Remember the Really Perfect Crime? Thus:

The Really Perfect Crime is not defined by the fact that no-one knows who did it. 

Instead it is to commit a truly atrocious deed and then arrange things so that we all know exactly who did it – but prefer to look away from the victim, to offer the criminal a drink, and chatter excitedly about ‘moving on’.

Similarly, perfect corruption is not in fact some sneaky manoeuvre aimed at squeezing some free cushions or a new conservatory from the taxpayer, confident that the facts will never see the light of public scrutiny. That involves only the furtive corruption of the corruptor.

It is something darker.

Something like setting up a system which corrupts everyone and from which there is no escape, as honest people no obvious choice but to cheat and lie if they are to stay in business.

Rather like the sovietisation of the UK higher eduction system:

You define educational success as, say, vast numbers of people going on to university who don’t really want to go on to university. But by the time the policy has worked its evil way, the thing being measured has done a cartwheel.

In this case, the thing that the government pays for, people turning up at a university, is measured. But people vanishing soon afterwards is something that it is in nobody’s interests to notice. The university wants to hang on to the government’s money. The government wants to be able to boast about how swimmingly everything is going and how much it is helping.

Only a few malcontents grumble, in things like blog comment threads, but if they get serious and loud about their grumbling, they too will find their interests seriously suffering, as they well know.

With enterprises that are responsible to themselves and to a gang of people in their immediate vicinity, people who are basically taking their own chances at their own expense, a mess like the one described so well by Rob Spence eventually gets corrected, because it costs too many people too much to persist with it … when the government’s success measurements cause havoc, everyone is all too liable still to conspire to say that all is well.

What makes sovietisation so uniquely itself is the way that everyone knows the story – what is going wrong and why it is going wrong – but nobody has any interest in telling the story like it really is, up to and including the Minister for whatever it is being deranged, for he/she too depends on all those statistically encoded lies to tell the world that he/she is doing a great job instead of merely a very average or worse job. The Prime Minister likewise, come to that.

Corruption – by degrees?