AND ANOTHER THING
Plenty of Continental palms waiting to be greased
PAUL JOHNSON
Have you ever been obliged to offer a bribe? It has happened to me on a number of occasions. One I particularly remember, in Venezuela, began with an immigration officer, flashing gold teeth, inspecting my passport upside down and pocketing it. I knew I would have to pass over some grub- by bolivars to get it back, and so it proved. Again, making a television movie in Indonesia, I watched with some interest while our unit manager negotiated the pas- sage of our filming equipment through cus- toms — they demanded US dollars there. In Darkest Africa I have occasionally had to hire a local whose principal task was to place infinitesimal sums into countless eager palms, in order to smooth our ways. But all these episodes, and others, occurred in Graham Greeneland, Somerset Maugh- am country, Conradia, where you would expect it.
In Britain it is different. The vast majori- ty of the population, even today, pass their entire lives without ever offering or receiv- ing a bribe. In my lifetime, we have lost our empire, most of our export trade and man- ufacturing industry, our command of the seas, much of our self-esteem, our reputa- tion for civilised behaviour, our reticence about sex, our faith in God and, most recently, our respect for monarchy. We are drowning in a wave of violence the like of which this country has never seen. But Britain remains remarkably incorrupt. We do not bribe public officials.
The only exception I can think of was the late Tom Driberg, long-time Labour MP, national executive member, party chairman and ultimately life-peer. He once explained to me, around 1960 in Muriel's Bar, that he always carried in his top jacket pocket a thick wedge of crisp new fivers, amounting to at least £100. Being an inveterate 'cot- tager', he was always in peril of the police and needed to whip out his payola at the shortest possible notice. He said it was no use offering a modest or even a substantial bribe. To overcome the natural honesty of the London policeman, you had to disori- entate him by flashing a sum beyond his customary imaginings — as £100 was in those days.
But Driberg's case apart, I have never come across such a thing here. One hears rumours, usually associated with places like Liverpool or Cardiff, and there are the occasional sensations — the Lynskey Tri- bunal, Poulson, etc — but our public life, on the whole, remains remarkably clean.
I raise the point because, of all the changes which will come into our quotidian lives as a result of European federalism, getting accustomed to corruption — being obliged to tender bribes in order to get public services we now take for granted, such as elementary justice in the courts is likely to prove the most shocking and objectionable. Last week, a number of important City gents, chairmen of clearing banks and the like, wrote to the Times insisting how indispensable it is that Britain sign the Maastricht Treaty. Have any of them considered for a moment what it will be like to work in the City when, in a merged Europe, Gresham's Law operates and corrupt practices drive out honest ones, as will inevitably happen? Such exalt- ed people rarely come across rank-and-file salesmen whose job it is to flog British goods in Continental countries like Ger- many where `brown envelope deals' are usual. Our tardiness in adapting to the norms of Continental business morality is one reason why our trade with other EEC countries is so heavily in the red. Yet this aspect of our future in Europe is never dis- cussed, in parliament, at business confer- ences and least of all at the absurd 'semi- nars' which John Major holds in No 10 or at Chequers.
Corruption on the Continent has increased, is increasing and threatens to overwhelm the authorities. In Italy the Ein- audi Centre of Turin reports that routine bribes paid by businesses to politicians, mainly to get public contracts, now amount to £5 billion a year. The newspaper La Rep- publica calculates that in the last 15 years £75 billion in bribes has gone into the polit- ical system. Even hardened and cynical Ital- ians have been shocked by what has been turned up in the latest investigations. It is 'It's no use blaming society. It's got an alibi.' not just a case of small or new firms paying up to get into the racket but of the very largest companies, including state-owned ones, handing over vast sums to stay in it. Thus ENI, the nationalised energy compa- ny, has forked out £680 million to political parties in the last 20 years.
These forms of corruption are endemic in Italy; the difference is the scale on which they now occur, and the extent to which entire political parties, as well as individu- als, are involved. The pattern seems to be the same in Spain, France and Germany. The guilty parties are precisely those of the left- and right-centre — Socialists, Chris- tian Democrats and the like, such as the Liberals in Germany — which have ruled the roost for the past generation or more and which are most closely associated with the European idea. Federalism and corrup- tion have grown up together. Nor is this surprising. Brussels is a machine for pro- ducing regulations, which are now pouring out on a scale never before seen this side of the Iron Curtain. The Soviet Union, the most regulated European country in histo- ry, was the most corrupt in consequence, and a sombre illustration of the axiom that rules so numerous they cannot be honestly enforced must generate bribery. The results can be seen in Russia today, now that the lid has been taken off: a society where cor- ruption is ubiquitous and ineradicable, and where the rule of law has broken down completely.
That is the direction in which Brussels, and the Continental political elites which thrive on its bureaucratic culture, are tak- ing the whole of Europe. No wonder the decline of public standards in Britain is already beginning to raise eyebrows: there are half a dozen senior or middling mem- bers of John Major's administration who ought, in honour, to have resigned their offices but who, in the anything-goes cli- mate of Maastricht, feel they can hang on. The Archbishop of Canterbury urges us not merely to embrace the treaty but to sign the Social Chapter too. Has he reflected, for one moment, on the moral implications of membership of a European federation? The truth is we face a future, not so distant either, in which graft and jobbery will over- shadow what is left of Westminster and Whitehall and in which the tentacles of venality will reach into every corner of our lives. Have you ever been obliged to offer a bribe? That will soon seem a silly question.
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