Because we let them.
Corruption is the UK is structural not personal.
What are those structures?
Is it because we are the second most centralised country in the world after North Korea?
Which means we are all victims of invisible analogue corruption that is far worse than the cost of a few tins of cat food*.
And, if you want my opinion, the way to end that structural corruption is to
• break up the English nation state* completely - it shouldn't even have a darts team, let alone a "parliament"
• replace it with a constellation of self governing city-states and regions
• give them power to make their own laws, raise taxes, conduct foreign policy and have their own darts teams
that way, the people to whom you grant authority to act on your behalf won't need a "second home allowance" because they will live on your street and work in your town hall, and if they abuse your trust, you can go round and wring their necks.
Of course, my opinion isn't worth sh**e (but nor is anyone else's from outside the centre of real, analogue, power).
And it's not very likely to happen anyway (but that doesn't mean it's not worth trying to make it happen.)
But if we are up in arms about the cat food, we have a responsibility to ask how it happened, be honest about who else has benefited from letting it happen*, and take responsibility for doing what is needed to stop it happening any more.
Asterisks:
*What do you think Peter Mandelson was doing on that Russian oligarch's yacht last summer? Talking about the football? A Lord and a gangster were carving up your life. How do you think the world's financial institutions got so "de regulated"? Anyone ask you if you thought it was a good idea to put your job and your mortgage at risk so that over-networked smug idiots could pay for their single estate first press olive oil importing businesses?
*nation states are sooo 19th century.
* And among those who benefit are the very same people stirring up the outrage in order to sell a few more copies of the Pyongyang Daily Worker.
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