The Integrity Gap: How We Built the Authoritarian Future We Fear

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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.

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 flick of a switch.

This is the great paradox of our time. The authoritarian right rails against an establishment that is, in many ways, already doing its work for it. Farage and his allies perform the role of anti-elite insurgents even as they champion the most corporate-friendly, deregulated politics imaginable. Strip away the theatre and Reform UK is a billionaire-backed project to dismantle the public realm, shred regulatory protections and hand what remains of state power to capital.

And the current Labour government, rather than resisting these trends, risks entrenching them. Invite BlackRock into your industrial strategy. Hand over NHS data architecture to Oracle. Populate your boards with corporate lobbyists. Expand surveillance powers and digital ID infrastructure. At that point, when the far right eventually take office, they will not need to construct the tools of repression. We will have built them for them.

This is the danger we face. Not an authoritarianism that arrives overnight, but one that is painstakingly assembled by governments of every stripe – until the day it falls into the hands of those more than willing to use it.

The only way out is through a profound change in political culture. More triangulation, more centralisation, more proximity to wealth will only tighten the trap. 

What is needed is a politics that trusts the public, not one that surveils and manages them. A politics that makes every vote count through proportional representation. A politics that brings water, energy, health and data back under public control so they are run for the public good, not private profit.

Robin Cook understood that integrity was not just a moral choice but a political necessity – the foundation on which democratic consent is built. He knew that pragmatism was compatible with principle, and that to surrender one was to lose both.

If Labour is serious about stopping the authoritarian right from filling the vacuum, it must rebuild trust by breaking with the very culture that is feeding public cynicism. Because if we fail to change course, the winners will not be the public but the billionaires – as the climate burns, inequality widens, and the last protections of a functioning state are dismantled before our eyes.