[gmac]

I think I disagree. When someone breaks a key moral principle — let’s say they are a murderer – we don’t spend time discussing how they are also good to animals or make a mean chilli. That doesn’t offset their transgression, so it becomes essentially irrelevant.

A key moral principle for a democratic government is to maintain public trust in democracy and its institutions. By pilfering public funds to enrich themselves and their friends, this government (and Johnson himself) has broken that principle, and until that has been remedied with resignation or impeachment, and ideally jail, it’s reasonable to talk of nothing else.

Except of course in this case we might also want to discuss this government’s appalling record elsewhere: allowing more of its citizens to die than almost anywhere else, per capita, by prioritising “the economy” and ignoring its own scientists; or destroying tens to hundreds of billions of pounds in wealth and tens to hundreds of thousands of livelihoods through their extraordinary scorched-earth Brexit.

[dalbasal]

I think this sort of thing has to be contextual. Is there any government or governing party anywhere that meets these standards?

Applied as it is hear, unless I'm missing something, your take means that there's no point or legitimacy to any conversation (EG a HN post) about any new UK agency (or sewage plant, school, energy plan, etc.) besides "they're corrupt, look at their other dealings."

I'm sympathetic to the moral principles. In particular, some have made the case that salacious shamelessness itself is the problem. It's corrosive.

But... Are you really at a point where you're calling quits on politics as a whole until this corruption stuff is sorted? Isn't this corrosive too?

I'm not saying that you can't put anticorruption first. It's definitely relevant here. This is a way of distributing money and contracts, after all. It is designed to not be accountable in conventional ways. Anticorruption is relevant and it's good to have people making that their top priority. But anticorruption is not the only thing at stake in anything and everything government related. There's also whatever the hell the thing is supposed to do.

Being uncorrupt, but failing to produce useful technology is also be bad. Maybe not murder bad, but I didn't think this is a useful way of thinking about it.

[DanBC]

This is not "corrupt but useful", it's "corrupt and useless".

> I think this sort of thing has to be contextual.

The context is that UK government gave £22 BILLION to private companies for Test and Trace, and they wasted most of it contributing to the very high death rate to covid in the UK.

https://committees.parliament.uk/work/906/covid19-test-track...

> At times, parts of the national tracing service have barely been used: in May, DHSC signed contracts for the provision of 3,000 health professionals and 18,000 call handlers. The call handler contracts were worth up to £720 million. By 17 June, the utilisation rate (the proportion of time that someone actively worked during their paid hours) was low for both health professional (4%) and call handler staff (1%), indicating that they had little work to do. This means substantial public resources have been spent on staff who provided minimal services in return.

> National and local government have tried to increase public engagement with tracing, but surveys suggest that the proportion of contacts fully complying with requests to self-isolate might range from 10% to 59%. NHST&T acknowledges that non-compliance poses a key risk to its success and has taken steps to increase levels of self-isolation, for example by making follow-up calls to people while they are self-isolating. For as long as compliance is low, the cost-effectiveness of NHST&T’s activities will inevitably be in doubt.

That's one example. There are dozens of other examples.

> Companies awarded pandemic-related contracts include Randox, which received £479m for Covid testing. The firm pays Conservative MP Owen Paterson £100,000 a year as a consultant.

> Meanwhile, Dominic Cummings’s father-in-law Sir Humphry Wakefield is an associate of the director of Admiral Public Relations, which received £670,000.

> Health minister Edward Argar is a former senior executive at Serco, which is in charge of much of the contact-tracing system. The company’s chief executive is Rupert Soames, brother of ex-Tory MP Sir Nicholas Soames.

> Public First, whose directors previously worked for Mr Cummings and Michael Gove, was also paid £840,000 for “focus group research”.

etc etc.