The inadmissible truth about corruption in the UK is that it's endemic. And not just money laundering; the very way governments (both Labour, Conservative, and Coalition) have pursued the business of privatization of state assets since 1979 is uniquely corrupt, on a massive scale.
Hint: corruption isn't just about simple bribery and envelopes full of banknotes passing hand. Ask yourself why so many cabinet ministers retire and end up on the boards of large conglomerates that specialise in bidding for government outsourcing contracts, or why so many long-term viable agencies of government (the Post Office, the Land Registry, the National Air Traffic Control System, the NHS ...) find themselves in need of privatization in the name of "efficiency". You can make any agency -- however potentially profitable -- fail if you run it into the ground through deliberate mismanagement, then show a rebound improvement when you sell it (or the service it provides) off to your golf-course cronies. And when you roll up to the banquet later, there's no evidential chain that can prove beyond reasonable doubt that what you did was grand theft.
>Hint: corruption isn't just about simple bribery and envelopes full of banknotes passing hand.
While I agree with you, I find the bare-faced cheek of publicly-advertised "donor clubs" that promise access to the Prime Minister for a mere £50k/year absolutely sickening:
Blimey, that's a fascinating link to be so public and explicit. They boast about not being funded by Trade Unions, and then invite big business to donate £50K so they can have lunch with the PM to "defeat the rise of socialism".
What's even more amazing, the text right under that header:
> Labour has said that they would turn their backs on our nuclear deterrent, abolish our armed forces and has openly sympathised with terrorist groups who seek to destroy our way of life. Their policies for the continued economic recovery of our great nation should make alarm bells ring.
> Labour are steadily building an army of far left-wing supporters and we should ignore this at our peril.
That page is truly bizarre - I hadn't managed to read all of it before (due to blood pressure issues) but now that I read the rest of it I'm actually quite amused.
Do you think they are planning a 70's style coup?
[NB I'm probably already on a watch list after paying for a book with a debit card (duh!) in a Sinn Féin shop in Belfast)]
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I was genuinely surprised that they use that phrase - what does socialism mean in that context? The NHS, opposition to zero hour contracts, basic human decency?
I think they're very much in favor of redistributing wealth. It's just the socialists' preferred direction of the redistribution that they don't agree with.
Honestly, they've been cutting government expenditure pretty heavily across the board (to the best of my knowledge) and military expenditure is way down.
Firstly, remember that "socialism" is a dirty word in US politics, but not in EU politics. The UK Labour party does claim[1] to be a socialist party. Their homepage[2] has a link to "affiliated socialist societies".
However in this case, the tories are just scaremongering.
[1] They're not really socialist anymore, since Tony Blair & New Labour back in the 90s at least.
So … it's okay for a union to shake down 1,000 members for £50 each and donate money to a politician in hopes that he will support an agenda favourable to unions, but it's not okay for anyone else to do the equivalent?
What are some examples of democratic countries where corruption is low?
Ask yourself why so many cabinet ministers retire and end up on the boards of large conglomerates that specialise in bidding for government outsourcing contracts, or why so many long-term viable agencies of government
Doesn't this happen elsewhere too? Example - revolving door in financial institutions
(Pressure for social change tends to come from the young, voters skew old, so in practice many direct democracies tend to be very slow to adapt to widespread grassroots social change.)
Unless you have some sort of constitutional provisions protecting people from each other, 51% of your fellow citizens will trod all over the other 49%.
And you may or may not have noticed, but most citizens don't seem to take the time to be up on the pros and cons for each and every provision of each and every piece of legislation that are debated today on the floor of parliamentary bodies.
In other words: it might solve what economists call the "principal-agent problem", but at a (potentially very high) cost.
A person who should not necessarily be considered a political system theorist once declared that freedom and democracy are incompatible. This may or may not be true, and for those pushing for democracy, maybe freedom is a non-issue from the start, but I think it needs to be at least considered whenever pushes for "moar democracy" come around.
Thats why I said "kind of". Real direct democracy should have those 3 fatures:
-mandatory referendum each year (question added to referendum once enough votes have been gathered) - anyone avoiding taking a vote is fined.
-3 answers under each question - Yes, No and Not Voting (so people wont just cast votes for subjects they are not interested in)
-2/3rds votes needed to pass the vote (to avoid 51% vs 49% - votes that count are only yes or no votes, "Not Voting" is not included)
-Then once the system matures proper democracy should have vote strength system - lets say 3 stages. 1st stage gets 1 vote, 3rd stage gets 3 votes. Higher stage = less taxes and more votes. You work + do some community voluntary work + have no issues with criminal law = you are 3rd stage.
Hmm. Interesting. Democracy, but with something like super-majority rules.
I'd like to see a feature that allowed cooler heads to prevail over time (like the US Senate was originally designed for). How would you keep the passions of the moment from being inflamed enough to blow by your almost super-majority rules?
In the US, you'd have problems getting your stage concept past "disparate impact" studies, but since we're speaking in hypotheticals anyway - this seems very Jeffersonian. How do you get something like this past the people who would cry (rightly or not) that your stage-3 continues to favor the historically privileged?
Any citizen of 18 years or older who works, do community work and avoid criminal charges would be stage 3. If someone cant pass those 3 rules, then what value he will bring to society anyways? His vote should be penalized. Dont get me wrong, its not to favorite good people, its to penalize people that cant do good to society. Vote strength should be based on your involvement in society and helping the community. Alcoholic bum should not have same amount of voting power as doctor. Yet, system would not discriminate poor people, since the rules are easy to follow. Rich people as part of their community work could speak at schools, drivers help people pass driving tests and unskilled workers clean woods from wild dumping places. Simple system that would allow lower taxes since the government would need less resources for public work done.
I would see many people avoiding doing the 40 hours of mandatory public work per year, so that would release them from being strong majority and their passion/patriotism would be graded this way.
Singapore is a oligarchic dictatorship and so corruption is somewhat irrelevant there. You have the most important institutions controlled by the Lee family, who's cult of personality remains unquestioned by those in outside Singapore, I mean did Lee Hsien Loong really deserve to be senior wrangler at Cambridge or is that just PR?
Yes, public sector competence is very high but that's not exactly difficult in an authoritarian and highly educated city state.
I'm sure there's a lot wrong with Singapore but the closest countries with comparable quality of government are Australia and Taiwan or Japan.
If the Lee family have a cult of personality it's invisible to tourists too. And Cambridge didn't even put the thumb on the scales to let in the current generation of the royal family, you really think they care about the Lees?
Of course a top University in the UK cares about the Lees. If you were like Lee Hsien Loong and nearly guaranteed to be a next generation political leader, any sane self-interested educational institution would give you preference.
Universities do this all the time, accepting children of foreign oligarchs who have CVs and test results padded with dubious measures. Why do you think the LSE brushed under the table Saif Gaddafi's ghostwritten doctorate? (a) because they didn't notice, or (b) the network effect of having the presumed (at that time) next dictator of Libya?
Cambridge never needed to put the thumbs on the scale for the current generation of the UK Royal Family because they never applied.
Lee Hsien Loong's story just seems like a propaganda story tailored for the perfect Singaporean technocrat (clever, driven, and can fit himself into any institution). While he's no idiot, his life could have been dreamed up by the North Koreans, a meteoric career in the army, receiving the title 'Chief Wrangler' at Cambridge. It sounds like propaganda.
Not that I disagree entirely however if Singapore is an oligarchic dictatorship then most democracies are. This includes UK & USA which we are discussing here.
Regardless Singapore has very low levels of corruption from what I have seen and experienced.
not at all true. Singapore is known for having draconian laws (such as no gum chewing) and it's government is high corrupted oligarchy. I've read about the previous leader Lee Kew that ruled with a iron first and died recently . He was the one that revitalized Singapore in the late 1970s to where it is today and its rampant corruption was an effect of his harsh rule and greed
You have read, I have experienced. Lee Kuan Yew was extremely anti-corruption and his actions back this up. When the CIA tried bribe him with $3.3m (about $25+m in todays cash) he turned it down. The guy was a master strategist and made it work for Singapore anyhow. You can read about it here: http://singapore.coconuts.co/2015/03/24/lee-kuan-yew-once-un...
...or if you are interested just google it and read about it somewhere else.
If Singapore were corrupt it would be more like Malaysia (it used to be a part of Malaysia). Instead Singapore is an economic miracle surrounded by hostile countries. The anti-corruption culture Lee Kuan Yew developed permeates every layer of society here. Try bribe a Singaporean cop and see how far you get. My brother-in-law works for the Land Transport Authority. He will not discuss the details of any up-coming projects with anyone, not even close family members, for fear that word will get out and speculators will take advantage.
Finally if you think the chewing gum law is draconian I can't really help you. It is completely inconsequential and I say that as someone who likes to chew gum. More worrying are the corporal punishment laws, lack of press freedom and civil rights violations (gays sex is still illegal for example) however 2 of 3 of these problems also exist in the USA today and 1 in the UK.
How so? Singapore has open and free elections. Anyone can run, it's just that the PAP, for all their flaws, do such a good job that there is no reason to vote them out. This is a reflection of the low corruption environment.
Or, lest we forget PRI, it is a sign of insanely high corruption. (Not saying it's the case in Singapore, just pointing out that a one party system doesn't necessarily point towards low corruption).
There's other possibilities (low press freedom, etc).
Exactly. Blair. Alistair Darling now on a major US bank.
The UK establishment have perfected the art of making the immoral legal. They are patient and wait for their reward.
Let's have another enquiry into it all! A "thorough" one that takes 5 years and costs millions only to find "systemic" issues with no individuals to blame.
There's nothing new about this, and nothing unique to the UK. Rich and powerful people tend to use their wealth and power to protect their wealth and power. And London has a lot of people with a lot of wealth and power.
The banking system is where most of the world's wealth resides, and since the London banking system dominates most of the global financial system, a lot of dodgy dealings happen in London. If you move it to the jungles of deepest darkest Peru, then the deepest darkest jungles of Peru will become corrupt.
I'm as disappointed as anyone about the cesspool of immorality that is modern finance, but David Cameron passing a few laws or conducting some kind of investigation is not going to change human nature. These are essentially the same problems that the Ancient Romans and Greeks complained about.
I dislike this kind of argument. Sometimes you see it trotted out regarding crime, and that it's impossible to e.g. stop people killing or burgling or thieving in general.
Except - we're doing a pretty good job of reducing such crimes.
It's easy to write off pretty much well any undesirable action as being "human nature" and I implore you to reconsider.
> David Cameron passing a few laws or conducting some kind of investigation is not going to change human nature
I agree that change is possible, but it's not going to come from the top. We the people need to push for that kind of change, but half the population is too busy repeating the establishment's line that "it's all the fault of immigrants".
I agree that it's nothing new in a general sense, but the reason this is catching people's attention is because there is this lingering perception that there is less corruption in the UK (and in western Europe, in general) than in other places.
The corruption is of a different nature. It's difficult to compare the corruption of, say, Kim Jong Un with that of David Cameron. In North Korea, the corruption is explicit and the proceeds benefit a small group of people. In the UK, it's systemic and hard to identify who's actually doing the corruption, and who benefits, and how.
It's even harder to identify how to fix it. In North Korea, we could just say "wipe out the leaders and it will fix the problem". In the rich world, the cronies don't belong to any one family, country, or business. It's an international aristocracy consisting of 1000s of people.
> or why so many long-term viable agencies of government (the Post Office, the Land Registry, the National Air Traffic Control System, the NHS ...) find themselves in need of privatization in the name of "efficiency"
A few articles in The Guardian recently on neoliberalism: First, from Goerge Monbiot's book, "Neoliberalism – the ideology at the root of all our problems"
Is that also evidence that companies hope they will be able to influence government by having an "insider" on their team? And they can show their investors that they have someone on the inside as well? Even if that individual is completely unable to in fact influence policy.
Every time i read news about corruption i check if Italy is being mentioned. This is how i found your comment. This is how i decided to reply that yeah in Italy corruption is a second state (voluntarily lowercase).
Hint: corruption isn't just about simple bribery and envelopes full of banknotes passing hand. Ask yourself why so many cabinet ministers retire and end up on the boards of large conglomerates that specialise in bidding for government outsourcing contracts, or why so many long-term viable agencies of government (the Post Office, the Land Registry, the National Air Traffic Control System, the NHS ...) find themselves in need of privatization in the name of "efficiency". You can make any agency -- however potentially profitable -- fail if you run it into the ground through deliberate mismanagement, then show a rebound improvement when you sell it (or the service it provides) off to your golf-course cronies. And when you roll up to the banquet later, there's no evidential chain that can prove beyond reasonable doubt that what you did was grand theft.