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British Politics Has Been Profoundly Corrupt For The Last 300 Years
As sordid as the revelations of the recent few weeks have been, It’s nothing new.
Slave traders, insider traders, lobbyists, Finance speculators, Newspaper barons and supporters of child labour have been among those who have risen to the very top of Public life in Britain in the last three hundred years.
In the last few weeks, you will have read about Owen Patterson, a Conservative member of parliament who was found to have breached parliamentary rules on advocacy and was recommended by an independent group of MPs for a thirty day suspension. What made headlines around the world was the fact that the sitting Prime Minister of the day instructed every Tory parliamentarian to vote against the recommendation of the independent group; This was until a public outcry forced him to do a volte-face.
If you knew nothing about British history, you would be forgiven for thinking that the misdeeds of Boris Johnson was a complete one-off, an outlier in an otherwise ethical institution.
But this unfortunately isn’t the case.
It is not an exaggeration to state that the United Kingdom of Great Britain invented corruption, as we know it today and exported it to the rest of the globe, allowing the Americans, Nigerians, Russians and Chinese to…