Britain’s corrupt elites
Simon Kuper
Financial Times
Britain is more free of corruption than most countries, says Simon Kuper. Yet we might be sliding backwards. Stefan Dercon, author of Gambling on Development, argues that a country develops when its elites strike a bargain and agree to go for development rather than dividing the spoils. Examples include China from 1979 and India from 1991. Britain’s development bargain, however, has broken down. A string of election victories led the Tories to suspect voters will back them no matter what, and they lost their common project in the Brexit wars. “When a common project dies, what remains is self-advancement.” This is what we saw during Covid, when well-connected Tories such as Michelle Mone and David Cameron used the crisis as an opportunity to pursue private gain. Britain’s “wealth-power nexus”, where City elites buy up political ones, “remains under-scrutinised”, but the public is catching on: polls show record numbers agreeing that politicians are just out for themselves. The good news is that the Tories will probably lose power this year. Elites strike development bargains when misrule threatens their legitimacy. China’s did after Mao’s death. “Britain’s elite may be getting there.”
How to fix broke councils
Anthony Breach
Conservative Home
The trickle of effectively bankrupt local councils is turning into a stream and risks becoming a flood, says Anthony Breach. The problem is bigger than a few cases of financial mismanagement, and cuts to government grants are only half the story. The other half is that council-tax increases are capped by central government. Squeezed between these two forces, councils are struggling to provide more than the statutory minimum of public service. The answer is fiscal devolution to shift local finance away from central grants and towards more local control. This would allow councils to keep more of the proceeds of growth and give them better incentives to generate revenues. Grants should continue on a simple per-head basis to help finance the services councils are required to provide. Business rates should be returned to local control, giving councils an incentive to listen to businesses and provide land for new factories, offices and shops. Councils should also have more flexibility over council-tax rates and get a slice of locally generated income tax to broaden the tax base and redistribute the burden more fairly. In the long term, this is the only way to get local-council finances “bac
