This unaltered story [1] was originally published on OpenDemocracy.org.
License [2]: Creative Commons 4.0 - Attributions/No Derivities/Int'l.
------------------------

Johnson’s UK, Bolsonaro’s Brazil and Orbán’s Hungary: peas in a state-captured pod

By:   []

Date: 2021-11

Yesterday morning, I started writing a piece asking whether the UK is a captured state after watching Conservative MPs vote to rip up the rules on parliamentary standards to protect their colleague, Owen Paterson.

Boris Johnson’s government has pulled back, slightly, from its threat to replace the independent anti-sleaze watchdog with a panel dominated by Tory MPs. And while Paterson may have since stepped down as an MP, the question remains: is the UK a state captured by vested interests?

State capture is different to classic bribery or corruption. An example of classic bribery is a property developer paying a bribe to get permission to build on a piece of land – a one-off benefit that breaks the existing rules.

State capture is when the property developer influences a government minister to change the rules about what kind of property can be built on what kind of land – thereafter, the developer has access to a whole new landscape of opportunity.

Tell your MP not to weaken political sleaze rules If enough of us speak up, we'll be able to protect honesty in public life. Email your MP

It’s a type of systematic corruption where narrow interest groups take control of the institutions and processes that make public policy, buying influence not just to disregard the rules but also to rewrite the rules.

That means that state capture has much deeper and longer-term consequences. If a group can change the rules, then it not only gains an advantage but also bakes that advantage in. State capture alters the rules by which we all live and any behaviour within the new rules is legal, not subject to challenge.

We tend to associate state capture with post-Soviet and post-colonial transitions. Think oligarchs in Russia and oil barons in Nigeria. But more recently, we’ve seen a new form of capture emerge in more mature democracies – and some worrying signs of it in the UK.

Time to sound the alarm

After Wednesday’s government-led vote to overturn the decision of the established parliamentary standards system and replace it with some hastily assembled partisan outfit, I felt it was time to sound the alarm.

Around the world, the new manifestation of state capture is led by politicians not business people. They get into power through elections but then radically change the rules of the game to entrench their power.
[END]

[1] Url: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/dark-money-investigations/johnsons-uk-bolsonaros-brazil-and-orb%C3%A1ns-hungary-peas-in-a-state-captured-pod/
[2] url: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/

OpenDemocracy via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/opendemocracy/