Liberal standards of good governance scrapped by today's Tories

 A young civil servant in my day would early be introduced to the work of Northcote and Trevelyan on his or her induction course. I hope that this is still the case. The recommendations of the Victorian reformers in 1854 were actioned by Liberal prime minister WE Gladstone and did much to end what was termed "The Old Corruption". For the sleaziness of many politicians at the time, one has to look no further than our former Conservative representative, Howel Gwyn, whose biography should still be available in Neath library. This is one of the reasons for Jacob Rees-Mogg and many like him today being described as Members for the 18th century. Under Charles III, the UK is returning to the standards resulting from the Restoration under Charles II and its over-reaction to the foregoing puritanism of Cromwell. Patrick Cockburn writes:

Signs of the retreat from the standards of honest and competent government to which the Victorian reformers aspired are today visible everywhere. What makes this decline so serious is the vast size of the sums of money now being wasted or misused. The most flagrant example of this was the waste of £12 billion spent on defective or over-priced PPE during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Probably, the figures are too gargantuan for people to take on board, but in a report published on June 2022, the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee, scarcely a muckraking body, spelled out the losses: equipment worth £4 billion did not meet NHS standards, £2.6 billion was not of a type or standard preferred by the NHS, £4.7 billion was written off because too much had been paid for it, and £673 million was spent on PPE that was defective.

The theft of the century

What we are really looking at here is one of the thefts of the century. The Government brushes aside this enormous useless expenditure of public funds, most of which ended up in somebody’s pockets, blaming it on an unprecedented emergency with which ministers were heroically seeking to cope. They argue that no time was available to check on PPE suppliers, however inadequate or dodgey they subsequently turned out to be.

This dubious argument silences many potential critics, aided by a certain naivety in Britain about the traditional mechanics of corruption. Our nineteenth-century ancestors would not have been so simple-minded, and would have been instantly suspicious of such self-serving government pretensions. They would not have been taken in by its claim that it was only its laudable enthusiasm to fend off disaster that regrettably led to so-many well-connected companies close to the Conservative Party winning profitable contracts.

And they would have been right: a study by the New York Times in December 2020 found that out of a sample of 1,200 Covid-19 related central government contracts worth £16 billion, about half of which worth £8bn, “went to companies either run by friends and associates of politicians in the Conservative Party, or with no prior experience or a history of controversy. Meanwhile, smaller firms without political clout got nowhere.”