There is a widely accepted description for crony capitalism – it is an economic system in which businesses thrive not as a result of free enterprise, but rather as a return on money amassed through collusion between a business class and the political class.

In the past decade, the governing party of the United Kingdom has relied almost universally on donations made by the very wealthy – self-made millionaires, billionaires and oligarchs. Last year, £11 million was donated to the Tory party by hedge fund managers and finance tycoons alone. Oligarchs donated well over £50 million in a decade. Before that, it was city donors – bankers that funded over half of the Tory coffers.

However, the oligarchs have been kicked out of the country – leaving the Tory treasury to work out new ways of funding themselves. Crony capitalism is what they know best.

More than 50 economists warned this week that Britain’s post-Brexit plans to boost the competitiveness of its huge finance industry in the City of London risked creating the kind of problems that led to the global financial crisis. In that crisis, the government supported banks to the tune of £500 billion – but then went on to double the national debt from £1.1 trillion to £2.2 trillion in the space of a decade and imposed austerity – a policy widely accepted as having failed the country.

The government is looking to use its newfound so-called “Brexit freedoms” to forge a new path. It is to require financial regulators to help the City of London remain a global financial centre after the country left the European Union. This is not quite the economic policies of the free market that are to fire up the burners – more like state intervention.

Reuters reports that –  the group of 58 economists, including a Nobel Prize winner and former business minister Vince Cable, said making competitiveness an objective could turn regulators into cheerleaders for banks and lead to poor policymaking.

It also raised the risk of hurting the real economy as the finance sector sucks in a disproportionate share of talent, they said in an open letter to finance minister Rishi Sunak

“The UK instead needs clear regulatory objectives that promote economy-wide productivity, growth and market integrity, and also protect consumers and taxpayers, advance the fight against climate change and tackle dirty money to protect our collective security,” the letter said.

There was another warning too. Britain’s financial services minister, John Glen, made the point that the new competitiveness objective given to the Bank of England and the Financial Conduct Authority “would be secondary to keeping markets, consumers and companies safe and sound”.

Banks have continually sought more focus on competitiveness from the government since Brexit than proposed, but the government has faced push-back from the BoE which has warned against a return to the “light touch” era that ended with lenders being bailed out during the financial crisis. The signatories of the open letter included Mick McAteer, a former FCA board member, and Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz.

What these experts are saying is that crony capitalism spills over into the government, the politics, and the media and when this nexus distorts the economy and affects society to an extent it corrupts public-serving economic, political, and social ideals. In other words – the economy trickles up to the wealthy, whilst draining the welath of everyone else. Hence, you see a fall in standards of living because that wealth is not more evenly distributed.