Politicians are Corrupted

Don’t Trust Them

The word “corruption” is regularly used to describe politicians’ conduct but seldom defined. In political discourse, the word is sometimes used broadly to refer to anything that seems dysfunctional or otherwise harmful to the public interest. At the same time, the Supreme Court has significantly narrowed the legal definition of corruption, curbed the reach of criminal anticorruption laws and limited policymakers’ ability to regulate the role of money in politics.

When government officials make decisions motivated by money or other forms of undue private gain, it warps policy and hurts the public. Things like public education, healthcare, infrastructure, and public safety lose out as public funds get misdirected and the quality of government services decreases.

The United States has seen corruption and its results many times in its history. During the late-19th century’s Gilded Age, for example, politicians routinely took bribes from corporations in deals that ultimately allowed those with the most wealth — robber barons and industrial conglomerates — to avoid regulation and gobble up public resources on favourable terms.

Meanwhile, workers often faced long hours, dangerous jobs, and meagre wages with few legal protections. Overcrowded housing, poor sanitation, and contaminated food were common.

Corruption has also played a major role in various financial crises. The lack of regulation bought by Gilded Age tycoons facilitated fraud and speculation, which led to stock market and banking crashes that cost people their life savings.

A century later, deregulation driven by the banking industry and the politicians it supported produced the 1980s savings and loan crisis, a banking collapse that cost taxpayers over $130 billion.

 But even after that scandal, Congress and regulators succumbed to pressure from the banking industry’s lobbying and campaign contributions to repeal laws designed to ensure market stability, prevent regulation of risky new financial products, and weaken watchdog agencies. These efforts paved the way to the subprime mortgage crisis, which sparked the biggest economic collapse since the Great Depression.

Beyond tangible losses, corruption erodes trust in government. When people feel like the system is rigged against them, many disengage from public life and choose not to vote, making government less representative and even less responsive to their needs.

Public confidence in government plummeted in the 1970s after the Watergate scandal exposed abuses of power in the Nixon White House, and it has never fully recovered. Many non-voters today continue to say they stay home because they don’t trust the government.

Supreme Court Decisions Allowing Corruption to Thrive

For decades, the Supreme Court has whittled down campaign finance regulations and narrowed the legal definition of how the influence of money in politics can count as corruption. These decisions, starting with Buckley v. Valeo in 1976 and continuing through Citizens United and others, sparked an explosion of political spending.

This flood of money comes from super PACs, which can raise and spend unlimited amounts. It has allowed ultra-wealthy donors to dominate politics in ways that were illegal before Citizens United and would be unacceptable in other countries.

In another series of cases, the Court pared back federal criminal anticorruption statutes, tacitly accepting it as an unavoidable part of politics. The Court also stripped away checks on presidential power, including rules for firing executive branch officials and prosecutors’ ability to hold the president accountable for misconduct while in office.

By carving out vast swaths of conduct from accountability, narrowing the scope of what counts as corrupt, and severely limiting the tools available to rein it in, these decisions create an environment that emboldens bad behaviour from public officials.

A worsening problem?

Given the relatively stable position of perceptions of UK corruption in recent years, it is perhaps surprising to see some commentators claiming that corruption in the UK is, in fact, getting worse.

In November 2021, Robert Barrington, professor of anti-corruption practice at the University of Sussex, claimed:

[…] the UK has taken the first steps on a journey towards state capture which ends in being a mid-ranking, politically unstable semi-democracy, with a mid-level economy, in which corruption is prevalent, and government is for the purpose of self-perpetuation and not the public interest.

He highlighted a selection of events which had led to perceptions that corruption was getting worse in the UK. He mentioned the Owen Paterson affair, where Conservative MPs were initially instructed to vote against the standards committee’s call for Owen Paterson to be suspended for 30 days for breaching rules relating to paid advocacy.

 Also highlighted were suspicions and allegations over the allocation of Covid-19 contracts to supporters of the Conservative Party and issues with the payment of then prime minister Boris Johnson’s holidays and interior decorating.

 Finally, the Jennifer Arcuri affair, where a Greater London Authority oversight committee investigated allegations that Boris Johnson had abused his position when London mayor to “benefit and reward” the American businesswoman Jennifer Arcuri were also mentioned by Professor Barrington.

Barrington concludes that “it is not too late to reverse the decline and change things for the better” and suggests that recommendations of the Committee on Standards in Public Life (CSPL), published in November 2021, are implemented and that the government consider setting up an anti-corruption agency or creating an anti-corruption commissioner. The most recent CSPL recommendations are discussed in further detail in section 4.3.

Daniel Hough, also from the University of Sussex, points to the time lag which exists between incidences of alleged corruption and the corruption filtering through into tables, noting “it may well be over the next few years the UK starts to slide”.