Because this article came out on Christmas Eve, and seems unbelievable, the outrageous things it reveals have been a bit buried. So I’m giving it a new push. With the government’s help, key sectors of the economy are being handed over to organised crime. theguardian.com/commentisfree/…
My guess is that there are now upwards of a million people in the UK working in organised criminal networks, with almost no fear of prosecution, facilitated by successive governments' wildly irresponsible deregulation. This is a fantastically hazardous situation.
As crime networks embed themselves in the economy and gain political power, we could slide towards the kind of Mafia state seen in the US during Prohibition, and in Russia, Italy, Mexico and Lebanon today. I can’t see any effective measures being deployed to stop this happening.
On the contrary, regulators and investigators have had their budgets slashed and been told, in effect, to sit on their hands. They are now so demoralised and weak that they could be knocked over with a feather. Organised crime is walking all over them.
You can see this as the dénouement of neoliberalism: remove all regulatory constraints, roll back the state, leave it to the mythical being they call the Invisible Hand, which they worship as avidly as any religious cult, and honest businesses are elbowed aside by the Mafia.
Incidentally, the Environment Agency’s register of waste contractors, that I found so easy to exploit, has now been online for seven years. But it’s still the Beta version, so full of glitches as to be scarcely usable. And meaningless anyway, as no one is checking. 
There's a similar level of chaos almost everywhere you look. After my article was published, a reader wrote to tell me about an entry he'd found in the government's register of businesses, Companies House. Here it is. There are many others like it.
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