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Comment by toyg | Hacker News Reader

> Councils are I think too small to access GDS?

Councils probably don't want to access GDS. Why lose all those sweet vendor kickbacks? Free ticket to this, free travel to that...

There is a lot of corruption in Britain at the lower level of government. It's all in plain sight, it's all legal, and because it benefits the same networks (someone would say "classes") that are structurally in power in Westminster, nothing gets done about it.

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Could you say a bit more about how those running the councils benefit from these contracts? I don’t think I fully understood what you were saying about kickbacks.

Say you are an ERP vendor who really wants to get a contract with the (imaginary) Penzance Metropolitan Borough. What do you do? You identify the key decision makers and start wining and dining them. Since scrutiny at local level has largely disappeared (thanks to the demise of local press), nobody will notice.

Maybe you don't even need to do that, maybe you already knew them from school, so it was a given that they'd call you as soon as they got in a position to bring you in - and you'll be so grateful, you'll probably let you stay at your cottage in France for free, any time they want.

Etc etc etc.

This is stuff that in other countries would be called organised crime, mafia, defrauding the state, and so on. In Britain it's just how the ruling classes go about business.

Birmingham council is run by Labour but Westminster is run by the Conservatives. Unless by classes you mean all politicians, it's not the case that it's all linked back to central government.

Besides, corruption isn't needed to explain this. ERP projects fail all the time, with SAP as well.

They're all the politician class. Labour don't represent the lower classes any better than the tories imo.

Doesn't really make sense to say that politicians are structurally in power in Westminster though. I mean, yeah, kind of by definition in a democracy the political classes are structurally in power.

Not in the way that we have in the UK - where most representatives (regardless of party) have gone through the same schools and the same social circles (bit of journalism, bit of finance, all largely in London or surrounding areas).

I know so little about British politics that I take Yes, (Prime) Minister at face value. I would have thought it war more about the (benefits and) interests of bureaucracy and civil service.

Labours today are literally red tories

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