8 OPINION AND DEBATE
The Persistent Scandal of Modern Corruption
THE FOUNDER January 2022
JOEL DAVIES | CONTENT WRITER
W
hile only time will tell if the Downing Street Christmas party scandal proves to be Boris Johnson’s great downfall, it is undeniable that the wave of corruption stories his government suffered in 2021 laid a foundation of distrust with the public that makes these allegations hard to shake. Since the beginning of the pandemic, a tidal wave of stories of PPE and testing contracts being awarded to close connections of ministers have emerged. Johnson’s holiday in Marbella was revealed to be funded by Zac Goldsmith, revealing close links with the former MP’s firms. In October, news broke of Malcolm Offord’s ascension to peerage – a Scottish businessman who had donated almost £150,000 to the Conservative Party over time. This exploded into another ‘cash for honours’ scandal in November 2021, topped off nicely by the Owen Paterson affair. The public money spent without disclosure on refurbishing Johnson’s Downing Street apartment, fined by the Electoral Commission in December 2021, formed the final addition to the public opinion tinder box that the Christmas parties would alight. The simple fact that this list is not at all extensive tells you all you need to know about the place of corruption in this government.
This heap of scandals may be proving challenging for the Johnson premiership, but they are only a symptom of the chokehold that corruption holds over the world’s biggest democracies. Money holds an often-understated influence in democracies across the world and forms a huge challenge for progressive agendas worldwide. Corruption can form roadblocks in the way of progress, it can buy silence from opposition, and it can get policies that the public may not support silently prioritised. Corrupt causes often penetrate the heart of modern politics, and for that reason we must be aware of their presence when they show their faces.
Corruption is such an endemic issue in the United States that it is only known as ‘lobbying’ and faces very little legal resistance. A multitude of campaign finance reform efforts have been undermined, and money holds a role in US politics that cannot be understated. Most recently, Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia singlehandedly sank Joe Biden’s $1.7 trillion Build Back Better plan, his decision likely influenced in no small part by the substantial donations Manchin’s campaign receives from fossil fuel industries. A pin-pointed offensive by lobbyists can derail revolutionary, and extremely urgent, legislation, while making a neat profit for the beneficiaries too.
Source: Peter Summers
In more fragile regions of the world too, corrupting forces play their hand, often destabilising states further. Ukraine is notorious for the level of corruption the state exhibits - state resources being siphoned off for profit has been a huge factor in the insufficiency of Ukraine’s army and its failure to join the EU. Bulgaria, too, experiences rampant corruption, being the worst scoring EU nation in the Corruption Perception Index of 2019. Political dissatisfaction runs high in the country, and electoral turnout is staggeringly low, creating concern for the unstable state of democracy in the country. In Russia, corruption and cronyism are such an embedded feature of the state’s functions that they are considered integral to the existence of Vladimir Putin’s government.
The abuse of state power is clearly a worldwide phenomenon, not isolated to Downing Street’s peculiar distribution of peerages and PPE contracts. At a time where democratic structures and values are under threat in Western and Eastern democracies alike, the arguments of anticorruption movements are worth taking seriously, not only to hold those in power accountable, but combat damaging, divisive, and dangerous populist agendas that emerge in times like these.
Designer Babies: The Future Poverty AELIYA RAZVI | CONTENT WRITER
D
esigner Babies have been a point of discussion and contention for scientists, the discussion first beginning with the publication of A Brave New World in 1932. The book is set in the distant future, the year 2540 and in this dystopian future, babies are no longer created and raised by their parents but are rather grown in vats and are graded into five different tiers of intelligence based on the chemical treatment they received as embryos.
