Support our mission to provide fearless stories about and outside the media system

Packed with exclusive investigations, analysis, and features

SUBSCRIBE TODAY

For years, the political centre has comforted itself with a story: that public mistrust is irrational. It is the product, we are told, of populism, social media echo chambers, bad-faith actors on the far right.

But look more closely and you will find a different story. This mistrust is not irrational at all. It is rooted in the lived experience of a public that has seen too much, been told too many half-truths, and been left to bear the cost when the promises of government have failed to materialise.

In my recent Robin Cook Memorial Lecture, I called this the "integrity gap" - the widening gulf between what governments say and what people believe. Cook's resignation over Iraq was one of those moments when the gap became undeniable. Two decades later, it has become the defining feature of British political life.

The public see a political class whose proximity to wealth has corroded its independence and whose language of public service has become a hollowed-out ritual. It is the same political culture which, now dominates No 10, which insisted Peter Mandelson's 'qualities' outweighed the risks.

This is not paranoia. It is the reality of a system where the dividing line between the state and wealth, oligarchs and corporate power has been systematically erased.

Consider the boards of government departments under this Labour government - the very bodies responsible for setting strategy across Whitehall. Two-thirds of their "non-executive directors" or NEDs, are drawn from corporate backgrounds. A third come from finance and professional services - including senior figures from Barclays, Europe's most fossil-fuel-invested bank, and PwC, the consultancy caught passing secret government documents to clients to help them avoid tax.

The lead NED at the Department for Transport is the former CEO of BAE Systems. The chairman of Ineos sits on the Ministry of Defence board. The lobbying director of British Airways - Britain's biggest polluter - sits at the heart of the Cabinet Office even as his company leads efforts to weaken climate regulations. Across the Department of Health, not one NED is a medic. Two are corporate lobbyists for private healthcare.

This is not a glitch. It is how the system now works.

ENJOYING THIS ARTICLE? HELP US TO PRODUCE MORE

Receive the monthly Byline Times newspaper and help to support fearless, independent journalism that breaks stories, shapes the agenda and holds power to account.

PAY ANNUALLY - £39.50 A YEAR

PAY MONTHLY - £3.75 A MONTH

MORE OPTIONS

We're not funded by a billionaire oligarch or an offshore hedge-fund. We rely on our readers to fund our journalism. If you like what we do, please subscribe.

And it does not stop there. The New Statesman's recent investigation into the Tony Blair Institute shows how deep this integration now runs. Since 2021, the institute has taken hundreds of millions from Oracle founder Larry Ellison. Its staff now sit inside government. Its proposals - from a national data library to the restructuring of NHS systems - read less like disinterested advice and more like a business plan for Oracle's global health ambitions.

This is not lobbying at the edges. This is corporate power wired into the state's decision-making architecture.

Against this backdrop, the government's drive for digital ID cards is more than just another technocratic reform. It is a decision that would permanently change the relationship between citizen and state. The arguments against are well known: function creep, weak oversight, disproportionate harm to marginalised groups, and the normalisation of what Gaby Hinsliff has called a "checkpoint society." Combine an ID register with facial recognition, predictive policing and AI-driven data profiling, and you have created an infrastructure that any authoritarian successor could weaponise at the fl...