The Value of History to Understanding Quality of Governance and Anti–Corruption

What can the historian offer those interested in the study of corruption? In this recently-published chapter I show how a historical approach can offer a productive and useful data set and tools to understand corruption and anti-corruption. Since corruption has existed across time and space, and is multi-faceted, involving politics, economics, law, administration, social and cultural attitudes, it can best be studied in a multi-disciplinary way that includes the study of the past as well as the present.

A historical approach offers ways of thinking about change and continuity, and hence also about how and why reform processes occur and are successful. Historical case studies can test and challenge social science models but also offer different, more qualitative, evidence that can help us to reconstruct the mentalities of those who refused to accept that their behaviour constituted ‘corruption’, as well as the motives of those bringing the prosecution or making allegations. Historical sources, often offering multiple perspectives of different participants, can also enable us to form a more holistic view of corruption scandals and of the important role of public discussion in shaping quality of government.

If history has so far been a little marginal to cross-disciplinary discussions about corruption and good government, the chapter seeks to make the cse that it might usefully be more included in analysis and policy discussions. The chapter contributes to a very wide-ranging volume, pulled together by the excellent team at Sweden's famed Quality of Governance Institute, that seeks to take a multi-disciplinary approach to the problems of good governance and anti-corruption. More details about the volume can be found here.

Mark Knights : 01 Oct 2021 14:13 |  Tags: Change; Continuity; Dependency Good Governance; History; Pathway Policy; Reform; |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Corruption and State Trials

In a chapter just published I examine prosecutions for corruption in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As well as prosecuting political and religious dissent, later Stuart state trials also targeted corrupt ministers who had been the subject of parliamentary investigations and were subsequently impeached for ‘high crimes and misdemeanours’. Indeed, as Lord Mansfield observed when passing judgement on a corruption case in 1770 and reflecting back on the previous two hundred years, ‘there hardly ever is an impeachment against a minister where the charge is not for receiving money for procuring a grant from the king’. The process of impeachment had been revived in 1621 specifically to deal with corruption allegations against Lord Chancellor Bacon and the device was frequently used over the next fifteen years. It once again became a potent weapon during the Restoration and was repeatedly used until 1725 when a Lord Chancellor was again tried in parliament for corruption.

The chapter investigates these trials in order to show how frequently issues of financial corruption were part of impeachments in the period after the Glorious Revolution and to reflect in turn on what these trials tell us about the nature of corruption more generally in this period. The chapter also analyses the defence arguments employed by the accused, highlighting how appeals to custom and to the letter of the law, as well as attempts to redefine bribes as ‘gifts’ or ‘presents’, were deployed both as a reflection of blurred conceptual boundaries and as a way of neutralising allegations of corruption. Misbehaviour was represented in such defences in terms of norms of friendship, the personal nature of office-holding or cultural factors, and these arguments were symptomatic of those deployed in many other attempts to grapple with early modern corruption. The cases therefore illustrate the difficulties involved in prosecuting this most slippery of crimes, as well as the extent to which its definition was problematic and contested. The chapter also demonstrates that state trials were, by their nature, very frequently politicised, and hence that they were a very blunt way to tackle corruption. For these reasons, impeachments fell into disuse after 1725 until a brief revival once more in the later eighteenth century and early nineteenth century, after which they were permanently abandoned.

Details about the volume can be found here

Mark Knights : 01 Oct 2021 13:58 |  Tags: Impeachment; State Trials; |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

'Old Corruption' Revived?

Writing about web page https://www.historyandpolicy.org/policy-papers/papers/old-corruption-revived-lessons-from-the-past

Are we living in an age of ‘New Corruption’ and if so, are there any lessons from our past about what to do about it? ‘Not since the Victorians abolished patronage with open competition has any government so ruthlessly ushered its placemen into every nook and cranny of the public realm’, argues Polly Toynbee [Dido Harding to head the NHS? Her position would be untenable | Polly Toynbee | The Guardian]. She implicitly refers to the mid-nineteenth century waning of ‘Old Corruption’ after an intense period of reform, and the recent revival of old practices.

‘Old Corruption’ – a term coined in the 1830s – was characterised by a ‘system’ of corrupt institutions and practices that diverted public money into the pockets of a political and social elite who distributed offices amongst their friends and family in order to advance their own profit. This article for History and Policy explores how far Old and New Corruption resemble each other; what reforms worked in the past; and what lessons can be learnt from this earlier history.

Here is a short summary of some of its conclusions

• Old Corruption taught us that neither public office nor a contract for outsourced public services should be obtained by patronage, patrimony or partisanship; but also that such forces are remarkably powerful, enduring and difficult to constrain.
• Both informal and formal restraints are necessary to attempt to do so. We need i) a vigorous and widespread debate on public ethics, particularly around issues of self-interest and accountability ii) robust, formal institutions with a remit for reform that remain independent from the executive iii) leadership demonstrating integrity.
• Some of the formal architecture of, and principles underlying, restraint already exist, the legacy of the struggle with Old Corruption; but they need to be protected from erosion and we also need to think about how to meet new challenges.
• We should view corruption not just as an issue of individual moral failing but as a systemic one in which many of our current institutions are interconnected and ripe for wholesale review.
• Anti-corruption is a long-term and on-going process but there are short-term measures that could help. One would be to increase the barriers and constraints on the ways in which vested interests influence public life and seek to determine the public interest.
• Crises and large-scale government spending increase both the opportunities for corruption and (with the consequent tax rises necessary to fund it) the public pressures for reform.

A satire of the ‘nabob’ (an anglicisation of the Indian word for prince), the rapacious Sir Thomas Rumbold, here neutralising his prosecution by showering money into a pot held by a government minister, Henry Dundas. Dundas was himself accused of creating a patronage network of Scottish MPs who would do the government's bidding.© The Trustees of the British Museum

Mark Knights : 12 Jul 2021 11:26 |  Tags: Corruption; Cronyism; From Lessons Old Past Patrimony; Patronage; The |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Corruption Unmasked!

‘Placemen’ were the bogeymen of seventeenth and eighteenth century ‘patriots’ who feared that the public good was being sacrificed to the unprincipled ambitions of corrupting Crown ministers and their lackeys. ‘Placemen’ were those who were given rewarding posts in government or sinecures as a means of buying their compliance and support, or merely as a way of rewarding those who were politically loyal or boosting the incomes of the social elite. As the resources of the British state grew in the eighteenth century, so did worries that a rich, parasitical elite was ‘placing’ cronies in every lucrative job so that they would unthinkingly do the government’s bidding whilst also siphoning off public money and diverting it into private hands. ‘Placemen’ were corrupt and corrupting, particularly if they sat in Parliament. As the eighteenth century wore on, and especially in the early nineteenth century, placemen and sinecurists were seen – especially by radicals - as part of a corrupt system of governance in need of fundamental overhaul. John Wade, for example, compiled a long list of placemen and sinecurists, together with their salaries and payments, in The Black Book or Corruption Unmasked! It attacked ‘a legalized system of pillage, fraud, and delusion’, of ‘connexion and influence’, which relied on corruption as an essential prop of government. It was a publishing sensation with fifty thousand copies of its first edition in 1828 being sold, and three further editions.

The pre-modern view about the corruption of placemen owed much to anxieties about an evolving imperial state but also to an immersion in ‘classical republicanism’ – the legacy from the classical world that emphasised the danger of the corruption of the constitution and of liberty itself. The corruption that Britons used to worry about most – once anxieties about the corruption of religion began to subside - was the corruption of the constitution by an overmighty executive that abused its patronage power to create undue ‘influence’ and oligarchical patronage. Instead, the public were urged to support those who were truly independent of the executive and hence disinterested, impartial voices who would seek the public good rather than partisan advantage. Voters, a 1658 tract warned, should avoid ‘those who in a selfish ambitious manner, seek and hunt after the imployment [sic], and use unlawful and indirect means to attain thereunto. The unfittest and unworthiest men are commonly the most forward to sue for Place and Offices’. Only the truly independent should be chosen, for ‘Ingaged men commonly have their eyes, ears and tongues in their heads, and at the dispose and command of others; their corrupt and carnal dependences and compliances choak their affections to the Publick-interest’.

Reformers saw placemen as part of an interconnected system of corruption: a corrupted electoral system, oppressive tax system, a system of militarism that required excessive taxation, and a corrupted financial system that made it all possible and benefited the placemen and cronies who staffed the political and social hierarchy.

‘The “System” that “Works so Well”!!’ (1831), BM Sat. 16610. The electoral ‘system’ is seen as corrupt, enabling public money to be poured into the pockets of ‘borough-mongers’ – those who bought their way into the representative system. Some of the coins are labelled 'Places', 'Livings', and 'Civil Offices'. Copyright Trustees of the British Museum.

Is twenty-first century Britain sliding back into an eighteenth-century-type world? Over £10 billion worth of covid-related contracts have been given out without competitive tendering, many to friends and associates of ministers. Dido Harding was appointed as Chair of the NHS Test and Trace without competition: she is a sitting Conservative Peer, wife of a Conservative MP and friend of former Prime Minister David Cameron. Richard Sharp, the new chairman of the BBC, is a Tory party donor and close friend of Rishi Sunak. Peter Riddell, the out-going independent commissioner for public appointments, wrote last November that “some at the centre of government want not only to have the final say but to tilt the competition system in their favour to appoint their allies” [Peter_Riddell_to_Lord_Evans.docx.pdf (publishing.service.gov.uk)]. Riddell warned that appointment panels were being packed in order to ensure that those ‘allies’ got jobs. The previous blog noted the cronyism apparent in government procurement; and the Cameron-Greensill scandal is another manifestation of it. Patronage, a willingness to do the government’s bidding and a record of total loyalty to the Tory party – these champions of free speech don’t want to hear a whisper of criticism! - seem to be the order of the day.

The system works so well!

Mark Knights : 14 Apr 2021 14:34 |  Tags: Appointments Black Book; Cronies; Official Patronage; Placemen; Sinecure; |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Crony Contracts

In the pre-modern period appointments to office and awards of government contracts were often based on patronage, ‘friendship’, nepotism and sometimes straightforward exchanges of money. Are we in danger of slipping back into a seventeenth or eighteenth century world? When even a reporter from the Daily Telegraph thinks that the Tory government emits a ‘stench of corruption’, we should take this question seriously [Madeline Grant, BBC Andrew Marr Show, 22 November 202].

Emergencies, such as wars or pandemics, open the coffers of the state. The need to support the state’s efforts in a moment of need justifies very high levels of spending but then seems to foster loose or self-interested handling of public money that destabilise notions of fair profit, the balance between the public and private interest, and practices of accountability. Cronyism and corrupt contracts become far more possible.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Britain was engaged in huge expenditure on war. Civil war in the 1640s raised unprecedented sums of money but also headaches about accountability. The parliamentary forces ranged against the royalists created the first system of parliamentary committees scrutinising public expenditure, though there were frequent allegations that money disappeared into the hands of private individuals profiteering from the crisis and officials who abused their power to advantage themselves or their friends.

The second revolution of the seventeenth century, in 1688, propelled Britain into war with France that lasted, more ‘on’ than ‘off’, for the next 125 years. War became increasingly global in nature, as colonisation meant conflict in Europe spread across the world, and consequently state debt increased in leaps each time tensions flared. Contracts were handed out to supply troops with clothing, food and drink, and to financiers to pay the armed forces overseas. But all this was accompanied by what many contemporaries regarded as large-scale corruption. And over a period of several centuries structures were put in place to properly audit the expenditure; to prevent conflicts of interest; to prevent public money from being siphoned off into private hands; and to hold individuals to account for their behaviour in office. The system creaked each time it was put under strain by largescale emergencies; and often further measures were put it place.

Ironically it was the early Tory party, which emerged in the later Stuart period, that worried about the corrosive effect of large-scale state funding that they saw as disappearing into the pockets of their Whig rivals. The first Tory party was in part formed around hatred of Whig profiteering and cronyism. Thus in 1712, towards the end of a long war with France that had seen the national debt rise to unprecedented levels, the Tories argued that partisan self-interest was undermining the national interest. Money, they argued, was being purloined by Whiggish City financiers who became wealthy on the backs of the taxpayer. The Tories prosecuted one of the leaders of the Whigs, the future Prime Minister Robert Walpole, for a corrupt contract awarded to cronies and with built-in kick-backs. Walpole was also said to have presided over an unaccounted hole in the public finances of £35 million. Walpole was slung into the Tower of London for 'a high breach of trust and notorious corruption'. Indeed, throughout his long tenure as prime minister the Tory rallying cry against him was that he corrupted government and the political system. Anti-corruption was a key part of what it meant to be a Tory.

This Tory satire of 1740 depicts Walpole as an overblown idol whose arse had to be kissed if one wanted to get a public office and who was associated, as the words underline, with ‘Corruption’, ‘Venality’, ‘Folly’, ‘Vanity’ and ‘Pride’. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

So it’s somewhat ironic that the Tories today should be the subject of numerous accusations that they award excessively lucrative contracts to cronies without proper scrutiny and fast-track deals for insiders; that they appoint officials to important posts without any public competition; and that ministers are allowed to breach the codes designed to ensure high standards in public life and may even have broken the law in the way they have disregarded due process.

Emergencies always test the systems of the state to prevent corruption, and historically those systems have needed adjustment if they are found wanting. Indeed, after most periods of emergency in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries there was a period of review and reform, and often of significant public anger. We seem to be approaching one such moment again.

For a good discussion about the current dangers of corruption see the Mile End Institute discussion at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k27w9VRE1gI.

For a warning, from the former director of Transparency International, about the dangers of corruption in Britain see https://www.qmul.ac.uk/mei/news-and-opinion/items/corruption-in-modern-britain-the-warning-lights-are-flashing-red--professor-robert-barrington-.html

For the National Audit Office report on government procurement during the Covid crisis see Investigation into government procurement during the COVID-19 pandemic - National Audit Office (NAO) Report

Boris Johnson ‘acted illegally’ over jobs for top anti-Covid staff | Politics | The Guardian

Mark Knights : 28 Nov 2020 16:54 |  Tags: Contracts; Corruption; Cronies Walpole; |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Impeachment: a political weapon that went out of fashion in England just as it was adopted in the US

Writing about web page https://theconversation.com/impeachment-a-political-weapon-that-went-out-of-fashion-in-england-just-as-it-was-adopted-in-the-us-130400

In this piece , published in The Conversation, I explore the history of impeachment, paralleling the prosecutions of the duke of Buckingham in 1626 and Donald Trump.

Mark Knights : 23 Jan 2020 16:15 |  Tags: Buckingham; Impeachment; Trump |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Parliament and Conflicts of Interest

Parliament, in the era of ‘Old Corruption’, was tougher on conflicts of interest than it is today.

Despite some claims that ‘conflict of interest’ is an inherently modern concept [https://www.oecd.org/site/adboecdanti-corruptioninitiative/39368062.pdf], it goes back a long way. Indeed, Parliament, even in its unreformed state and when ‘old corruption’ prevailed, was paradoxically stricter about conflict of interest than it is today: MPs with financial interests in legislation were not allowed to vote, withdrew themselves from debates and in 1782 were banned from sitting in Parliament if they had an interest in a financial contract from the government. So might history help us here, if the parliamentary precedents and legislation were enforced?

As long ago as 1604 an MP was told to leave a debate on a bill in which he had a personal interest and this was probably not the first time this had happened, since the Commons resolved that this was ‘agreeable with former Order and Precedent in like cases’. Withdrawal from debate in such instances was confirmed in 1623 and 1626, and extended to cover the committee stage. In 1664 a vote of an MP with a conflict of interest was disallowed and challenging such a vote after it had taken place, or withdrawing before a vote, became the practice of the House. This was confirmed in 1797 when the prime minister, William Pitt, proposed compensation for those who had suffered from losses on money loaned to the government in what was known as the ‘Loyalty Loan’, raised to fight war against revolutionary France. 14 MPs who had an interest in the outcome voted for the compensation, leading to a challenge to the Speaker to rule on whether an MP could vote on an issue in which he was personally interested. Speaker Addington declared that it was the practice of the House that they could not and added:

when any measure is submitted to the House, the substance of which is to confer a pecuniary advantage, or diminish a loss, which is the same thing, I am satisfied it is not consistent with that mode of proceeding which the House has adopted on occasions of delicacy and importance, that any member should vote on a measure by which he intends to derive any benefit in case that measure should be carried into law.

The result was that the votes of the 14 MPs were disallowed. The same principle was applied in 1800 and again in 1811 (when in the light of a rehearsal of the earlier rulings the MPs refrained from voting). The 1811 instance clarified that that interest had to be ‘a direct pecuniary interest’. Even so, attempts to secure legislation on the matter proved elusive. In 1825 an attempt by a radical MP, Joseph Hume, to push for a formal motion ‘that no Member shall vote for or against any Question in which he has a direct pecuniary interest’ was defeated, but only because the House seemed reluctant to formalise a convention that ‘gentlemen’ understood. Hume summed up the debate by stating that he was glad that the principle that MPs with a conflict of interest could not vote was so generally recognised. This was again confirmed in 1830 and 1895. So it seems clear that MPs with personal financial interests in legislation should not speak in debate or vote on it. Why this is no longer upheld seems something of a mystery.

So, whilst it is really good to have a register of interests, might it not also be used to allow votes to be challenged and even voided when a conflict of interest is proven, as required by a good deal of parliamentary precedent? In 2016 72 (Tory) MPs who were registered as landlords voted down a Labour bill requiring landlords to make their homes fit for human habitation: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/tories-vote-down-law-requiring-landlords-make-their-homes-fit-for-human-habitation-a6809691.html

Would not the application of parliamentary precedent have prevented this?

The image, BM Satires 6021© The Trustees of the British Museum, is a detail from a James Gillray depiction of the Committee appointed in 1782 to investigate victualling contracts during the war with America. They examined Christopher Atkinson, a corn factor and M.P. for Heydon, employed by the Board to purchase malt on commission, who was accused of cheating by overcharging and false accounting. The conflict of interest is apparent in Atkinson being an MP and hence potentially voting on his own investigation: the chair of the committee's speech bubble reads 'This is certainly the first instance of an accused Man sitting as Judge on his own Cause & requires particular attention'. Atkison was subsequently expelled the House but was able to return in 1796 after being exonerated - he successfully claimed that the fraud allegations against him had been malicious. He was nevertheless described as ‘a man whose sole object in this world is gain’: https://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1790-1820/member/atkinson-christopher-1739-1819

Moreover, the unreformed House of Commons – some fifty years before the Great Reform Act! – also passed legislation in 1782 disqualifying MPs from being able to sit in Parliament if they held an interest in any public contract. The act was an attempt to prevent the corruption of Parliament by private interests – something that had become an urgent matter in the light of the loss the year before of the war against the American colonies, a defeat that forced a fundamental review of the moral, economic and political state of the nation. It was generally acknowledged that excessive profits were being made in a corrupt way by contractors who were supplying war materials and money for the purpose of carrying on the American War. The law had something of a loophole in it, allowing exemptions for private companies of more than 10 people entering into a contract for the public benefit. It is worth remembering that this was passed when the number of private stock companies was tiny and restricted, after the first crash of the stock market in 1720. In other words, the exemption was not aimed at allowing a blanket evasion of the terms of the act. The act was superceded by the 1957 House of Commons Disqualification Bill, which removed the bar on MPs being government contractors or having a financial stake in contractors. Although there is still a requirement for MPs to declare their interets, is transparency sufficient?

Standards were reviewed even in the era of ‘Old Corruption’. There is of course a Parliamentary Commmissioner for Standards now - might the two dimensions of parliamentary practice identified in this blog be ripe for review in the twenty first century?

Mark Knights : 15 Apr 2019 17:01 |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

The History of Anti–corruption

The Long History of Anti-Corruption

There is a tendency amongst some to assume that anti-corruption strategies and campaigns are a recent phenomenon. This is partly based on the idea that it was only in 1996 that the President of the World Bank declared that ‘we need to deal with the cancer of corruption’ and that a series of NGO conventions against corruption were devised only in the late twentieth century.

Yet a new collection of essays – Anticorruption in History: From Antiquity to the Modern Era edited by Ronald Kroeze, André Vitoria and Guy Geltner (Oxford University Press, 2018) – shows that anti-corruption has a very long history, stretching back at least to classical antiquity.

The volume arose out of the ANTICORRP project, which sought to investigate anti-corruption through an interdisciplinary perspective. The essays are valuable because historians have been relatively slow to explore the topic, and policy makers and social scientists have (until very recently) tended to be relatively uninterested in historical data. So the possibility now exists of a more fruitful dialogue.

The essays in the volume suggest that debates about corruption were very active before ‘modernity’; that corruption was often a politicised allegation; that anti-corruption was closely linked to ideals of good governance; and that contexts of time and space were extremely important in shaping anti-corruption. The volume shows that even the European experience of anti-corruption has been very different, and was contingent on context.

My own contribution explores anti-corruption in seventeenth- and eighteenth- century Britain. It argues that although there were interesting periods when reform measures were concentrated, anti-corruption was more of a process than an event and that we might therefore think about anti-corruption in terms of waves of activity. This means that there was no simple or sudden shift from a corrupt pre-modernity to a non-corrupt modernity, or a ‘new’ focus on anti-corruption in the latter. The British experience also suggests that anti-corruption took different forms at different times to meet challenging circumstances in evolving political, religious, administrative, legal, economic, social and cultural spheres.

My chapter also seeks to identify a series of factors – some micro, some meso, others macro – which both facilitated and hindered anti-corruption. I suggest that anti-corruption was restrained by inadequate safeguards for whistle-blowers; that scandal could focus on individual misbehaviour rather than structural reform; that social and cultural norms changed slowly; that paradoxically war both opened up opportunities for corruption and created pressures and crises that led to anti-corruption; and that legislation and rules alone had only limited effect. The chapter ends by considering some of the ways in which British national identity was nevertheless increasingly constructed in terms of standards of integrity and honesty.

Other essays in the volume consider the differing experiences of France, Italy, Spain, Denmark, Holland, Germany, Sweden and the Ottoman Empire. This comparative framework (and some of the essays are explicitly comparative) across time and space will become increasingly important in showing different traditions and contextualised solutions to apparently similar problems. Collectively, they raise interesting questions about how far universal measures fit all contexts.

© Trustees of the British Museum

Mark Knights : 02 Jun 2018 12:19 |  Tags: Anti-Corruption; British Identity Modernity; |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Laughing at corruption and the trials of William Hone

Throughout history one of the responses to corruption has been to satirise it and its perpetrators. Satirists in classical antiquity, such as Horace and Juvenal, had sought either to mock or snarl at corruption. Graphic satirists did so in Britain in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a tradition continued by cartoonists today. But those being satirised – governments or interest groups – have often reacted badly in the past and present to such treatment and sought to close it down.

Two hundred years ago, in December 1817, the radical publisher William Hone laughed at the government for its corruption and so it tried to stop his mouth. He was subjected to three trials in as many days, but, as I explore in a recent chapter in a collection of essays about satire and laughter, Hone emerged victorious from his gruelling ordeals. Hone’s trials raised fundamental issues not only about how far the press had a right to expose and mock governmental corruption but also how far satirists saw themselves as part of a tradition in which free-born Britons had a duty and right to engage in such activity.

Hone was prosecuted for three mocking parodies, which emulated religious texts - the creed, the litany and the catechism - to ‘instruct’ audiences in the vice of corruption rather than in the pious virtue of integrity. The Sinecurists’ Creed attacked those who held ‘a place of profit’ for which their only duty was to perform loyal duties to the government; and The Late John Wilkes’s Catechism had a central character, Lickspittle, who is instructed how to become ‘the Child of Corruption’. A third piece offered a satrircal Political Litany. The government alleged that religious texts should never be used to mock in this way, since to do so in turn mocked religion, and that Hone was therefore guilty of blasphemy. Hone’s defence was that religious parody had been used since the sixteenth-century Reformation -even by the great reformers such as Luther - and he produced print after print, of text and image, to prove his point. Hone was acquitted in all three trials, a victory both for the freedom of the press and the capacity of satire to puncture corruption. Indeed, Hone went on to produce more radical, popular attacks on what he saw as the systematic corruption of both the government’ s ministers and the system of politics operating in his day. Perhaps the most famous was The Political House that Jack Built (1819) which parodied a nursery rhyme to lash the ‘vermin’ who infested politics.

For Hone, and many others, satire was a particularly appropriate genre to use against corruption. Satire was a way of reforming vice by exposing, ridiculing and shaming it. And it could be used against individuals who engaged in corruption as well as the vice of corruption itself. Satire also uncovered the hypocrisy that often lay under secretive corruption that hid under a thin veneer of legitimacy. Satire drew some of its comic effect from the incongruous juxtaposition of the corrupt inner man and his outward profession of integrity. But besides being entertainment, satire could also unleash powerful emotions of contempt, disgust and anger. This meant that it was a genre that could be prone, at least in the eyes of those being attacked, of excess. If satire was necessary to correct vice, it could, critics argued, also be abused: ridicule could inspire undeserved contempt and even corrupt the people with false notions undermining of authority. Hone’s trials, which are being re-enacted in an eighteenth-century setting as part of the Warwick Words History Festival in November (click here for ticket details), explored such issues as they put parody in the dock.

  leftL Lilburne 1646; Right, Hone, 1821

The trials also showed that Hone’s ‘age of reform’ had not only to be fiercely fought for at the time but also stood on the shoulders of at least two centuries of literary and political culture. Hone brought armfuls of old pamphlets and prints into court, dating back to the 1600s and 1700s as well as the 1800s, in order to show the importance of parody as a means to reform religion and to attack political corruption. His particular hero was the mid-seventeenth century radical John Lilburne, whose output he assiduously collected. Lilburne, like Hone, saw citizens as being subject to corrupt authorities; and Hone modelled his heroic self-defence on Lilburne’s own 1646 trial. Hone later wrote that when he read Lillburne's own account of his trial he felt ‘all Lilburne’s indignant feelings, admired his undaunted spirit, rejoiced at his acquittal … This book aroused within me new feelings and a desire of acquainting myself with Constitutional Law.’ For Hone, the turmoil and corruption of the 1810s found echoes in earlier reformation and revolution. Britain’s nineteenth-century struggle for reform thus had very long roots that Hone’s trials help us to appreciate.

Mark Knights : 24 Sep 2017 16:18 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Report for Transparency International

Old Corruption – what can Britain’s past tell us today?

In a report published today, for Transparency International, I show how Britain’s history has shaped what we understand by the term ‘corruption’ as well what measures we see as being effective or necessary to curb it. ‘Corruption’ and ‘anti-corruption’ have not been (nor are they now) universal, timeless, context-less phenomena but should be seen as conditioned by the past.

Taking an overview of Britain between the sixteenth-century Reformation and nineteenth-century Reform, I argue that our modern notion of corruption (centred on bribery and probity in office-holding) has evolved over time. In the process, alternative ways of thinking about corruption have been largely displaced.

For example, I show how the idea of ‘the abuse of entrusted power’, TI’s definition of corruption, emerged as a concept in the mid-seventeenth century and then strengthened over the next two hundred years, fundamentally shaping how we view public office. But the report also highlights how ideas about religious corruption have faded and some things that were once thought to be corrupting – the pursuit of self-interest, for example - are now often seen as helping to combat corruption (the pursuit of self-interest in a free market is seen by many as an essential component of anti-corruption).

What does the past tell us about how to curb corruption? The report highlights the transformations possible if non-partisan commissions systematically examine the administration of governmental departments and public finance; the additional weight when popular and elite pressures coincide; and how campaigns for strong ethics underpinned a reform agenda by ensuring that its rationale is embraced rather than being seen as a mere set of abstract rules.

My report also highlights the paradox inherent in state-building, arguing that the growth of the state is both part of the problem, because it facilitates corrupt access to enlarged resources and power, but also the solution, since it offers the best means to curb, restrain and punish corrupt behaviour.

Two caveats are made. The first is that corruption is a highly resistant problem and that hence reform can take a long time – there is no easy, quick solution. Britain’s own struggle with corruption occurred over many centuries and we would do well to remember our nation’s past scandals. The second is that those mobilising the rallying cry of “corruption” often do so for self-serving or even corrupt ends, so that we have to be careful how we view those pressing for change as well as those resisting it.

The report ends with a short case study of Samuel Pepys, the seventeenth-century diarist, offering readers two different ways of seeing him, as corrupt or not. The reader is asked to ‘judge’ Pepys. Deciding what we think about Pepys helps us explore issues today about how we define corruption and where we set the boundaries between private and public interests.

The report is based on research, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, which will appear as a book published by Oxford University Press.

James Gillray, The Tree of Corruption with John Bull hard at work(1795)

Mark Knights : 10 Nov 2016 09:27 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem