Public faith in politics is now in the gutter. Here’s how Labour should drag it out |
With grimly apt timing, the annual Transparency International (TI) corruption perceptions index lands today. The news is not good. The world is growing more corrupt as it becomes less democratic. As for us, Britain is sliding downwards on the perceptions scale, seen at its lowest so far for probity.
Once ranked in the top 10, at eighth place in 2017, we are now in 20th position. The UK’s score for corruption in government and public office has worsened according to this year’s Economist Intelligence Unit expert assessment. This index was sampled between January 2024 and September 2025 – before the current Peter Mandelson scandal – but it absorbs the last decade of misgovernance, fraudulent Brexit electioneering and Boris Johnson misdeeds. The chances are that next year’s ratings will take us further down this slimy slope. Unless, that is, prompt and radical action is taken to put up guardrails and close loopholes to protect against corruption of all kinds.
In speech after speech before the general election Keir Starmer promised to “clean up politics”. But he and others in his cabinet tripped at the first fence, accepting (though transparently declaring) gifts of clothes and tickets: analysis by Tortoise found the shadow cabinet “accepted more than £220,000 worth of free tickets and gifts for themselves or staff over the course of the last parliament” including “Glastonbury, the Proms, the British Grand Prix, Cricket, Wimbledon”. This is puny stuff compared with Covid contracts, where TI found that “multiple red flags in more than £15bn of contracts amounting to a third of all such spending points to more than........