Teflon coated fat-cats and bent ministers: Welcome to Britain

It is not just a British phenomenon, of course. In Italy the immunity from Law of the political class and the corporates has given Beppe Grillo’s Five Star 109 seats in the Italian Parliament and over 25% of the popular vote. In Britain, as George Monbiot points out in the Guardian this morning, we have G4S, a company that has given us ‘Institutional Peculation’, and Cameron’s crony government, where every chiselling little crook of a minister is immune from the sack if they are chums with the boss. Teflon-coated fat cats and bent ministers; welcome to Britain in 2014.

All over Europe there is a groundswell of opposition to the entrenched corruption of big business and a self-serving political class, though whether it’s building to the sort of cathartic cleansing that Europe last saw in 1848 is questionable. Monbiot’s parallel with Brazil in the late ’80s is a useful one; it’s more likely that government will just spiral in a cesspit of corruption, with a merry go-round of bent leaders; Sarney, Collor, Franco, Cardoso, Lula. 

There are times when you can understand the need to vent popular anger; I think it was in Sierra Leone that the ministers of the old government were summarily taken to the beach, tied to telegraph posts and shot. Perhaps its just as well Britons are not this way inclined, or ministers would be gazing at rows of posts embedded in the Thames foreshore opposite the Westminster terraces on which they sip their Pimms.