From the BBC:
Legislation aimed at making it easier to prosecute companies who make corrupt payments abroad has come into force.
The Bribery Act overhauls existing laws dating back to 1889 and creates offences that carry prison terms of up to 10 years and unlimited fines. It makes it illegal to offer or receive bribes and to fail to prevent bribery.
Both British and foreign companies are covered, provided they have some operations in the UK. The act also applies to individuals. The government says the act will cement the UK's position as a global leader in the fight against business corruption.
Ho hum.
Clearly, we ought to make bribery and corruption illegal within the UK, it doesn’t take a forensic accounting degree to know that we are the ones being robbed (i.e. if civil servants enter into contracts on unfavourable terms for the taxpayer), although the UK government is pretty much world champion at this - if politiicians were held up to the same standards, they'd all be behind bars.
As to abroad, it's difficult to approve of bribery, but 'everybody else does it' so if a UK business doesn't get the contract, then somebody else will. Although it's a negative sum game, it's a bit like piracy, which was good for the UK for the simple reason that we were better at it than everybody else.
But think about it - if you are trying to bribe an official, where is it going to be easier - in a democratic country which is financed by taxes, or in a despotic country that is kept afloat with aid payments? The latter, surely, and didn't our government recently boast about how much aid it wants us to pay, waffling on about soft power and all that?
To cut a long story short, the quickest way to reduce bribery and corruption would be to reduce government spending and especially aid spending.
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14 comments:
The magistrates and judges are all freemasons anyway.
The quickest way to reduce bribery is to to reduce the temptation to bribery.
Democracy, taxation, spending may be proximate relations but they are not inherently riskful in themselves.
The place most bribes take place is here in the west. Because that is where the most unearned windfalls are to be made.
Poor places only seem more bribeful because there are only a few doing it, are easy to identify.
You are correct about here, we are all at it. Homeowners especially aspire to it though never get there.
Again even a government of purity and thrift would only increase land values, thus bribery. Perfect government would be nice but would improve nothing for all people. I wish the libertarians would start to think about this, alas it is a religion for them so they wont.
You really should read(and understand what it is saying) this. It will save you loads of time:
Technology and the Distribution of Wealth
"To cut a long story short, the quickest way to reduce bribery and corruption would be to reduce government spending and especially aid spending".
My version: "To cut a long story short, the quickest way to reduce bribery and corruption would be to reduce government"
To cut a long story short, the quickest way to reduce bribery and corruption would be to reduce government spending and especially aid spending.
Robbed me of the comment I was going to make.
SL, are they?
RS, Homey double-think says that bribing them with ever rising rental values and land values is not bribery at all, but the Core Function Of Government (see Mervyn King's comments about the main aim of monetary policy being to 'support asset prices').
L, JH, agreed, that is the inevtiable conclusion.
Don't we want as much foreign bribery as possible?
Being a rich country, we have plenty of cash for bribing. It would let us push overpriced crap from the UK onto the foreign country with the most corrupt governments.
In fact, if anything would force other countries to sort out their bribery problem it would be the reduced competitiveness they suffer from overpaying.
This is therefore a pretty stupid law.
OP, being amoral about it, yes of course.
I could never undertand why people made such a fuss about BAe/Saudi Arabia. With the Saudis, there is no moral distinction between 'government' and 'hard working taxpayers'.
One family 'owns' all the oil, and they run the country for their own benefit. So if BAe bribe one prince to buy their fancy aeroplanes, it is merely one prince robbing from another prince, and it's all good from out balance of payments point of view.
Or you could see it as a way of clawing back some of the aid money we gave them in the first place.
I could never undertand why people made such a fuss about BAe/Saudi Arabia.
I could. Basically, BAe were bribing the Saudis with taxpayers money.
B, the way I understood, BAe were bribing Saudis with BAe's money.
And even if it was UK taxpayers' money, if we bung some despotic prince £1 million in order to secure an order for a UK-based company of £1 billion, it's still money well spent. Sort of like Export Credit Guarantees except better.
But were BAe going to make any profit on that £1bn order? AFAIK, the whole armaments industry only survives on massive injections of public cash, so the country would actually be better off financially if we had no armaments industry at all. The people who run this industry have got themselves into the same cosy position vis a vis the State as the bankers, revolving door and all.
B: "the country would actually be better off financially if we had no armaments industry at all."
Yes, warfare and armaments are clearly a negative sum game, but, seeing as we have BAe anyway, as long as Johnny Foreigner is wasting his money on our weapons, that recovers part of the cost.
Plus, having sold weapons to such gits, they have to stay nice to us or we won't sell them replacement parts.
"the Core Function Of Government" is to stay in power.
FC, is it so terrible if 'the state' persists?
It's easy to confuse 'the government' (i.e. Camercleggiband, the civil servants, the bankers, the EU) etc with 'the state' (which is all of us playing by common rules). I'm quite happy for the UK to bumble along in vaguely the same direction for the foreseeable, I'd just like to change the tax system and allow smoking in pubs etc.
I'm not against 'the state' because that would mean I'm against everybody else on these shores.
As I like to say... you can't bribe people who are spending their own money.
Bribery works by paying people who are spending someone else's money. You find the guys with the £1m training budget, and you take him out to Twickenham regularly. Now, the company might get stiffed by a bad deal, but he gets some nice days out.
This isn't really too much of a problem in free market business. The company that allows this will raise their prices and their customers will go elsewhere. In government, you have a monopoly provider, run by people without much personal stake, that you can only fire once every 4 years, and because of Duverger's Law in the UK, for only one other choice.
African corruption is in a whole different league, because the governments spend other people's money on someone else, and that money doesn't even have to be accounted for. There's 1 simple reason why the Conservatives are keeping foreign aid so high, and that's to deflect the "nasty party" label, not to make sure that Africans have clean drinking water.
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