When you count the 250,000 believed to disposing of waste illegally, the networks ripping off the elderly and vulnerable, the money launderers in the City, the modern slavery ops in agriculture, beauty salons etc, how much of the UK workforce is engaged in criminal activity?
What we're witnessing in this country is almost complete regulatory collapse, driven by successive governments slashing what they call "red tape", alongside massive reductions in the budgets of regulatory agencies, whose monitoring and enforcement capacity has fallen off a cliff.
"Leave it to the market", they say. But when you leave the market to regulate itself, those who prosper are the spivs, the corner-cutters, the chancers and the outright criminals. Deregulation allows them to undercut their more conscientious competitors.
The result is an economy that becomes progressively criminalised. And this feeds back into politics, as can be seen in many countries. Politicians become dependent on criminal networks for their survival. And things start going very badly wrong.
After a while, criminality can achieve critical mass in an economy, after which it comes to dominate a nation’s politics. It has happened in Italy, Russia, Mexico, Lebanon and elsewhere. To those who believe it couldn’t happen here: don’t be so sure.
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