Labour Hub Editors

Political corruption is worse than ever – and  people know it

Mike Phipps reviews Good Chaps: How Corrupt Politicians Broke Our Law and Institutions – And What We Can Do About It, by Simon Kuper, published by Profile.

“The World Bank defines corruption as the use of public office for private gain,” Simon Kuper tells us in this short book. “Sometimes this use is illegal, but often it’s perfectly legal. For instance, David Cameron’s lobbying for the Greensill Capital firm during the pandemic didn’t break any rules.”

This is part of the problem. In just six years, Britain has fallen from eighth to twentieth in Transparency Intenrational’s global anti-corruption index. At times, Kuper seems nostalgic for a supposed lost era when a deep-rooted public service ethos was shared across Britain’s upper class elite – strange considering his withering critique of that elite in his previous book Chums. However, it’s doubtful that public life was ever particularly sleaze-free.

Yet things have got worse, and more blatant. Cash for honours is now so routine, it rarely makes the news. And in a country where only 5% of offences reported to the police lead to a charge – let alone a conviction – corruption is quite likely to go unpunished. Breaches of campaign finance laws especially are largely ignored by the English police.

Corruption has many consequences but one of the most damaging is the erosion of public trust in politics. In 2023, public opinion on whether politicians were “out for themselves” hit 70%, the highest ever.

Political donations have long been a problem. They are growing both absolutely and in proportion to other sources of a party’s income. By 2000, the Conservatives were getting less than 5% of their money from membership fees.

State funding of political parties is one solution, although difficult to justify in a context of ongoing austerity. “Yet a donor-free political system could have saved the taxpayer a fortune,” suggests Kuper, citing the Covid VIP lane, where the government gave lucrative contracts to “useless companies run by Tory donors.” This, however, implies that donations automatically entail an expected payback. From the standpoint of trade union contributions to Labour, this is highly contestable: such donations are probably the cleanest in politics.

Evidence suggests that when a government becomes more nationalist it become more corrupt. The elevation of the morally deficient Boris Johnson to Prime Minister certainly created a permissive mentality. Kuper catalogues how cash for access mushroomed under his premiership. The situation was worsened by the poor calibre of many of Johnson’s ministers, who, not understanding the complex processes of their own departments, could be easily swayed by a persuasive donor to cut corners.

The author is rightly concerned about how easily the rules banning foreign donations can be circumvented. Russian money is a particular problem. Once UK citizenship is acquired, legal donations follow – as with Lubov Chernukhin, whose husband had been deputy finance minister under Putin and later chairman of Russia’s state development bank. By 2023, she had given the Conservatives more than £2.4 million. “Lubov Chernukhin’s money cannot be disentangled from the Russian regime,” says Kuper – and he cites other donors with links to post-Soviet regimes about whom the National Crime Agency has been alerted. Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee reported in 2020 that Russian influence in the UK is “the new normal”.

“Of all the Russian influencers in British politics until 2022, first prize must go a father-and-son operation: the former KGB agent Alexander Lebedev and his son Evgeny, the newspaper proprietor,” writes Kuper.

In 2008, the Lebedevs bought the loss-making Evening Standard newspaper. In the 2012 London mayoral election, the paper backed Boris Johnson. In the same year, Johnson attended one of the Lebedevs’ legendary parties at their Italian Palazzo in Umbria. The Italian authorities believed the building was being used for espionage purposes, which the Lebedevs strenuously denied.

In 2017, Johnson, now Foreign Secretary, flew directly from a NATO summit in Brussels to the Palazzo, where he later admitted to attending an undocumented meeting with a longtime KGB agent, without officials present – an event that would normally be unthinkable.

On becoming Prime Minister, Johnson nominated Evgeny Lebedev for a life peerage, against the advice of intelligence officials. When Covid hit and the Evening Standard’s circulation collapsed, due to the absence of commuters, Johnson allegedly “funnelled hundreds of millions of subsidies in the form of Government advertising with a select group of newspapers”, which included the Standard, according to an article in Byline Times, entitled “Why Did Boris Johnson Meet Evgeny Lebedev Twice in Days Before First Covid Lockdown – With No Civil Servants Present?”

Russia’s war on Ukraine saw the British establishment detach itself from the Lebedevs. Johnson’s government never sanctioned Alexander Lebedev – “perhaps worried about what he might reveal” – but Canada did. Yet the Tory party continued to accept donations from individuals linked to the Russian economy, notably Chernukhin.

For Labour, the big donors that had become a feature of the Blair years deserted the Party as it moved left in Opposition. The emergence of the anti-Corbyn faction Labour Together, and its capacity to mobilise donations for itself, laid the basis for a well-funded Keir Starmer leadership campaign in 2020. Only after former director Morgan McSweeney – now Starmer’s head of political strategy – stepped down as Labour Together’s administrator were the organisation’s donations fully registered. The Electoral Commission found that Labour Together had committed 20 separate breaches of the law and fined it £14,250 , equivalent to a mere 2% of the undeclared donations.

Legal restrictions and tougher enforcement in relation to the abuses itemised in this book might not do much more than create new loopholes, as corruption itself is really just a manifestation of a wider problem. For all his spotlighting of political sleaze, Kuper seems to shy away from a more fundamental, point. In any liberal democracy, there is a central contradiction between the basic equality implied in one-person-one vote and the stark inequality of a neoliberal economy, where the economically powerful can throw money into politics in a variety of ways – including donations, but also ownership of the media, contacts and networks with a range of state officials  – to get the outcomes they want.

As Britain’s inequality has worsened, it’s not surprising that those distortions in our democracy have proliferated and been expressed more flagrantly. While not denying that corruption is an issue for all parties, it’s a particular problem for those in thrall to the rich, the Tories especially. Kuper ducked this structural problem in his previous book, but the question remains: is the system fixable – and if so, how?

Mike Phipps’ book Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2022) can be ordered here.