Make corruption history?

Who remembers the slogan “Make Poverty History”? It used to be found on banners on streets, on pamphlets and on the top corners of websites. I remember Bob Geldof trying to get a crowd of people at Hyde Park to chant it at the “Live 8” concert in July 2005, which he envisaged as part of some big protest against the G8 summit that was going on in Scotland, but which the concertgoers saw as just a rock gig. But despite the march of climate change and its consequences, despite the deterioration of human rights and the spread of state-enforced poverty in parts of the world, nobody seems to be talking about how to make poverty history anymore. Instead, we hear a lot of talk about corruption, and a lot of criticism of the cultures of the peoples affected. The latest example is the anti-corruption summit hosted by David Cameron this past week.

Cameron made some noises this past week about a new register of properties owned by foreign *companies* in the UK (it doesn’t mention individuals, although such people often use front companies based in Crown Dependency tax havens to own properties here) and there has been an agreement by some of Britain’s crown dependencies (though not the British Virgin Islands) to share property registers. It all depends, of course, on legislative approval, where it could easily be watered down, or it could be delayed indefinitely. It’s not only foreigners who use ruses such as offshore companies to hide their assets; British citizens are known to do this as well, likely including some of Cameron’s friends and major Tory donors, and deterring wealthy foreigners from buying property in the UK, however corrupt they are, could result in house prices falling (or at least not rising as quickly as had been expected). You would not get wealthy Tory MPs to vote against their personal interest, as has been seen with bills to raise the standards of rented accommodation.

His own party is also under investigation for overspending on election expenses in numerous constituencies, many of them the marginal seats that made the difference in the 2015 election. Even one of the newly-elected Tory Police and Crime Commissioners (PCCs), who have to have a clean record even as a juvenile to stand for the position, is under investigation for this offence. The investigations may lead to criminal charges (though not necessarily against the MPs) and it’s been suggested that they could trigger by-elections, possibly endangering Cameron’s majority. It’s not the first time it’s been suggested that a Tory government with a narrow majority may have secured crucial votes through corrupt means: in the 1990s it was revealed that Tory party activists had engaged in “granny farming”, meaning purporting to secure postal votes for old people in retirement and nursing homes, then switching them to proxy votes which they then cast in the Tories’ favour.

The British establishment (its politicians and media) likes to think it can lecture other nations on corruption despite having benefited from corruption in other countries in the past. Britain’s everyday life isn’t affected by corruption; we do not have to bribe policemen or officials just to get basic business done for example. But there used to be a joke that the reason you didn’t get military coups in the USA was because there was no US embassy there; corrupt rulers in other countries who steal from national banks stash their ill-gotten gains in banks in Europe and the USA. That was tolerated for as long as these régimes suited US and European interests, and when they were overthrown, they were often rescued by their patrons and allowed to take their loot with them, as in the case of the Marcos family when they were outsted from power in the Phillipines in 1986; the Phillipine government has recovered only a fraction of the Marcoses’ loot. Even at last week’s summit, the present Nigerian president, Muhammadu Buhari, demanded that Britain return the money stolen by previous presidents such as Sani Abacha, which presumably is still sitting in London banks. There is a sense that when corruption happens here, it’s little bits here and there and the law will sort it out, even though it often does not, while corruption abroad is blatant, large-scale and *vulgar*. But we don’t mind the money when it’s spent on luxuries in Knightsbridge. Corruption, like rape, is only ‘real’ when it’s stereotypical and blatant.

As I said at the beginning, we are more interested nowadays in criticising other cultures and less interested in hunger, poverty or political repression. In the last couple of years the Tories, particularly William Hague (who retired as an MP last year), have addressed summits such as the 2014 London “Girl Summit” on such issues as FGM and child marriage and another that year on ending sexual violence in conflict, leading a radical feminist on Twitter to gush that Hague almost sounded like one of them. I have a suspicion that their newfound enthusiasm for women’s rights in other countries in fact has more to do with distracting popular attention from the deteriorating human rights situation, from such things as governments selling huge tracts of land to foreign corporations so as to grow food for export, resulting in the people who live there being forced out, often into barren ‘villages’ set up by the government. It’s that much easier to ignore such things if you think that these are already people who don’t even respect their wives’ and daughters’ human rights.

Significantly, in Hague’s speech on sexual violence, he did not mention the arms trade once; Kaye Stearman of the Campaign Against the Arms Trade (CAAT) observed in 2013 that the last (coalition) government was “much more blatant — quite shameless” about promoting arms exports, while previous governments had done so with some degree of embarrassment; it is known that British equipment exported to Saudi Arabia has been used in their bombing campaign against Yemen over the past year. The Ethiopian government’s ‘development’ schemes that are leading to large-scale displacement of indigenous people are being funded by international institutions such as the World Bank and the UK’s Department for International Development. Yet human rights only matter nowadays if the people infringing them are ordinary people, not the state, and certainly not when backed by western governments and major banks.

Of course, most people would say that poverty as such will never be history. But we can fight the impoverishment of people by political repression and violence. This is not what the recent Tory interest in corruption and women’s rights is all about; it is about posturing while upholding the unjust economic world order, the wealth and power of the global super-rich, behind the scenes, and there are a lot of vested interests in nothing much being done, and the flow of money northwards and westwards continuing.