Covid and corruption go hand in hand in Britain; Turkey makes a fortune from passport sales
Hello, and welcome to Oligarchy. We are tracking how Covid-19 and the world’s response to it is affecting the super-rich — and what that means for power and politics.
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GREAT BRITISH CORRUPTION
Every week my wife, who’s a doctor, reads the British Medical Journal, the magazine of the UK doctors’ train union and an influential medical publication. She occasionally tries to interest me in some of the articles, but rarely has much success, so she was quite surprised this week that I’d already read the main editorial, before she got round to opening the envelope.
- “Science is being suppressed for political and financial gain. Covid-19 has unleashed state corruption on a grand scale, and it is harmful to public health,” said the editorial, which was written by the journal’s executive editor and which made quite a stir on my WhatsApp. “Politicization of science was enthusiastically deployed by some of history’s worst autocrats and dictators, and it is now regrettably commonplace in democracies.”
The editorial is a powerful read, made even more compelling by the fact it’s written in the dry tones of academic literature, rather than sensationalist tabloidese. What is most remarkable is how it exposes the insidious and hidden way that corruption works in a developed country like the UK, which has lessons for the United States, the countries of the EU, and elsewhere.
This year has been marred by corruption crises all over the world related to governments’ response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Mostly, however, these scandals have been of a familiar type — bribes being paid, journalists being jailed, governments over-paying for crucial goods. This is awful, but it is what corruption looked like last year too, and the year before. The only difference in 2020 is that money has been stolen from a Covid-19 budget rather than somewhere else. In Britain, however, where stronger institutions normally keep such crude corruption to a minimum, corrupt players have had to become more imaginative.