There is no Utopia no matter where you are in the world and one can be sure that those who believe that ‘Western’ democracy is squeaky clean are one of two things: ludicrously naïve or outright hypocrites.
Like an untold number of Pakistanis, I have spent long years in the West but the facts I will refer to in this column aren’t dependent on living and acquiring knowledge in a certain country in the West. They can easily be found using the Internet and the search engine of your choice.
Let’s pick up the example of the UK, whose Westminster model serves as the template for many parliamentary democracies in the world. Depending on the state of societal development, they deliver to varying degrees wherever they are, are never perfect, but almost always found to be better than any authoritarian system.
An internet search will throw up endless examples over the decades. We will just mention a handful of recent ones. When he was prime minister, Boris Johnson appointed Richard Sharp as the chairman of the licence fee-funded BBC.
It has now emerged that just before applying for the job, Sharp was discussing with a Canadian businessman Sam Blyth, a distant cousin of Johnson, the then prime minister’s financial difficulties. Sharp is said to have given Blyth a senior civil servant Simon Case’s phone number.
The discussions and contacts led to a £800,000 loan to the prime minister who was already embroiled in a controversy after asking a Conservative party donor to pay for some refurbishment at his official residence, No 10, Downing Street.
Appearing before a cross-party parliamentary committee that grilled him, Sharp denied any wrongdoing but expressed regret that the BBC was embarrassed as a result. Once the media dug its teeth into the story, it was certain that the matter would not end with those denials.
More recently, the media has used both the former prime minister’s and the BBC chairman’s video clips where they contradict one another with the former saying Richard Sharp knew nothing about his financial affairs, the man himself telling the parliamentary committee that he discussed the former prime minister’s finances with Sam Blyth but cautioned him to go through the proper, ‘ethical’ channels if he wanted to help.
If this was the only scandal hitting the governing Conservative Party, it would be one thing. The multimillionaire Nadhim Zahawi, who was sacked from his cabinet position as Conservative Party chairman, survived in office for weeks by using high-profile law firms to try and silence those looking into his financial affairs.
To cut a long story short, Zahawi set up a business owned via a Gibraltar-based offshore company which was his for all practical purposes but the paperwork showed his father was the majority owner. He is said to have attracted the tax office’s attention when he received a multimillion pound (£30 million, as per some media reports) payment from this company and failed to pay tax on it. He was fined £3.7m.
When the legal notices failed and a tax lawyer-journalist laid bare the case, the Tory Party chairman described what happened as an “innocent” mistake. Speaking at a public function a little later, the head of the HM Revenue and Customs said his department did not fine people for “honest mistakes”.
Nadhim Zahawi. Photo: No 10/Flickr CC BY NC ND 2.0
Eventually, Nadhim Zahawi was sacked by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak after receiving the report of an investigation he had ordered into the affair. This probe predictably followed the media storm and not initial suggestions that the cabinet member may have tried to evade taxes.
The examples being mentioned have been randomly cited and not in order of the magnitude of the money involved but the best has been saved for the last. PPE or personal protection equipment for healthcare staff particularly working in hospitals during the peak of the COVID crisis was not easy to come by.
The Johnson government that to this day makes chest-thumping claims of how well it handled the COVID onslaught relaxed rules to purchase PPE stocks. It later emerged that PPE worth several billion pounds was quite substandard and hence useless.
A parliamentary inquiry report said: “The Department for Health & Social Care … lost 75% of the £12bn it spent on personal protective equipment … in the first year of the pandemic to inflated prices and kit that did not meet requirements — including fully £4bn of PPE that will not be used in the NHS and needs to be disposed of.”
Among the beneficiaries with connections to many leading lights of the Tory party were a top aide to former prime minister Liz Truss, former home secretary Priti Patel and, even more outrageously, a company owned by the sister of the then health secretary Matt Hancock in which the latter was a 20% shareholder. Tory peer Michelle Mone also profited directly from PPE contracts.
Patel and Hancock and some other Tory top guns involved in the scandal lost their jobs but due to other factors. For example, Hancock was captured on CCTV in a passionate embrace with a top aide in the corridor right outside his office while both had obviously removed their masks. Both were married.
The purpose of this piece isn’t to say corruption is acceptable because it happens everywhere but only to point out that the best safeguard against it is a truly free media and an upright, incorruptible criminal justice system.
Until we develop such institutions, there is little hope of a move forward in this area. With a decrepit, creaky justice system, susceptible to political and other influences, all one will see is political opponents demonised and hounded and never a credible campaign to root out or control the evil.
Abbas Nasir is a former editor of Dawn.