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Johnson’s UK, Bolsonaro’s Brazil and Orbán’s Hungary: peas in a state-captured pod

State capture happens when narrow interest groups take control of public policy, buying influence to rewrite the rules. There are signs it’s happening in Britain

By Liz David-Barrett
Johnson’s UK, Bolsonaro’s Brazil and Orbán’s Hungary: peas in a state-captured pod
Both Orbán and Johnson were democratically elected and have since attempted to rewrite the rules
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Yesterday morning, I started writing a piece asking whether the UK is a captured state after watching Conservative MPs vote to rip up the rules on parliamentary standards to protect their colleague, Owen Paterson.

Boris Johnson’s government has pulled back, slightly, from its threat to replace the independent anti-sleaze watchdog with a panel dominated by Tory MPs. And while Paterson may have since stepped down as an MP, the question remains: is the UK a state captured by vested interests?

State capture is different to classic bribery or corruption. An example of classic bribery is a property developer paying a bribe to get permission to build on a piece of land – a one-off benefit that breaks the existing rules.

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Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0