[cjbgkagh]

We have oligarchic corporatism, not democratic capitalism, though I guess that is what is meant by the phrase ‘late stage capitalism’. The problem is that we already have regulatory capture, a more powerful regulatory system leaves us with fewer ways to escape the oligarchs control.

[varispeed]

The problem isn’t the number of regulators or how muscular they are. It’s that there’s no functioning enforcement. You can design the neatest regulatory framework in the world, but if the people meant to uphold it look the other way, you may as well print it on kitchen roll.

Take MI5. Their remit explicitly includes safeguarding the democratic system. Yet when you’ve got a government holding cosy meetings with global asset managers and, like magic, Digital ID turns into a flagship national policy nobody voted for, where are they? Nowhere. They’re busy pumping out LinkedIn-based “espionage alerts” about Chinese headhunters while ignoring policy capture happening in broad daylight. They don’t even need the Prime Minister’s blessing to investigate that kind of threat. They just… don’t.

So yes, we have oligarchic corporatism. But the real failure is that the institutions meant to keep it in check have basically checked out.

[cjbgkagh]

In my opinion these institutions only had stated intentions of keeping democracy in check. I think they’ve always been tool for oligarchic forces to use against the masses and each other.

To me the apparent incompetence of the SFO is better explained as a mechanism for the UK gov to double dip on bribes / campaign donations when the first one was insufficient.

I think the effective anti corruption institutional culture was built when there was competition between empires and it was in the empires interest to do so.

There is still a general perception that the UK has comparatively low levels of corruption but I attribute this to low levels of petty corruption. It is still in the interest of a corrupt state that lower level corruption is effectively policed as they are in competition. So it’s very possible that the majority of the population will not be privy to corruption while at the same time the majority of important decisions made are corrupted.