Britain has a real problem with corruption in its politics.
Money buys access in our politics, money buys power in our politics,
money buys you a seat at the top of the table and it buys you what you want.
If you are a conservative donor and you give the party £3 million
you can effectively buy yourself a seat in the house of lords.
That's a seat in a legislative body for life!
You know for £3 million I think a lot of people think that's pretty cheap.
If you give the Conservative party £50,000 a year,
you get to go to quarterly off the record private briefings
with the prime minister and cabinet ministers.
That's a really cheap deal if you think about it £50,000
and lots of these people then just so happen to get
hundreds of millions of pounds of public money,
and I think it's really important to remember that
this is public money.
I think as long as money continues to play such a huge role in our politics,
we're going to be in trouble.
At the moment in the competition between money and democracy,
money is winning.
Jeffrey Cox was the attorney general a long-standing conservative MP,
and also a man with private business interests as a lawyer
earning over a million pounds a year.
On top of his job as an MP he gets paid a basic salary of £82,000
which some conservative MPs have said just not enough to live on
and just remember folks that's almost four times the average income
here in the United Kingdom.
During Covid he was representing the British Virgin Island government
so that's a government of a tax haven
in a corruption case against the United Kingdom government.
So the United Kingdom government was pursuing
a corruption case against the British Virgin Islands.
and he was defending them.
Mr Cox we discovered as well had an interest in a film scheme
that had been labeled as a tax avoidance scheme
and had been investigated in the past that he hadn't declared
and the thing that strikes you time and again with someone like Jeffrey Cox.
who are they serving like who is their master
if someone is a member of parliament is that not their job first and foremost?
But if they're earning many times their salary as a consultant
for a private company who are they representing?
And I think in many ways what we're seeing is the tip of the Iceberg.
Like Jeffrey Cox didn't break many rules but what he did i think a lot of us have a huge problem with
us and that's the big issue with this actually it's not about necessarily rules it's about what's
right and if the rules say this this is okay well then the rules are wrong it's worth remembering
that so much of this kicked off in the last few weeks because of owen patterson owen patterson
lobbied on behalf of randox randox won hundreds of millions of pounds in government contracts
to provide covert testing in particular think about what randox got out of this for a couple
of hundred thousand pounds they were able to get a parliamentarian to lobby on their behalf
and at the upshot of that they ended up with these huge sums of cover contracts half a billion pounds
in public money owen patterson to this day says i would do the same thing again tomorrow i did
nothing wrong the only reason this scandal broke out properly was because the government had so
much uber as boris johnson thought he could do whatever he wanted and he thought he could just
knock the whole house of cards down to save owen patterson he realized he couldn't do that because
of public pressure from people like open democracy frankly from journalists from politicians from
civil society who said look we won't stand for this but at the end of the day you've still
got the same people the same systems the same leverage of money and power in our politics that
loudon parsons lobby allowed so many others to lobby and i think what we've seen is a culture
in british politics it's very very relaxed about mps having vested interests outside of politics
shortly after he left office's brexit secretary david davis was hired by jcb at 3 000 pounds an
hour to give consultancy advice what kind of advice frankly would david davis be able to
give for 3 000 pounds an hour just so happens jcb are one of the biggest story donors very close to
the conservative party i think that asks a really really legitimate question about what are people
buying for this sort of money it feels like mps all too often are willing to just say yeah just
anything that comes along and mps had trousered over six million pounds since the pandemic began
from second jobs they include everything from theresa may who's get paid hundreds of thousands
of pounds to deliver after dinner speeches and if you've heard theresa may speak you would
wonder who was going to pay that kind of money to listen to theresa may and you could draw your own
conclusions about what people are buying really there why we will never excuse me she is not alone
we've seen a lot of mps getting paid significant sums of money to do things like be consultants
to sit on the boards of companies to represent private interests in government what it shows
is the extent to which we've normalized and think it's okay for people to profit from political life
and it's not just in the short term as mps i think there's a real danger by fixation
on second jobs we missed probably even a bigger issue which is the revolving door
that politicians and the private sector pass through all the time a fifth of the new intake
of conservative mps from 2019 had a background in the lobby industry and this is a huge industry
and time and again you know they we said they were going to reform lobbying legislation in the wake
of david cameron the green cell scandal where david cameron was being paid to be a lobbyist
for greensell but wasn't actually registered as a lobbyist because the law didn't mean that he had
to and that was the law that david cameron himself brought in so once you stop being an mp you can
then go and work for companies and earn huge sums of money imagine you're an mp here and you become
a minister and you're thinking well i'd probably be on the in this job for a couple of years once
i'm gone i get a nice cozy job in the private sector are you going to make the hard decisions
that need to be made in the public's interest are you going to think about where you're going to be
in a few years time so many mps have got their own experiences and so many mps like kirsten
have made lots of money while also being mps are not probably best place to say what needs to come
next i think that's the fundamental problem in british politics where we expect mps to regulate
themselves you know we saw what happened when we let the banks regulate themselves and we're
going to go back there we're going to that's what we think is the way it needs to happen i think
we need independent regulation we need independent bodies to hold these parliamentarians to account
we can't just leave it up to the leader of the opposition or anybody else and say what should and
shouldn't be the norms of our politics behind all of this is the reality that big business want to
influence government and in some ways by focusing only on mps focusing only on what mps are doing we
miss a huge part of this story which is that these huge companies want to influence and we've created
a system that's actually tailor-made for them to buy influence to be able to influence government
and we know it works here at open democracy we're often trying to reveal the corporate side of all
of this in some ways if we don't what will happen is these organizations these big businesses will
find other ways to influence our politics without us realizing it i think any democratic system
in which people are able to buy access like this where people are able to get mps parliamentarians
ministers to do their bidding in exchange for money begs huge questions i think there's a huge
compromise in our democracy that's something we have to all be very very worried about
and for far too long we haven't done enough about it i think what's really worth remembering about
this whole own patterson story and the whole kind of lobbying scandal that's breaking in government
and the whole kind of sleaze scandal as we call it but i think sleaze is probably too kind a word you
know i think we should call it what it is which is corruption but what's missed i think in a lot of
this is the government was willing and i think would be willing again to do anything it can
to avoid independent scrutiny yes boris johnson rolled back on things like second jobs but don't
forget what he tried to do what he did do with the government legislation that was passed said
that they would replace the existing independent standard watchdog with a basically a quango staff
by tory mps that would be headed by john wishing dale an mpu himself had regularly broken standards
and actually a quarter of the tory mps who were pushing for this new committee had themselves been
found to have broken standards rules have been criticized by the standards committee but behind
all this i think is a bigger question actually oddly bigger than just corruption and sleaze it's
the question of the lengths that boris johnson and boris johnson's government are willing to go
to avoid independent scrutiny and it's not just about things like parliamentary standards we have
an election bill going through the commons which is a disaster it's going to change the oversight
of the electoral commission put it into the hands of the government effectively we have similar
things to the migration bill we have official secrets exchange they're going to make jobs
of journalists like me even harder than they are now this is not just an isolated incident i think
it's so important to see this not just as part of the corruption of government but that corruption
extends far more than just in terms of lobbying and second jobs and everything else it extends
to actually independent oversight and scrutiny of the government of this country independent
media has been at the heart of revealing this scandal here at open democracy we've told so
many stories that have made a difference when it comes to exposing the corruption in sleeves
and british politics please do support open democracy www.opendemocracy.net and please do
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