...only in a more 'sophisticated' way...
Yeah, this is something I've thought for a while now. I mean plenty of countries are openly and blatantly ultra-corrupt, the sort of place where a candidate is so unbelievably popular that he actually gets over 100% of the vote, and where corruption still means shady men in long coats exchanging bulging brown envelopes on park benches, and opposition politicians or government-critical journalists accidentally brutally cutting their own heads off while eating breakfast. And this is business as usual for pretty much the whole world outside of the developed Western nations, Japan and a small handful of other countries.
But when you consider how political decisions are made in the UK at the highest level, it just makes all that stuff look thoroughly amateur. Consider the likes of Aaron Banks, Cambridge Analytica, funds (which are always "contributions" and never "bribes") funnelled through shell company after shell company, from Guernsey to the Caimans and back again, and all these "think tanks" that supposedly offer "advice" to governments but are actually just special-interest pressure groups in all but name - surely the worst of these is the so-called Taxpayers' Alliance, which if half of what I've read about it is true, would be more accurately called the Tax-
Avoiders' Alliance. (In fact I'm not sure of that at all - there may well be much worse examples out there that I, along with 99% of people, am not even aware of.)
It's notable that the UK is apparently one of the least corrupt countries in the world according to the
Corruption Perceptions Index - note that middle word!