AND ANOTHER THING
Global corruption is everywhere, including Labour's backyard
PAUL JOHNSON
Downing Street let it be known this week that the Prime Minister has been hav- ing urgent talks with the security service over the growing menace of the Red Mafia. It is good to hear that our government has at last woken up to what is the greatest threat to the civilised world today: global crime and corruption. We have been learn- ing, again, that there is no such thing as a happy ending in this world. If we destroy a particular horror, we must beware that what takes its place is not even worse. That is one aspect of Karl Popper's Law of Unin- tended Effect. We rejoiced at the implosion of the Soviet Union at the end of the 1980s, and the liberation of the Russian people from the long slavery of communism. We did not foresee that tyranny would be suc- ceeded by kleptocracy, and that where the KGB once inspired fear, its role would be taken over by crime, often employing the same people.
The Red Mafia now operates all over the world. People say it is a power in Lon- don. Certainly there are a lot of rich Rus- sians here, and, since Russia's currency is virtually worthless, they have not come by their spending money honestly. They are in Paris, Rome, Madrid and Berlin too, and there are more Russians squandering money in Monte Carlo than in the heyday of the spendthrift grand dukes before the first world war. They have sinister doppel- gangers too, so that when a billionaire banker burns to death in Monaco it is nat- ural, if mistaken, to assume that Russians did it. This new Mafia has had more suc- cess in penetrating governments than its KGB progenitor. It's odd that while the West spent a lot of money and energy combating Soviet intelligence, it has, until recently anyway, largely ignored the Red Mafia, which has been far more successful — yet another proof that private enter- prise works more efficiently than the pub- lic sector.
The original Mafia flourishes too. In the last year, after heroic but ultimately unsuc- cessful efforts to put leading mafiosi and their political stooges in jail, the Italian judiciary has abandoned its campaign. The. acquittal of Giulio Andreotti was the last straw. Ordinary Italians now grimly accept that their recent hopes of one day living in an honest country were a mirage, and that they will just have to go on paying up. It is much the same story in Spain, France,
Germany and Belgium (Greece, of course, has been a kleptocracy for a long time). Thanks to the EU, the wet-rot of corrup- tion has spread from the South to the North, so that one now hears bitter com- plaints even from Denmark and Sweden. The EU is itself a prime engine of corrup- tion. The exposure of its last Commission, bent from top to bottom, has achieved nothing. The new lot are just as bad, worse maybe. All EU institutions — the Commis- sion, the court, the bank, the parliament et al. — are swarming ant-hills of lobbyists and middlemen. A high proportion of the billions which pass through the EU ends up in the pockets of officials and parlia- mentarians and influence-pedlars of all kinds. Who gets it, and how much, we shall never know, since the EU is inadequately policed and audited, and no one is ever prosecuted or jailed. Euro slush-money sloshes about in the bilges of the various capitals, including London, and seeps through to the politicians and journalists. Show me a poverty-stricken Europhile who preaches from conviction. Is there such an animal?
Much of the endemic corruption springs from the political parties, which are now among the big spenders. The disease spread to Europe from America, where it has been a source of corruption since as far back as the 1820s, and among the Democrats at least is now more vicious than ever. I thought it a tragedy that Ken Starr, given the chance as Independent Counsel of investigating Beijing's contribu- tion to the Clinton campaign coffers in return for foreign-policy concessions, took the easy option of probing the President's sex life. So things are worse than ever across the Atlantic; and over here, especial- ly among the left-wing parties, the depreda- tions of the Clinton White House are seen as a model of how to do things and stay in power.
Party-political corruption is particularly insidious because a man who is too squeamish to fiddle for himself may be persuaded that it is right to fiddle for his party. That, I take it, is the lesson to draw from the scandal now surrounding ex-chan- cellor Kohl. Party fund-raising has been at the bottom of all the worst political crimes in Spain and France, as well as Germany and Italy. And of course a man who fiddles for his party will usually end by fiddling for
himself too. The disease has certainly spread here in recent years. It is another case of the Law of Unintended Effect. When we brought the unions back under the law, and Labour was freed from its total financial dependence on the barons, we little suspected that the cure would be worse than the disease. Labour's money- men began to raise funds on the open mar- ket, using the spoils of a future Labour government as collateral. They got Clin- ton's people to show them how. As they learned money-raising skills, so they acquired the taste for spending it, and now see money as the chief means to acquire office and keep it. Office means spoils, which sell for more funds, and so the cycle perpetuates itself.
On the other side of the ledger income — Labour has also been innovato- ry. It has, for instance, turned the House of Lords into a Labour money-raising institu- tion. Kicking out the hereditary peers will make it even easier for Labour to sell peer- ages on an enlarged scale. Even as it is, Tony Blair has outstripped all his predeces- sors in the rate at which he has made seats in Parliament — including Pitt the Younger, much criticised for the number of peers he made, and Lloyd George, who went down in the honours-for-sale scandal of 1922. Blair has already created 170 peers, over one a week on average. How many paid for their seats and titles? A third? A half? The sums which changed hands vary enormously. One rich grocer paid £3 million. At the other end of the range, a sharp lawyer got away with a mere £6,000. The rate for media peers seems to be £25,000. Businessmen pay much more.
In many ways we are back in the 18th century, when a rich man could buy a rot- ten borough and so become an MP for cash. A life peer, be it remembered, is a member of Parliament too, and once he has bought his peerage is there for life. Since it costs the taxpayer scores of millions of pounds a year to keep the peers in grandeur, Labour is actually getting the public to pay for its money-raising efforts. The higher honours are only one type of spoil. There are vast numbers of quangos, too, to which Labour is adding at the rate of one a month. So if Blair is serious in wishing to do something about the global spread of corruption, let him start in his own backyard.
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