When I published my previous essay in the Daily Sceptic on the rape-gang scandal, I attempted to describe what a serious integrity mechanism would look like in a state that wished to root out corruption rather than narrate it. Drawing on the example of Hong Kong’s Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC), I set out, in practical terms, what such a body would require: independence from police and ministerial control, genuine investigative authority and a simple governing proposition: that no institution can be trusted to police itself when it is itself the problem.
My former colleague and sometime co-writer David Betz remarked on X that the piece read like a final appeal to reason – a last attempt to delineate what accountability might resemble if the contemporary administrative state in Britain still possessed the will to pursue it. We both agree that it does not have the will and have written several times to this effect.
That observation points to what the earlier essay left insufficiently examined. The pressing question is not what an integrity mechanism would look like. It is why such a mechanism has not appeared, and why, under the present dispensation, it cannot.
