced stage of socio-ecological breakdown; and the extent to which bribery corruption and sleaze just becomes an ever-present part of our daily reality. These are not aberrations/shocks away from the system, this is the system.