Six Issues in Indian History Writing

 

When Your Capitalist Economy Fails, Blame the Foreigners!

In Brexit Britain, being a foreigner marks me out as evil

Joris Luyendijk in The Guardian

I realised it only after having done it. On Tuesday I was watching my kids playing with other children in a London park. I was about to call out to them when I intuitively caught myself. Having lived here for most of their life, my children speak flawless English. I, however, have a clear Dutch accent. Yelling to them would suddenly single them out as foreigners to the other children. Only six months ago none of this would have occurred to me. Now I find myself lowering my voice.

Something is rotting in England and the Brexit referendum result seems to have given the rot a boost of oxygen. The problem is not that a majority of English people or their government are racist or xenophobic; they are not. The problem is that those English people who are racist seem to think they have won the Brexit referendum and that now is open season. The government is doing precious little to counter this impression, while the powerful tabloids are feeding it, day in day out.

Yesterday’s Daily Mail splash was a new low. Featuring nine small photos of lorry drivers on their phones, the tabloid claims to have caught “17 foreign truckers using their phones at 50mph”. The key word here of course is “foreign”, establishing an unconscious link in people’s minds between “foreign” and evil. The Daily Mail has been at this for a long time, with my personal “favourite” its front page about “EU killers and rapists we’ve failed to deport”.

Recent research suggests that humans are predisposed to “learn” negative stereotypes. Our brains are more likely to remember negative information than positive information, especially about groups of whom we already hold negative views. Such a harmful cognitive feedback loop would call for extra caution when reporting, making sure ethnicity or religion is included only when relevant to the story. “Foreign lorry drivers using their phones while driving” does not pass that test, unless you believe English drivers never use their phones on the road.

LSE foreign academics told they will not be asked to advise UK on Brexit



“Foreigner”. When I came to live here five years ago that word felt so different from how it does today. Britain was the country that would give the governorship of the Bank of England to a Canadian – try to imagine Germany making a non-German head of the Bundesbank. London’s financial sector, where I had come to do research, was teeming with European immigrants telling me that it was in the City that for the first time ever they no longer felt like a foreigner. “It’s like they don’t see my skin colour,” a French-Algerian, Turkish-German or Surinamese-Dutch banker would say with genuine emotion. “It’s all about what you can do here, not how you look or where you are from.”

Fast forward a few years and a woman of Polish origin goes on BBC Question Time to say she no longer feels welcome in Britain. The audience boos her, proving her point better than she ever could. This is now a country where a minister calls for firms to publish lists with the “foreign” workers they employ, and where another government ministry tells the London School of Economics to no longer put forward any of its “foreign” academics for consultancy work on Brexit. Those two statements were rescinded, but the same is not true of another, made by a minister who described UK-based EU nationals such as me as among Britain’s most valuable bargaining chips in Brussels.

Meanwhile, the Daily Express and the Daily Mail seem to compete for the most outrageous incitement against migrants, refugees, “foreigners”. Indeed, in some quarters of England today, calling somebody “foreign” is enough to win the argument. The European court of justice? The European court of human rights? Well, they are staffed by foreign judges, so case closed.

Liam Fox: EU nationals in UK one of 'main cards' in Brexit negotiations



It is strange how these things get under your skin, when you realise that for millions of tabloid readers you are a “foreigner” rather than a fellow European. It suddenly feels significant that in the English language “foreigner” and “alien” are synonyms. When I have to fill out a form for the NHS, having to choose between “British white” and “Any other white” no longer looks so innocent; the same with schools having to report their pupils’ racial and ethnic backgrounds.

When I now see somebody reading the Daily Mail I can’t help thinking: why would you pay money to read invented horror stories about people like me? I am a supremely privileged middle-class Dutchman who can always return to his homeland – an even more prosperous place than England. But what must it be like for a 13-year-old UK-born girl of Kosovan descent growing up in Sunderland?

Usually a piece like this concludes with a sanctimonious warning of what history tells us xenophobic incitement ultimately leads to. But we are well past that. Jo Cox is dead. Hate crime figures have soared. Some people simply seem to have taken the Daily Mail at its word: our country is flooded by evil foreigners. The politicians are in cahoots with them. Who will speak for England?

Don’t blame foreign investors – the roots of the housing crisis lie closer to home

David Madden in The Guardian

In a city where super-prime properties and tenant evictions are both on the rise, the housing system is broken and many residents are looking for someone to blame. For Londoners, rent consumes nearly two-thirds of the typical tenant’s income, and it will take 46 years for the average single person to save for a deposit on their first home. With overseas buyers acquiring as much as three-quarters of all new-build housing in London in recent years, it is understandable that foreigners would be cast as the villains behind the housing crisis. As a result, the London mayor Sadiq Khan last week launched an inquiry into foreign investment in the city’s housing market.

Londoners are not alone in questioning the impact of global investors in local housing markets. The issue is being politicised in cities throughout the world. In Vancouver, Canada, where single-family homes cost around 21 times the region’s median income, the city introduced a 15% tax on non-resident foreign property owners this August. Australian states that encompass Sydney, Melbourne, and other cities have also introduced or raised taxes on house purchases by foreigners.

It’s important to understand how overseas investment shapes residential opportunities and neighbourhood life. Khan is right to draw attention to the ways that housing in London is intertwined with global financial flows.

But foreign ownership is only part of a complex story – one that involves many actors and institutions located much closer to home. Searching for meddling non-natives to blame is ultimately a distraction. The idea that the housing crisis can be pinned on foreigners is a politically convenient simplification that risks letting other culprits off the hook, while doing little to change the status quo.

Focusing on overseas investors allows British policymakers to obscure their own role in producing the housing crisis. Over the decades, politicians at all levels of government have played an active part in creating this situation. Ministers promoted market-centric reforms such as the right to buy and more flexible tenancies, welcomed institutional investors into the housing market, and pushed through budget cuts in the name of austerity. These changes undermined council housing and weakened tenants’ security while making housing a more liquid commodity. Councillors across greater London have given the green light to estate demolition and gentrification, and allowed developers to build expensive new projects without significant numbers of affordable housing units.

Without these actions, we wouldn’t even be talking about Russian or Chinese investors. National and local political elites in Canada, Australia, the US, and elsewhere likewise bear responsibility for promoting the financialisation of housing.


Pointing at foreigners is a way to pretend to address the housing problem while ignoring the demands of activists

Blaming overseas investors similarly ignores domestic ones. Foreign owners may be particularly disconnected from local knowledge and conditions, but if they were simply replaced by their native counterparts who pursue the same strategies, the housing crisis would remain.

Pointing the finger at foreigners is also a way to pretend to address the housing problem while ignoring the demands of activists. The movements that have been mobilising in opposition to developers, councils and national government are fighting against displacement and in favour of establishing housing as a universal right. Whether exploitative landlords and serial collectors of luxury flats are British or foreign is beside the point. No housing activist has ever carried a sign demanding “British mansions for British oligarchs.”

None of this is to say that foreign ownership doesn’t matter. But the real issue is the political-economic condition that makes it possible: the commodification of housing. This term describes the process by which housing comes increasingly to function as a financial instrument rather than as shelter. Foreign ownership only matters because it is fuelling this broader process.

Rather than lashing out at foreigners, who are an easy target, city-dwellers and politicians such as Sadiq Khan need to ask tougher questions. Whose interests are served by urban regeneration in its current form? Why are collective resources such as public housing being dismantled and sold off? What alternatives to deepening housing inequalities are possible?

Why we prefer our immigrants to be invisible

The treatment of cleaners at the University of London highlights our shameful treatment of immigrants

• 
• • Nick Cohen
  • The Observer, Saturday 21 June 2014 18.05 BST

Independent Workers of Great Britain pickets outside the University of London Commonwealth Hall. Photograph: Peter Marshall/Demotix/Corbis

The story of the University of London's cleaners ought to be a modern Made in Dagenham. Immigrant women were scraping a living on a poverty wage from an employer who wanted them to clean up other people's mess and get out of sight when they'd finished. They fought back and, in a rare uplifting moment in these dismal times, won. They forced the university to raise their pay from £6.15 to £8.80 an hour and give them decent holidays and sickness leave.

But no one will make a film about the university cleaners because it lacks the prime ingredient for a feelgood story: a happy ending. Instead, their experience tells a more hypocritical tale about the British attitude to immigrants. Public opinion is set against them. But for all the outrage, Britain still wants foreigners' money, and employers and the middle and upper classes still want foreigners' labour – as long as it is cheap and as long as the workers do as they are told and do not make a fuss.

In 2011, no one noticed the University of London's Latin American cleaners. They travelled on the early-morning buses or trains, when most of London was still in bed, and spent their days doing shifts for two or three different employers. To the academics and students they served they were next to invisible: seen but not noticed; essential but neglected. On the surface, the cleaners, porters, caterers and other contract workers must have looked easy to intimidate. I met Sonia Chura, their leader, and two of her comrades last week. They were all barely five feet tall and couldn't speak English. They were in a strange land that cared nothing for them. "What can they do to us?" their masters must have thought.

As it turned out, they could organise an unofficial strike, get back pay they were owed, attract the attention of the radical press and go on to win better pay and terms and conditions. Their achievement is all the more remarkable because their own union, Unison, did not support them.

Anyone who hopes for a stronger labour movement knows that trade unions must start recruiting the cleaners, shop workers, security guards, carers, maids, nannies and cooks who make up the new working class. By necessity, they must appeal to women and tackle the admittedly formidable task of organising new immigrants. Yet Unison turned on the cleaners.

It found technicalities that allowed it to declare an election in which immigrants ran for union positions invalid. When cleaners protested outside Unison headquarters, its officials locked the doors and called the police. If you want to understand why the British trade union movement is dying faster than grass in a heat wave, the vignette of Unison demanding that the cops control its members tells you all you need to know.

The cleaners did not give up. They joined and helped develop a tiny new union – theIndependent Workers of Great Britain. It is run by Jason Moyer-Lee, another figure who might have stepped out of an inspirational film. He was an American graduate student in London who was appalled by the way employers treated foreign workers and devoted his time to helping them, first in Unison and then in the new union

Now he must help save their jobs. The halls of residence the women cleaned will be closed. The contractors refused to say if they would move the activists to new work. Nor would the University of London, the umbrella body that comprises the London School of Economics, University College London and many another fine liberal institution. I asked its spokesman if the university would guarantee that the women would not be punished for asking for £8.80 an hour. That was a matter for the contractors, he replied. I pointed out that the university paid the contractors. If it said they must keep the activists, the contractors would obey.

"Of course," he said in a sing-song voice, "we absolutely believe in workers' right to peacefully protest." He made the University of London sound like a noble place, while avoiding a promise to ensure that the women were kept on. I later found he had dodged the question for a good reason. As the wretched man was speaking to me, the contractors were telling the activists that not one woman who organised a protest would get a permanent job. I hope they drag them and the university through every employment tribunal they can find.

But even if they lose a tribunal case, the Home Office will not be able to drive them out of Britain. Like so many of the Latin Americans here, they originally moved to Spain. The Spaniards gave them citizenship that allows them to work in any European country. They fled north to avoid the depression the euro crisis brought. As long as Britain stays in the EU, they are safe. They will find other work, too, if they abandon any thought of campaigning for decent treatment. Employers want compliant labour, whether immigrant or native. As immigrants are the easiest to exploit, they will always be popular

It is a nice coincidence that their struggle is taking place in a university. Foreign students are in the opposite position to contract workers. They have money; cleaners do not. Britain wants their cash, but it also wants to get rid of them as quickly as possible. Universities depend on foreigners to subsidise British students – nearly 20% of the output generated by universities comes from non-EU students. Theresa May, however, has driven down the immigration figures by ending the old system that allowed foreign students to pay off debts by working for two years in any job they could find after graduating. The number of foreign students keeping the academic "business" rolling in grew at 5% a year in the last decade but is falling now. I wouldn't be surprised if it fell much further. "We want your money, but we don't want you," isn't the most enticing sales pitch.

The richer parts of London have become creepy places. The streets are deserted and the houses dark. Foreign oligarchs have bought up homes as an investment, thus fuelling the Osborne housing bubble, which provides us with what growth we have, but they don't live in them. What a metaphor for how Cameron's Britain wants its immigrants. If they are poor, it wants them to be invisible, flitting uncomplainingly from one menial job to the next. If they are rich, it wants them to hand over their money and leave. Either way, it doesn't want to see them.

Alastair Campbell's attack on the Mail was terrifying – and brilliant

Why is the left obsessed by the Daily Mail?

The Guardian has published an extensive critique of the Daily Mail and its reporting of Labour, press regulation and the Snowden leaks. We invited Mail readers to join in that debate. Paul Dacre, editor-in-chief, asked for the opportunity to comment. Here is his contribution

• 
• • Paul Dacre
  • The Guardian, Saturday 12 October 2013

Paul Dacre: 'Our crime is that the Mail constantly dares to stand up to the liberal-left consensus that dominates so many areas of British life.' Montage: Guardian

Out in the real world, it was a pretty serious week for news. The US was on the brink of budget default, a British court heard how for two years social workers failed to detect the mummified body of a four-year-old starved to death by his mother, and it was claimed that the then Labour health secretary had covered up unnecessary deaths in a NHS hospital six months before the election.

In contrast, the phoney world of Twitter, the London chatterati and left-wing media was gripped 10 days ago by collective hysteria as it became obsessed round-the-clock by one story – a five-word headline on page 16 in the Daily Mail.

The screech of axe-grinding was deafening as the paper's enemies gleefully leapt to settle scores.

Leading the charge, inevitably, was the Mail's bête noir, the BBC. Fair-minded readers will decide themselves whether the hundreds of hours of airtime it devoted to that headline reveal a disturbing lack of journalistic proportionality and impartiality – but certainly the one-sided tone in their reporting allowed Labour to misrepresent Geoffrey Levy's article on Ralph Miliband.

The genesis of that piece lay in Ed Miliband's conference speech. The Mail was deeply concerned that in 2013, after all the failures of socialism in the twentieth century, the leader of the Labour party was announcing its return, complete with land seizures and price fixing.

Surely, we reasoned, the public had the right to know what influence the Labour leader's Marxist father, to whom he constantly referred in his speeches, had on his thinking.

So it was that Levy's article examined the views held by Miliband senior over his lifetime, not just as a 17-year-old youth as has been alleged by our critics.

The picture that emerged was of a man who gave unqualified support to Russian totalitarianism until the mid-50s, who loathed the market economy, was in favour of a workers' revolution, denigrated British traditions and institutions such as the royal family, the church and the army and was overtly dismissive of western democracy.

Levy's article argued that the Marxism that inspired Ralph Miliband had provided the philosophical underpinning of one of history's most appalling regimes – a regime, incidentally, that totally crushed freedom of expression.

Nowhere did the Mail suggest that Ralph Miliband was evil – only that the political beliefs he espoused had resulted in evil. As for the headline "The Man Who Hated Britain", our point was simply this: Ralph Miliband was, as a Marxist, committed to smashing the institutions that make Britain distinctively British – and, with them, the liberties and democracy those institutions have fostered.

Yes, the Mail is happy to accept that in his personal life, Ralph Miliband was, as described by his son, a decent and kindly man – although we won't withdraw our view that he supported an ideology that caused untold misery in the world.

Yes, we accept that he cherished this country's traditions of tolerance and freedom – while, in a troubling paradox typical of the left, detesting the very institutions and political system that made those traditions possible.

And yes, the headline was controversial – but popular newspapers have a long tradition of using provocative headlines to grab readers' attention. In isolation that headline may indeed seem over the top, but read in conjunction with the article we believed it was justifiable.

Despite this we acceded to Mr Miliband's demand – and by golly, he did demand – that we publish his 1,000-word article defending his father.

So it was that, in a virtually unprecedented move, we published his words at the top of our op ed pages. They were accompanied by an abridged version of the original Levy article and a leader explaining why the Mail wasn't apologising for the points it made.

The hysteria that followed is symptomatic of the post-Leveson age in which any newspaper which dares to take on the left in the interests of its readers risks being howled down by the Twitter mob who the BBC absurdly thinks represent the views of real Britain.

As the week progressed and the hysteria increased, it became clear that this was no longer a story about an article on Mr Miliband's Marxist father but a full-scale war by the BBC and the left against the paper that is their most vocal critic.

Orchestrating this bile was an ever more rabid Alastair Campbell. Again, fair-minded readers will wonder why a man who helped drive Dr David Kelly to his death, was behind the dodgy Iraq war dossier and has done more to poison the well of public discourse than anyone in Britain is given so much air-time by the BBC.

But the BBC's blood lust was certainly up. Impartiality flew out of the window. Ancient feuds were settled. Not to put too fine a point on things, we were right royally turned over.

Fair enough, if you dish it out, you take it. But my worry is that there was a more disturbing agenda to last week's events.

Mr Miliband, of course, exults in being the man who destroyed Murdoch in this country. Is it fanciful to believe that his real purpose in triggering last week's row – so assiduously supported by the liberal media which sneers at the popular press – was an attempt to neutralise Associated, the Mail's publishers and one of Britain's most robustly independent and successful newspaper groups.

Let it be said loud and clear that the Mail, unlike News International, did NOT hack people's phones or pay the police for stories. I have sworn that on oath.

No, our crime is more heinous than that.

It is that the Mail constantly dares to stand up to the liberal-left consensus that dominates so many areas of British life and instead represents the views of the ordinary people who are our readers and who don't have a voice in today's political landscape and are too often ignored by today's ruling elite.

The metropolitan classes, of course, despise our readers with their dreams (mostly unfulfilled) of a decent education and health service they can trust, their belief in the family, patriotism, self-reliance, and their over-riding suspicion of the state and the People Who Know Best.

These people mock our readers' scepticism over the European Union and a human rights court that seems to care more about the criminal than the victim. They scoff at our readers who, while tolerant, fret that the country's schools and hospitals can't cope with mass immigration.

In other words, these people sneer at the decent working Britons – I'd argue they are the backbone of this country – they constantly profess to be concerned about.

The truth is that there is an unpleasant intellectual snobbery about the Mail in leftish circles, for whom the word 'suburban' is an obscenity. They simply cannot comprehend how a paper that opposes the mindset they hold dear can be so successful and so loved by its millions of readers.

Well, I'm proud that the Mail stands up for those readers.

I am proud that our Dignity For The Elderly Campaign has for years stood up for Britain's most neglected community. Proud that we have fought for justice for Stephen Lawrence, Gary McKinnon and the relatives of the victims of the Omagh bombing, for those who have seen loved ones suffer because of MRSA and the Liverpool Care Pathway. I am proud that we have led great popular campaigns for the NSPCC and Alzheimer's Society on the dangers of paedophilia and the agonies of dementia. And I'm proud of our war against round-the-clock drinking, casinos, plastic bags, internet pornography and secret courts.

No other newspaper campaigns as vigorously as the Mail and I am proud of the ability of the paper's 400 journalists (the BBC has 8,000) to continually set the national agenda on a whole host of issues.

I am proud that for years, while most of Fleet Street were in thrall to it, the Mail was the only paper to stand up to the malign propaganda machine of Tony Blair and his appalling henchman, Campbell (and, my goodness, it's been payback time over the past week!).

Could all these factors also be behind the left's tsunami of opprobrium against the Mail last week? I don't know but I do know that for a party mired in the corruption exposed by Damian McBride's book (in which Ed Miliband was a central player) to call for a review of the Mail's practices and culture is beyond satire.

Certainly, the Mail will not be silenced by a Labour party that has covered up unnecessary, and often horrific, deaths in NHS hospitals, and suggests instead that it should start looking urgently at its own culture and practices.

Some have argued that last week's brouhaha shows the need for statutory press regulation. I would argue the opposite. The febrile heat, hatred, irrationality and prejudice provoked by last week's row reveals why politicians must not be allowed anywhere near press regulation.

And while the Mail does not agree with the Guardian over the stolen secret security files it published, I suggest that we can agree that the fury and recrimination the story is provoking reveals again why those who rule us – and who should be held to account by newspapers – cannot be allowed to sit in judgment on the press.

That is why the left should be very careful about what it wishes for – especially in the light of this week's rejection by the politicians of the newspaper industry's charter for robust independent self-regulation.

The BBC is controlled, through the licence fee, by the politicians. ITV has to answer to Ofcom, a government quango. Newspapers are the only mass media left in Britain free from the control of the state.

The Mail has recognised the hurt Mr Miliband felt over our attack on his father's beliefs. We were happy to give him considerable space to describe how his father had fought for Britain (though a man who so smoothly diddled his brother risks laying himself open to charges of cynicism if he makes too much of a fanfare over familial loyalties).

For the record, the Mail received a mere two letters of complaint before Mr Miliband's intervention and only a few hundred letters and emails since – many in support. A weekend demonstration against the paper attracted just 110 people.

It seems that in the real world people – most of all our readers – were far more supportive of us than the chatterati would have you believe.

PS – this week the head of MI5 – subsequently backed by the PM, the deputy PM, the home secretary and Labour's elder statesman Jack Straw – effectively accused the Guardian of aiding terrorism by publishing stolen secret security files. The story – which is of huge significance – was given scant coverage by a BBC which only a week ago had devoted days of wall-to-wall pejorative coverage to the Mail. Again, I ask fair readers, what is worse: to criticise the views of a Marxist thinker, whose ideology is anathema to most and who had huge influence on the man who could one day control our security forces … or to put British lives at risk by helping terrorists?

-------

Alastair Campbell's attack on the Mail was terrifying – and brilliant

Campbell's bravura performance took on the Mail's venomous world view, which is that, as an immigrant, you are only ever tolerated

• 
• • Alex Andreou
  • theguardian.com, Wednesday 2 October 2013 13.03 BST

So, to recap the effects of that Daily Mail article on Ralph Miliband: It robbed the Conservative party conference of the headlines it expected – it was ahead of any of their policy announcements all yesterday in most news bulletins, across most channels. It reinforced Ed Miliband's image, for the second week running, as someone of integrity who stands up to bullies. It secured him sympathy and support from most political opponents. It caused a social media reaction which refreshed everyone's memory about the Daily Mail's historical links with Mosley and Hitler. It even managed to revive interest in the Leveson inquiry's recommendations. All in all, it was the journalistic equivalent of a glorious Stan Laurel pratfall.

It also marked the moment when Alastair Campbell singled himself out as the natural successor to Jeremy Paxman. You know, the Paxman of old, when it was his line of questioning which caused a stir, rather than the configuration of his facial fuzz. It was all at once both refreshing to see someone properly "grilled" on Newsnight for the first time in months, and depressing that it had to be by another guest.

It was also, personally, a rather odd moment to find oneself rooting for Alastair Campbell. You got a glimpse of how utterly terrifying he must have been to deal with, when he was Blair's press pointman. How overwhelming and irresistible. A glimpse of how his ability to grind down anyone expressing a contrary view may have contributed to both the success and the hubris of the Labour party at that time. At the same time, as someone hoping that Cameron will be relegated to oblivion at the next election, I had to admit: if I could employ him to help bring that about, I would have to consider it. I may not like him, but – boy – is he good at his job!

Within 10 minutes, he got further than all the other television news political editors and correspondents put together did over 24 hours. He secured an admission from the Mail's deputy editor, Jon Steafel, that, at the very least, using a photograph of Ralph Miliband's grave was an "error". He succeeded in exposing internal rifts within the Daily Mail, by outlining the areas where even Paul Dacre's deputy refused to support him. The coup de grace was the phrase "the Daily Mail is the worst of British values, posing as the best". I suspect it will follow the Mail for many years to come. It was a bravura performance.

He even got close to unpacking the wider point. How is it that one can extrapolate hatred of Britain from criticism of its institutions? It seems that sections of the press (and, I'm sure, the public) are never far from the McCarthyist view, that wanting to change the way the state works makes one an enemy of the state. But there is a further point bubbling under the surface. Implicit in the Daily Mail's venom is the idea that being republican (in the wider, rather than US, sense), being suspicious of organised religion, being a pacifist or a socialist – all these things, which are upsetting to the Mail and its readership – become a cardinal sin if you are also a foreigner.

As a foreigner with strong opinions, I have come across this hundreds of times, in various permutations. As an immigrant one has no right to criticise any aspect of the UK. Regardless of how long one has been here, regardless of the validity of one's opinion, regardless, even, it seems, of serving in the military during a war, the immigrant's stake is limited. He is tolerated, but should watch himself. The invitation can easily be withdrawn. He should be grateful unconditionally. That Daily Mail article is just a longer version of, "If you don't like it here, you can fuck off back to your own country". It is an attitude that is not only still prevalent, but permeates the political rhetoric on Europe, trade, foreign policy and immigration.

It is this snobbery, resistance to new ideas and sense of inflated ego that are truly holding Britain back from being all it can be. It puts me in mind of something the American journalist and essayist Sydney J Harris wrote:

"Patriotism is proud of a country's virtues and eager to correct its deficiencies; it also acknowledges the legitimate patriotism of other countries, with their own specific virtues. The pride of nationalism, however, trumpets its country's virtues and denies its deficiencies, while it is contemptuous toward the virtues of other countries. It wants to be, and proclaims itself to be, 'the greatest', but greatness is not required of a country; only goodness is."

Britain is far more corrupt than we think

Mary Dejevsky in The Independent

Within Britain, there is a widespread view – seriously dented neither by the MPs’ expenses saga nor by the newspaper phone-hacking scandal – that this is not a corrupt country. It might not be quite as squeaky clean as Scandinavia, but it is nothing like – let’s see, who shall we offend? – Italy or Spain. As for Russia or China, well, we can strut the moral high ground – can’t we? – certain of our superiority.

Incorruptibility is part of our national self-image. But we flatter and deceive ourselves. Over the past few weeks, The Independent has exposed private investigators who routinely break the law, digging for dirt on behalf of commercial clients. The techniques – phone hacking and “blagging” – are the same as those for which journalists have been hauled before the courts and pilloried by public opinion.

If there seems to be a slight edge to our reports, how could there not be? On present evidence, law enforcers would appear to take a dimmer view of journalists applying these illegal methods, or buying them in, than it does of business people and lawyers who do the same. That, at least, was the message from the Serious Organised Crime Agency, which initially instructed MPs not to name the companies commissioning such services on the grounds that it could “undermine their financial viability” by “tainting them with… criminality”.  Yesterday, however, there was a change of heart and Soca supplied the Home Affairs Select Committee with a list of a list of 101 names of people and organisations who have hired private investigators. The committee’s chairman, Keith Vaz, is now deciding whether to publish them.

Strictly speaking, blagging – obtaining information by deceit – can succeed without a partner. The offence is all on one side: no money or favour changes hands. But this is not the only way in which information is obtained. As with journalists and the police or others who hold  sensitive information, it is now known that money or favours have changed hands. And in these cases, those who sell are as culpable as those who buy. There has to be a market for the transaction to work.

The sellers might not see themselves as corrupt, merely as individuals exploiting an opportunity, or enjoying a perk of the job. That such practices may not always have been recognised as corrupt does not make them less so. It just means we are more adept than some of our neighbours at not calling things by their proper names. A gift for euphemism is something else that defines our national character.

If journalists and private investigators were the only ones under investigation, and the only commodity changing hands was information, we might just be able to file it away and argue that Britain has a very limited and very specific corruption problem. But this is not true, either.  In banking, we have had the rigging of Libor, the key lending rate, by individual bank employees for personal gain. As corruption goes, this comes close to the top of any list because  greed compromised a major pillar of the financial system – in a global financial centre which was built largely on its word being its bond.

A few steps further down we have claims of corrupt behaviour by British companies abroad. Only last week accusations were made against employees of a British company in China, GlaxoSmithKline. According to the Chinese, other pharmaceutical firms are also in the frame – for allegedly bribing doctors to prescribe their products. It is not, of course, that paying backhanders, or “doing as the natives do”, was unheard of in the operations of UK companies outside Britain. But the Bribery Act of 2010 made it expressly illegal, and it comes to something when it is the Chinese authorities doing the exposing and British companies that find themselves in the dock. The reputational damage flows only one way.

Again, it might be just possible to winkle out a “British” exception and claim that this sort of corruption reflects the malign influence of “foreigners” rather than any home-grown proclivity. But such complacency is challenged by the latest “global corruption barometer” compiled by Transparency International. Published earlier this month, its findings show not only that the perception of corruption in Britain has increased markedly over the past two years – not surprising, giving the prominence of the phone-hacking scandal – but that in the same period one person in 20 claims to have paid a bribe to a public official for services as diverse as health, justice and education.

A first instinct is, naturally, to question these conclusions. A second would be to surmise that those who admitted paying a bribe were at the margins – newcomers, perhaps or illegal migrants. But that would be too easy an escape. As with journalists and police, corruption is a transaction. There must be takers as well as givers. But I find it credible, too, because of a mini-brush of my own. When posted abroad more than 10 years ago, I checked that my husband, if he became non-resident, would have to pay privately for his (expensive) Parkinson’s medicine. The doctor, a locum, said yes, that was so. Then he paused, and – as I read it – implied, no more, that a deal could be struck. I left, but a possibility was there. 

And this is where corruption begins. Not with GSK in China, but with crimes left unpunished, names left unnamed and the prosaic minutiae of daily needs debased. If the Serious Organised Crime Agency is telling MPs – our representatives – what we the public may and may not know for national commercial reasons, the UK is on a slipperly slope indeed.