Its quite simple with this government, Brexit was an idea supported by incompetents and charlatans but following the referendum and especially following Johnsons election as PM supporting brexit was rewarded with promotion and those opposing it or deemed not sufficiently enthusiastic about it were demoted or hounded out. Net result the people you want running the country were gone and you are left with mostly charlatans as happens in any country when right wing populists do well.
Power corrupts but there was nothing in the Blair or Major administrations that even came close to the level of outright corruption seen from this lot. I just don't understand how people aren't in jail over PPE procurement/track and trace or whatever the fvck it was called.
Basically what Clergs said - they’re all as bad as each other - the political class is venal and corrupt in general. It’s not a Tory or Labour thing.
I look forward to the transformation of the keen defenders of public integrity and probity in the political class, condemning the misdeeds of the Tory government into Labour meatshields as soon as Starmer is sworn in, with the insistence that their tribe can do no wrong
Labour will be paying plenty of people off once in govt.
Donny, you’re very naive, Labour supporters were rewarded with chair and ceo positions in almost all public bodies; pfi; immigration grift (Hinduja etc). It was less commented on because of media ties and the economy was doing well (although as we now know that was a mirage)
Maybe the difference about the Tories is that fewer of them have the Good Guy complex
a lot of politicians think they are heroes come to save the day and persist in that belief regardless of how divergent their actual behaviour becomes from that behaviour
tbh I don't think corruption is a huge issue in the uk at the parliamentary level, from either party. not to say it doesn't exist but it isn't endemic.
what really worries me is the incessant creep of corruption at the local government and local civil service level. britain is moving towards becoming a low-trust society and that will damage our lives more than any MP.
our story starts in the heady days of 2010 with the spam face David Cameron. Cameron was not a great PM, he was good at presentation and media management but he was a terrible decision maker, but he did preside over a relatively professional party that had to be disciplined
then Brexit blew up the tory the party, moderates who could see the direct of travel tried to steady the bus and were purged, opportunists (May) tired to embrace the ultra-nationalist frothers who didn't know what they wanted or refused to accept the price for what they wanted was political annihilation and couldn't reconcile them.
her departure left the door open to someone monumentally stupid enough to try to do the same thing, up steps Boris one of the the least qualified people to hold public office in the UK (something else he shares with corbyn) - but that's okay because Boris is supposed to be the front man to dominic cummings grand scheme to purge all the big boys who were mean to him and didn't let him in their posh club because he's a weirdo computer nerd.
predictably Boris smashes Corbyn because they are the basically ideologically the same guy and while a dick Boris is more personally likeable than the awkward Corbyn and rewards loyalty over competence greating a stinking sesspool of corruption and cancer at the heart of government so toxic it killed off the longest reigning monarch in uk history.
enter one Elizabeth Gozer Truss. who promptly dies (hat tip horrible histories). enter enter one Rishi Sunak the only man with less personality and spontaneity than Keir Starmer (credit to the tories for finding a polar opposite to Boris though). unfortauntely Sunak, once a child of above average intelligence and now an adult of distinctly average intelligence is in the unfortunate position of suddenly learning that all the people applauding him and telling him how smart and cool he is and how good his jokes are were only doing it because he (well his wife) was paying for the drinks. With credit to him he realises that his inner circle are actually incompetent morons and that he has a real chance of being branded the UK's worst PM (until the next one). With incredible foresight and strength or character Sunak immediately, doubles down on the stupidest and least workable plans his incompetent cabinet have presented him and pins his hopes on Angela Raynor owing £50 of unpaid CGT to win the 2024 GE.
I'd argue that there was just as much sleaze in the Major and Blair governments as there is today.
The difference is that the current crop are boldface about it, zero shame and their voting base appears to admire them for it. And why would they worry when they can just gaslight and spin their corruption on social media or GBeebies.
You cannot even begin to compare Cameron with Major. As soon as Cameron was out of office he was making millions from Lex Greensill. And it wasn't just Cameron, it was senior civil servants also. Read about what Bill Crothers and Jeremy Heywood got up to.
The political system drives it. It’s fundamentally unfair and those who benefit are basically untouchable.
The tories will be rightly kicked out and replaced by labour. Not because labour are any good or offer something significantly better, just because that’s how the system operates.
Sumo agree to an extent but do you have any grounds for hope that they will be better in any significant sense? Less shit maybe, but is that good enough?
I mean, I guess Starmer has had some sort of professional career prior to politics and some sort of professional ethics hammered into him that the tory top brass sloughing from cronie non job to cronie non job haven't
so I have some hope that labour might enact some discipline around this stuff
plus they have been watching at how it has decimated the tories so they should have a sense that it is actually dangerous in a way the 2019 tories didn't seem to comprehend
Starmer hasnt got much integrity so not expecting him to clean up politics. And on important issues he's already compromised. LFI paid up member. He's in no hurry to criticise Israel. Best friends with Business. No hurry to reform the system for a fairer distribution of wealth and power. Talking to the red tops. Happy to take notes from Murdoch.
He's as dirty as sunak except he's not in power and he markets himself as having principles
Madders and Kimmy - that’s rose tinted glasses and recency bias making you forget the sleaziness of the Blair and Major governments - sleaze was the main political attack on Major - weren’t politicians literally accepting envelopes of cash from billionaires? And the Labour government basically sold passports to the Hindujas
And the MP expenses scandal happened under Labour (yes that was an equal opportunity one implicating all parties but that is exactly my point - they are all the same- it’s just easier to remember recent Tory corruption plus there are more opportunities for corruption in government- we will see the Labour snouts in the trough soon enough - industry has already started courting the Shadow Cabinet
I do agree with pancakes that it’s worse at the local level and many councils seem to be basically run for the benefit of property developers and the like - Private Eye’s Rotten Boroughs is great on this and is non partisan even though their overarching editorial line is pretty standard New Labour stuff (on immigration, Brexit, COVID restrictions etc).
To add - there are of course individuals variations and some politicians are better than others. And there are some minor variations between parties on policy, but what I said is true of the political class as a whole.
Although in practice the governing policy of both major parties is essentially the same on all major issues with some minor differences whipped up to frenzy to galvanise their respective tribes especially on culture war stuff. But eg on Brexit or COVID it’s all just marching in lockstep.
The Tories will talk tough on immigration for their base but they won’t actually do anything to restrict it except some symbolic Rwanda nonsense. Labour will talk big about closer EU ties but they won’t actually go back.
The Sunak/Cameron wing of the Tories and the Blairite/Starmer wing of Labour have far more in common with each other than with the more grassroots wings of their own parties - the ERG or the Corbynites respectively
Stru - the expenses scandal was incredibly, almost comically trivial in most cases and essentially MP's had been told it was OK to max out their expenses. There were a handful who had genuinely been fraudulent on a larger scale and who were convicted but I don't think any of the fraudulently obtained sums exceeded 50k?
Cash for questions and donations for honours were all very small time as well. Political patronage resulting in quango jobs for supporters isn't corruption. It is the way the system works.
Literally hundreds of millions of pounds (it's probably billions) were stolen from the country in dodgy procurement in Covid. It's unprecedented in scale in the modern era in Britain.
Unprecented apart from all the mates of the government who were massively enriched in the 1910's and 1930's by converting their peacetime factories to produce ammunition and the like.
sleaze was the main political attack on Major - weren’t politicians literally accepting envelopes of cash from billionaires?
Mmm. Compare and contrast to giving out billions of taxpayer cash to their "VIP lane" mates and failed test & trace system, repeatedly breaking rules and laws you enacted 5 minutes ago and repeatedly lying to parliament about it, deliberately crashing the economy, trying to change the rules o save your rule-breaking mates, etc, etc. Not to mention brexit (referendum and implementation).
Speak for yourself but I know a fair few people who are alive and remember the war and also the assorted grift involved in the ongoing rationing after the war.
Kimmy and Madders - corruption is measured by the scale of the opportunity for it. If Labour had been in power they'd have done the same thing during COVID and certainly they used their opportunities during the Blair government.
Like I said - we'll see the Labour scandals too, over the next few years, especially after the initial honeymoon period ends.
I don't think the two of you will do this, but there are plenty of Labour supporters on ROF who will be happy to meatshield for them and justify it or explain that the Tories were worse, simply because it is Labour and therefore it must be okay.
If Labour had been in power they'd have done the same thing during COVID
we'll never know, will we. I doubt the partying/lies would have happened under anyone but Johnson, regardless of political party. Ditto giving high-paying jobs to his g/f's pathetic mates.
These last few years has seen undoubtedly the worst governments in many decades if not centuries.
I think what distinguishes it from the corruption and incompetence of others is that it seems to have absolutely no ideology other than power. The uniting principle was supposedly Brexit but it turns out they didn’t actually have any plans of their own to implement. They just lurch from crisis to crisis, or dead cat to dead cat shouting about culture wars.
The Blair government was far from perfect and made mistakes but Mandelson resigned/was sacked when he was caught out. Every time a Tory gets caught out (which is all too regular due to their incompetence and greed) they are hanging on, dragging it all out. Just like Sunak painfully hanging onto power for what end? It’s not to improve public services, or standards of living which have all plummeted - or to reduce the tax burden which has gone up. It seems only to be so he moves up the list of shortest ever PMs and pads his CV out.
Get them out. If the next lot are as bad get them out too.
I actually agree Coracle that this government is particularly incompetent. I just don't accept the implied corollary from most on this thread that therefore the new Labour government will be much better. If they're lucky they won't have a crisis like COVID to deal with that's all.
It's the political class as a whole that has declined, not just the Tory party.
the ppe and testing contracts have been brushed under the carpet to an extent, but in years to come it will be the biggest scandal amongst many to emerge from this swamp of a government. I fully expect people to end up in prison.
Stru - the political class may well have declined as a whole but we won’t know for sure until Labour has actually been given a go in government. The Blair administration was thought to be inexperienced and lack quality before 1997. It was still streets ahead of this Tory administration.
But we all know the issue with the current Tory party: it got taken over by the headbangers and the moderates were purged. The opposite is happening in the Labour Party.
There does appear to have been something qualatively different post Boris, simply because his default response to anything was to lie, even if the truth wouldn't have been so bad. His instinct was to just make something up and then try to style it out.
That said, whoever is in Govt are the ones that people try to influence, because they have influence. Unless you're playing the long game (or you're less than a couple of years out from an election the opposition is bound to win), there isn't the same impact cosying up to the shadow cabinet, let alone anyone outside it. In addition, the Govt or people with influence in the governing party have more visibility. If some bank bencher from somewhere unknown gets implicated in something dodgy, no-one really cares, or cares for long.
Plus, the longer you're in Government, the greater the opportunity for naughty things and to get caught and for things to come to the surface. It was the same with Blair / Brown, Major and this Govt. Unless its something sanctions busting (like arms to Iraq etc) and there's a public inquiry, it might make the news media, but even then, it's probably only of real interest in the Westminster bubble.
If there are ultimately inquiries about things like PPE procurement, the politicians who facilitated it will probably have retired, or won't be in Govt, but the suppliers (like Mone) will hopefully all get done for fraud, tax evasion and money laundering. Although the SFO will undoubtedly screw up the prosecutions.
Coracle - indeed, we'll have to see what Labour in the 2020s are like - personally I think they are worse than Blair's Labour by miles, and people who shouldn't be running corner shops are going to be Cabinet ministers (so no different from the current Tories).
They'll have a couple of years of honeymoon period and being able to blame the years of Tory rule for anything that goes wrong, and then things will slowly start to slide and the incompetence will become more visible and the scandals will start to build up..
As for the Tories, they are most certainly not captured by the "headbangers" - if they were, Steve Baker would be PM and Cummings would be hanging around Rasputin-like. On the contrary, both parties are firmly controlled by the men in grey suits, aka the Centrist Dad coalition. It doesn't matter if you vote Tory or Labour - both the Blairite Starmer gang and Sunak/Cameron types are going to have virtually the same policies on everything that matters, with some cosmetic differences.
That is exactly why voters are fed up - there is no real alternative. This is why Reform for all their looniness are polling well - they are genuinely something different from the grey establishment consensus that hasn't had any new ideas since New Labour 30 years ago (if not earlier). And if the Momentum wing of Labour ever finds the guts to split, they'll be a challenge to Starmer from the left in the way Reform is for the Tories now, and UKIP used to be.
I'll grant you though that the grassroots wing of the Tory party has been more effective at using its balance of power leverage through the ERG and the CRG (the latter was less effective because Labour could be relied on to support the government on COVID measures so the CRG's votes were less important) than the Momentum wing of Labour, which has been thoroughly ground into dust by Starmer.
This seems rather pessimistic. Yes, Labour has statist, interventionist instincts and is naturally sympathetic to the public sector middle class and in an already high tax economy these tend to work against what we really really need, which is increased productivity. But if it can avoid massively upsetting the international money markets and at the same time just not be corrupt-and-hopelessly-incompetent-like-the-current-bleeding-stump-of-the-Tory-party, then maybe we will be ok ?
Coffers - the Corbyn wing of Labour fits that description and the whole Labour Party before Blair. But no party fits that description now unless you count clowns like the Socialist Workers or whatever
Sunak being in office has more ways to actually harm people but Starmer has already lied on a range of matters and has supported genocide in Palestine and he's not even in office yet.
If we can't have truth from our leaders then what's the point.
Aside from lying he's povrn he's a tyrant of his own party.
Meatshielding for labor just because the Tories are crap isn't a virtue.
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Its quite simple with this government, Brexit was an idea supported by incompetents and charlatans but following the referendum and especially following Johnsons election as PM supporting brexit was rewarded with promotion and those opposing it or deemed not sufficiently enthusiastic about it were demoted or hounded out. Net result the people you want running the country were gone and you are left with mostly charlatans as happens in any country when right wing populists do well.
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no, power corrupts
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Power corrupts but there was nothing in the Blair or Major administrations that even came close to the level of outright corruption seen from this lot. I just don't understand how people aren't in jail over PPE procurement/track and trace or whatever the fvck it was called.
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it's just silly to say they're uniquely corrupt
they didn't even steal money for a campervan
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Basically what Clergs said - they’re all as bad as each other - the political class is venal and corrupt in general. It’s not a Tory or Labour thing.
I look forward to the transformation of the keen defenders of public integrity and probity in the political class, condemning the misdeeds of the Tory government into Labour meatshields as soon as Starmer is sworn in, with the insistence that their tribe can do no wrong
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Labour will be paying plenty of people off once in govt.
Donny, you’re very naive, Labour supporters were rewarded with chair and ceo positions in almost all public bodies; pfi; immigration grift (Hinduja etc). It was less commented on because of media ties and the economy was doing well (although as we now know that was a mirage)
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Maybe the difference about the Tories is that fewer of them have the Good Guy complex
a lot of politicians think they are heroes come to save the day and persist in that belief regardless of how divergent their actual behaviour becomes from that behaviour
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*that belief
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Flypaper thread for Tozzas who deny it.
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tbh I don't think corruption is a huge issue in the uk at the parliamentary level, from either party. not to say it doesn't exist but it isn't endemic.
what really worries me is the incessant creep of corruption at the local government and local civil service level. britain is moving towards becoming a low-trust society and that will damage our lives more than any MP.
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Unfortunately Britain is totally corrupt.
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I just don't understand how people aren't in jail over PPE procurement/track and trace or whatever the fvck it was called.
What happened during the world wars with procurement would blow your mind.
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They're not the worst, it's just the most visible because of the constant news cycle and mass souveillance from social media.
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ExProsecutor 04 Apr 24 10:27
Are the Tories the worst? And if so, what explains it?
_______________________________________________________________
the fish rots from the head
our story starts in the heady days of 2010 with the spam face David Cameron. Cameron was not a great PM, he was good at presentation and media management but he was a terrible decision maker, but he did preside over a relatively professional party that had to be disciplined
then Brexit blew up the tory the party, moderates who could see the direct of travel tried to steady the bus and were purged, opportunists (May) tired to embrace the ultra-nationalist frothers who didn't know what they wanted or refused to accept the price for what they wanted was political annihilation and couldn't reconcile them.
her departure left the door open to someone monumentally stupid enough to try to do the same thing, up steps Boris one of the the least qualified people to hold public office in the UK (something else he shares with corbyn) - but that's okay because Boris is supposed to be the front man to dominic cummings grand scheme to purge all the big boys who were mean to him and didn't let him in their posh club because he's a weirdo computer nerd.
predictably Boris smashes Corbyn because they are the basically ideologically the same guy and while a dick Boris is more personally likeable than the awkward Corbyn and rewards loyalty over competence greating a stinking sesspool of corruption and cancer at the heart of government so toxic it killed off the longest reigning monarch in uk history.
enter one Elizabeth Gozer Truss. who promptly dies (hat tip horrible histories). enter enter one Rishi Sunak the only man with less personality and spontaneity than Keir Starmer (credit to the tories for finding a polar opposite to Boris though). unfortauntely Sunak, once a child of above average intelligence and now an adult of distinctly average intelligence is in the unfortunate position of suddenly learning that all the people applauding him and telling him how smart and cool he is and how good his jokes are were only doing it because he (well his wife) was paying for the drinks. With credit to him he realises that his inner circle are actually incompetent morons and that he has a real chance of being branded the UK's worst PM (until the next one). With incredible foresight and strength or character Sunak immediately, doubles down on the stupidest and least workable plans his incompetent cabinet have presented him and pins his hopes on Angela Raynor owing £50 of unpaid CGT to win the 2024 GE.
and I suppose that brings us up to date?
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what guy and donny said.
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Tony Blair has literally become a super elite money concealer on the back of being a dodgy geezer who blew the hands and feet off iraqi toddlers
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"oh no OUR tribe would never be khvnts"
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I'd argue that there was just as much sleaze in the Major and Blair governments as there is today.
The difference is that the current crop are boldface about it, zero shame and their voting base appears to admire them for it. And why would they worry when they can just gaslight and spin their corruption on social media or GBeebies.
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“Super elite money concealer” Add to watchlist
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They’re the worst in our lifetimes, but nowhere near the worst. Walpole etc. It is a good time to be alive.
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You cannot even begin to compare Cameron with Major. As soon as Cameron was out of office he was making millions from Lex Greensill. And it wasn't just Cameron, it was senior civil servants also. Read about what Bill Crothers and Jeremy Heywood got up to.
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The polling doesn't support this at all. Politically interested right whingers have all decamped to reform.
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The political system drives it. It’s fundamentally unfair and those who benefit are basically untouchable.
The tories will be rightly kicked out and replaced by labour. Not because labour are any good or offer something significantly better, just because that’s how the system operates.
It’s depressing!
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Penguin04 Apr 24 11:31
Not because labour are any good or offer something significantly better, just because that’s how the system operates.
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the bar for "good" and "significantly better" has kinda been set low
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Yep, they’re all the same.
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Sumo agree to an extent but do you have any grounds for hope that they will be better in any significant sense? Less shit maybe, but is that good enough?
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I mean, I guess Starmer has had some sort of professional career prior to politics and some sort of professional ethics hammered into him that the tory top brass sloughing from cronie non job to cronie non job haven't
so I have some hope that labour might enact some discipline around this stuff
plus they have been watching at how it has decimated the tories so they should have a sense that it is actually dangerous in a way the 2019 tories didn't seem to comprehend
but yeah, as I say, the bar is low
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Starmer hasnt got much integrity so not expecting him to clean up politics. And on important issues he's already compromised. LFI paid up member. He's in no hurry to criticise Israel. Best friends with Business. No hurry to reform the system for a fairer distribution of wealth and power. Talking to the red tops. Happy to take notes from Murdoch.
He's as dirty as sunak except he's not in power and he markets himself as having principles
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hardly.
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Madders and Kimmy - that’s rose tinted glasses and recency bias making you forget the sleaziness of the Blair and Major governments - sleaze was the main political attack on Major - weren’t politicians literally accepting envelopes of cash from billionaires? And the Labour government basically sold passports to the Hindujas
And the MP expenses scandal happened under Labour (yes that was an equal opportunity one implicating all parties but that is exactly my point - they are all the same- it’s just easier to remember recent Tory corruption plus there are more opportunities for corruption in government- we will see the Labour snouts in the trough soon enough - industry has already started courting the Shadow Cabinet
I do agree with pancakes that it’s worse at the local level and many councils seem to be basically run for the benefit of property developers and the like - Private Eye’s Rotten Boroughs is great on this and is non partisan even though their overarching editorial line is pretty standard New Labour stuff (on immigration, Brexit, COVID restrictions etc).
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To add - there are of course individuals variations and some politicians are better than others. And there are some minor variations between parties on policy, but what I said is true of the political class as a whole.
Although in practice the governing policy of both major parties is essentially the same on all major issues with some minor differences whipped up to frenzy to galvanise their respective tribes especially on culture war stuff. But eg on Brexit or COVID it’s all just marching in lockstep.
The Tories will talk tough on immigration for their base but they won’t actually do anything to restrict it except some symbolic Rwanda nonsense. Labour will talk big about closer EU ties but they won’t actually go back.
The Sunak/Cameron wing of the Tories and the Blairite/Starmer wing of Labour have far more in common with each other than with the more grassroots wings of their own parties - the ERG or the Corbynites respectively
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Every time Mandelson reappears in the toilet bowl to ‘advise’ Keith let us shout “Did you ever pay Geoffrey Robinson his £373 grand back?”
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Wise words above
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It always takes time. They start out well with some discipline but the longer a party stays in power the more lax it gets.
Remember Mandelson and the oligarch's yacht?
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Stru - the expenses scandal was incredibly, almost comically trivial in most cases and essentially MP's had been told it was OK to max out their expenses. There were a handful who had genuinely been fraudulent on a larger scale and who were convicted but I don't think any of the fraudulently obtained sums exceeded 50k?
Cash for questions and donations for honours were all very small time as well. Political patronage resulting in quango jobs for supporters isn't corruption. It is the way the system works.
Literally hundreds of millions of pounds (it's probably billions) were stolen from the country in dodgy procurement in Covid. It's unprecedented in scale in the modern era in Britain.
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What about Labour syphoning money off to various NGOs and 3rd sector fellow-travellers?
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Rare agree with Risky here.
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Unprecented apart from all the mates of the government who were massively enriched in the 1910's and 1930's by converting their peacetime factories to produce ammunition and the like.
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Mmm. Compare and contrast to giving out billions of taxpayer cash to their "VIP lane" mates and failed test & trace system, repeatedly breaking rules and laws you enacted 5 minutes ago and repeatedly lying to parliament about it, deliberately crashing the economy, trying to change the rules o save your rule-breaking mates, etc, etc. Not to mention brexit (referendum and implementation).
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Yes Sails. Unprecedented in living memory…
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Speak for yourself but I know a fair few people who are alive and remember the war and also the assorted grift involved in the ongoing rationing after the war.
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Kimmy and Madders - corruption is measured by the scale of the opportunity for it. If Labour had been in power they'd have done the same thing during COVID and certainly they used their opportunities during the Blair government.
Like I said - we'll see the Labour scandals too, over the next few years, especially after the initial honeymoon period ends.
I don't think the two of you will do this, but there are plenty of Labour supporters on ROF who will be happy to meatshield for them and justify it or explain that the Tories were worse, simply because it is Labour and therefore it must be okay.
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we'll never know, will we. I doubt the partying/lies would have happened under anyone but Johnson, regardless of political party. Ditto giving high-paying jobs to his g/f's pathetic mates.
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Well, we know that Labour MPs put forward dodgy ppe supplier names….
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These last few years has seen undoubtedly the worst governments in many decades if not centuries.
I think what distinguishes it from the corruption and incompetence of others is that it seems to have absolutely no ideology other than power. The uniting principle was supposedly Brexit but it turns out they didn’t actually have any plans of their own to implement. They just lurch from crisis to crisis, or dead cat to dead cat shouting about culture wars.
The Blair government was far from perfect and made mistakes but Mandelson resigned/was sacked when he was caught out. Every time a Tory gets caught out (which is all too regular due to their incompetence and greed) they are hanging on, dragging it all out. Just like Sunak painfully hanging onto power for what end? It’s not to improve public services, or standards of living which have all plummeted - or to reduce the tax burden which has gone up. It seems only to be so he moves up the list of shortest ever PMs and pads his CV out.
Get them out. If the next lot are as bad get them out too.
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I actually agree Coracle that this government is particularly incompetent. I just don't accept the implied corollary from most on this thread that therefore the new Labour government will be much better. If they're lucky they won't have a crisis like COVID to deal with that's all.
It's the political class as a whole that has declined, not just the Tory party.
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lol he resigned on the basis he would be brought bakc shortly/given eu commissioner job
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"I'd argue that there was just as much sleaze in the Major and Blair governments as there is today."
Wtf. The awarding of covid contracts to mates of people in government is unprecedented in how blatant it was and how little people seem to care.
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the ppe and testing contracts have been brushed under the carpet to an extent, but in years to come it will be the biggest scandal amongst many to emerge from this swamp of a government. I fully expect people to end up in prison.
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Stru - the political class may well have declined as a whole but we won’t know for sure until Labour has actually been given a go in government. The Blair administration was thought to be inexperienced and lack quality before 1997. It was still streets ahead of this Tory administration.
But we all know the issue with the current Tory party: it got taken over by the headbangers and the moderates were purged. The opposite is happening in the Labour Party.
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lol he resigned on the basis he would be brought bakc shortly/given eu commissioner job
But he/Blair recognised that he needed to first step away as he had been caught.
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There does appear to have been something qualatively different post Boris, simply because his default response to anything was to lie, even if the truth wouldn't have been so bad. His instinct was to just make something up and then try to style it out.
That said, whoever is in Govt are the ones that people try to influence, because they have influence. Unless you're playing the long game (or you're less than a couple of years out from an election the opposition is bound to win), there isn't the same impact cosying up to the shadow cabinet, let alone anyone outside it. In addition, the Govt or people with influence in the governing party have more visibility. If some bank bencher from somewhere unknown gets implicated in something dodgy, no-one really cares, or cares for long.
Plus, the longer you're in Government, the greater the opportunity for naughty things and to get caught and for things to come to the surface. It was the same with Blair / Brown, Major and this Govt. Unless its something sanctions busting (like arms to Iraq etc) and there's a public inquiry, it might make the news media, but even then, it's probably only of real interest in the Westminster bubble.
If there are ultimately inquiries about things like PPE procurement, the politicians who facilitated it will probably have retired, or won't be in Govt, but the suppliers (like Mone) will hopefully all get done for fraud, tax evasion and money laundering. Although the SFO will undoubtedly screw up the prosecutions.
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Coracle - indeed, we'll have to see what Labour in the 2020s are like - personally I think they are worse than Blair's Labour by miles, and people who shouldn't be running corner shops are going to be Cabinet ministers (so no different from the current Tories).
They'll have a couple of years of honeymoon period and being able to blame the years of Tory rule for anything that goes wrong, and then things will slowly start to slide and the incompetence will become more visible and the scandals will start to build up..
As for the Tories, they are most certainly not captured by the "headbangers" - if they were, Steve Baker would be PM and Cummings would be hanging around Rasputin-like. On the contrary, both parties are firmly controlled by the men in grey suits, aka the Centrist Dad coalition. It doesn't matter if you vote Tory or Labour - both the Blairite Starmer gang and Sunak/Cameron types are going to have virtually the same policies on everything that matters, with some cosmetic differences.
That is exactly why voters are fed up - there is no real alternative. This is why Reform for all their looniness are polling well - they are genuinely something different from the grey establishment consensus that hasn't had any new ideas since New Labour 30 years ago (if not earlier). And if the Momentum wing of Labour ever finds the guts to split, they'll be a challenge to Starmer from the left in the way Reform is for the Tories now, and UKIP used to be.
I'll grant you though that the grassroots wing of the Tory party has been more effective at using its balance of power leverage through the ERG and the CRG (the latter was less effective because Labour could be relied on to support the government on COVID measures so the CRG's votes were less important) than the Momentum wing of Labour, which has been thoroughly ground into dust by Starmer.
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I think Streeting will be the next leader. Ruthless, pink, working class, white. Will appeal to far more of the country than most.
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"Britain will dislike the Labour government in no time"
https://www.ft.com/content/14697639-5ec7-40e7-a679-3ceef10e7529
(I think the paywall is circumvented if you click through from the Twitter post: https://twitter.com/FT/status/1775118664594862256)
This seems rather pessimistic. Yes, Labour has statist, interventionist instincts and is naturally sympathetic to the public sector middle class and in an already high tax economy these tend to work against what we really really need, which is increased productivity. But if it can avoid massively upsetting the international money markets and at the same time just not be corrupt-and-hopelessly-incompetent-like-the-current-bleeding-stump-of-the-Tory-party, then maybe we will be ok ?
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On the contrary, both parties are firmly controlled by the men in grey suits, aka the Centrist Dad coalition.
That would certainly explain why this country is expert-infested and stuck in a rut.
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Guy - are there left wing populist? And what happens to a country when they win?
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Coffers - the Corbyn wing of Labour fits that description and the whole Labour Party before Blair. But no party fits that description now unless you count clowns like the Socialist Workers or whatever
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Kimny; hardly
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Sunak being in office has more ways to actually harm people but Starmer has already lied on a range of matters and has supported genocide in Palestine and he's not even in office yet.
If we can't have truth from our leaders then what's the point.
Aside from lying he's povrn he's a tyrant of his own party.
Meatshielding for labor just because the Tories are crap isn't a virtue.
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