Impunity is the handmaiden of corruption — even in Britain 

People recognise corruption when they see it, though they would find it hard to define. The misuse of public power for private benefit is a concise definition used by the Berlin-based Transparency International, a not-for-profit authority whose Corruption Perception Index scores and ranks corruption by country across the globe. Transparency International points to poorly regulated financing of political parties as the source of the trouble. But political bribery, bungs, “buying influence” to use Tony Blair’s words, are all part of a wider story. In societies ranked as the worst at the bottom of the table, corruption is endemic reaching beyond the political into business and into access to public services bringing misery to those too poor to bribe. In many countries, like Nigeria, it is a longstanding feature of the political and economic culture. You wonder when and how it started and became so pervasive.

Forty-five years ago in Nigeria I received my first, and last, bribe – more of a sweetener really, on the campus of Ahmadu Bello University, situated in the North. One evening just before the final exams there was an unexpected knock on the door. It was Mr Chukwuma Onyeme (name changed) a mature Ibo student of mine from the South who had once whispered to me “we foreigners must stick together” – it was not long after the Biafran war of secession. Mr Onyeme, father of seven children, was bearing a six-pack of Nigerian Guinness as a gift. I graciously accepted.

This transaction could be construed as a bribe. Mr Onyeme had struggled with the course and I expected him, at best, to get a borderline pass. He probably expected the same. But the six-pack was a bad choice. Nigerian Guinness tasted sweetish to me and looked like brown Windsor soup. I would go to considerable lengths to avoid it. In any case, the examination board awarded Mr Onyeme his degree without my help. His school-teacher salary would rise. The school fees of his children would be paid. In the round a good result, but giving sight of the tip of an iceberg that sank a country’s development despite, or possibly because of, its oil wealth.

Several years’ experience of corruption in Nigeria now prompts the question whether Britain, twelfth from the virtuous top in the Transparency Corruption Index, but dropping points in the last three years, might be too complacent about risking its reputation for probity. In a predominantly service economy respected for its diplomatic, legal, educational and financial services, probity matters. The behaviour of government has consequences and can destroy a country’s international reputation remarkably quickly.

Take as an example our Housing, Communities and Local Government Secretary, Robert Jenrick, and the recent saga of Richard Desmond’s £1 billion property development at Westferry Printworks, challenged by the council in London’s Tower Hamlets. To avoid the council’s £45 million community benefit levy – for health and education – the minister, lobbied by Desmond at a Conservative Party fundraising dinner, needed to approve the project before 15 January 2020. On 14 January, overruling his own civil servants and inspectorate, Robert Jenrick granted this permission. Two weeks later Desmond donated the very modest sum of £12,000 to the Conservative Party. In proportion to his gain it was the equivalent of a six-pack of Guinness. Knowing that he had been lobbied, the minister should have recused himself. When the story broke in June, Jenrick was obliged to reverse his approval because, in his own words, it looked “unlawful by reason of apparent bias”. He was not sacked, nor does he shun the glare of publicity. On the contrary he comes in third or fourth in the batting (read obfuscating) order of ministers led by Michael Gove on the BBC4 flagship Today programme. 

The question whether such behaviour, and tolerance of such behaviour, heralds a general onset of corruption in government became particularly pressing in March and April when, during the first wave of the Covid pandemic, there were shortages of PPE for frontline medical staff. While several European countries began to initiate PPE procurement procedures in late January 2020, it was a month before the British government, in panic mode, set to. Tendering, following the normal rules for getting good value for public money, went out the window and, according to the Treasury, £15 billion was – wastefully – spent on supplying PPE to retrieve the situation. A special pathway was set up for Cabinet Office and VIP contacts – read friends and associates of Tory peers, MPs and councillors – to submit proposals for multi-million contracts. The Good Law Project, a not-for-profit membership organisation that uses the law to protect the interests of the public, is seeking a judicial review and litigation in the absence of any official enquiry into negligence or corruption. It cites that three of the biggest PPE contracts awarded were to a pest-control company, wholesale confectionary company and a private fund operating out of a tax haven.

Prodigious public spending provides governments with enhanced opportunities to benefit their friends and supporters. Alongside the pressures created by government indecision, the ideological drive to outsource responses to the Covid crisis when there were already competent local public authorities available, opened up another door to the Tory “chumocracy”. 

Isn’t it problematic that an individual can move seamlessly from a key position in a huge company such as SERCO (which runs, among other things, private prisons) via the Department of Justice to become a Minister of State for Health — whereupon SERCO is given a whopping Track and Trace contract? Step forward Edward Argar MP. Aren’t the perennial Tory fundraisers, private dinners, sustaining a host of questionable relationships and creating potential conflicts of interest, the intricate foreplay to potential corruption? And what does it say about our society when consultants to SERCO’s Track and Trace, drawn from the corporates, are paid up to £7,000 of public money a day, while newly qualified nurses start risking their lives in the NHS on £23,000 a year. How long can our public services survive such dystopian priorities?

From his days as Mayor of London, Boris Johnson’s approach to conflict of interest has been shown to be, shall we say, casual. Impunity is the handmaid of corruption. But when it comes to his supine coterie, Johnson doesn’t do resignations or sackings, and unlike Mrs Thatcher, doesn’t do God. “Freedom will destroy itself if it is not exercised within some sort of moral framework, some body of shared beliefs, some spiritual heritage”, she told the congregation of St Lawrence Jewry in March 1978. That’s a warning the libertarian Tory back benches might heed. When breaching international law and treaty becomes part of our negotiating toolkit, you wonder in what sense the Prime Minister is still leading a Conservative Party defending conservative values. 

We have too long been watching the misuse of public power with its predictable reputational consequences. It is misplaced complacency to believe we are not wandering down the road to corrupt government.

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