Moneyland: Why Thieves and Crooks Now Rule the World and How To Take It Back

by Oliver Bullough

Similarly, after the Brexit referendum, the UK government’s agenda to open up the offshore world to fight both tax dodging and corruption almost entirely halted. ‘The anti-corruption phone just stopped ringing,’ said Jon Benton, an ex-policeman who worked in the Cabinet Office as a senior adviser for the pre-referendum prime minister, David Cameron. In a country that is focused on its own troubles and concerns, there is little appetite for leading a global quest to rebuild the world’s financial architecture. It is possible to cheer this development, as a reassertion of one country’s democracy against the snares of international bureaucracy, which of course it is. But it is ironic, too, that a democratic outburst sparked by anger over the arrogance of a distant elite should have destroyed an initiative designed precisely to rein in that very elite.