Simon Kuper
speaker
89 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Sep 2024
last heard 4 Jun
Simon Kuper’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
The issue is that four countries in those lists are expected to play in the FIFA World Cup and play matches here in the US.
I'm talking about Iran and Haiti, who are under the full travel ban, and Cote d'Ivoire and Senegal, who are under the partial ban.
It's something I'm getting used to, yes. I just dived into corruption when I began researching this book. I was astounded how much there was that everybody just seems to live with. And now I talk about it.
Sleaze is a British euphemism because British people don't want to say that there's corruption in Britain because corruption obviously only you have in Brazil or Russia and bad countries. In Britain, we can't have that. So sleaze is a way of making it sound sort of titillating, tabloid headlines. Corruption is, I'm using the World Bank definition, abuse of public office for private gain.
So if you're an MP or a civil servant or you could be a doctor or a police officer, you'd use that office to make money for yourself. And that can be completely legal. So we have ex-prime ministers who go off and work for Saudi Arabia, Kazakhstan, try and go into business with China, etc. It's legal, but they're still monetizing their office. So to me, that's corrupt.
I think it's incredibly stupid. That would be my sense. It is a form of corruption in that, you know, because you have office, you're leader of the opposition, you get some free clothes. But it's not such a big deal. I mean, he could have bought the clothes. He could have paid Arsenal for the box.
And so instead of drawing a sharp contrast between a conservative government where there were terrible cases of corruption, most of all the COVID VIP lane, then you could come in and say, we don't do that. And somebody wants to give you free clothes. And you say, no, we don't accept free clothes. I'd like them, but can't do it.
It would just have been so easy and it's incredibly stupid to have lost that moral lead and to have set a tone that people are going to remember for years.
Pretty much, yeah. That's the British system. You phrase it very well. Anything goes as long as you declare it. That sounds like The Purge. Yeah. You know, this phrase that transparency is the best disinfectant, which is nonsense because you'd be completely transparent. You took a donation from some crook. You put it on the register. You hope that nobody will check it.
You know, there's fewer and fewer sort of local journalists if you're an MP in the Northeast, say, who will go through that. So mostly anything goes as long as you can declare it is right. And they didn't even declare some of this, which is also odd. Right.
I think he has a point that when I was researching corruption under the conservatives, there was so much of it that each scandal would displace the next one. So Sunak got helicopter rides from a donor who later got into legal problems. And, you know, this lives and dies a couple of days in the newspaper. And then there's some other terrible scandal.
Boris Johnson goes and meets the Venezuelan dictator paid by a hedge fund manager. So the main Tory donor, Frank Hester, who I think is the largest donor to any political party in the history of British policies, gave the Conservatives about 15 million, comes out that he said the terribly racist and misogynistic things about Diane Abbott, Labour MP.
And, you know, it's a story for a few days and then it's completely faded. So it's true. I mean, I think Steve Bannon coined the phrase, you flood the zone with shit. I don't think the Tories were deliberately doing that. but it works very well as a distraction tactic. You say they had a sort of conveniently timed bout of diarrhoea?
I think by the end of the Conservative government, they didn't have a shared project anymore. They didn't believe in the same thing. They didn't really try to pass any laws and they knew they were going to lose. So it was each person for themselves. Just grab all you can.
Yeah, that's Bannon's. Yeah, it applies to media strategy. So if there's a bad scandal about you, you just create another scandal or five others, five other stories. And the problem with Labour is that this story has stuck for a week, 10 days, and people dig further and then there's a new item of clothing
It's impossible to measure corruption exactly because by definition, most of it is hidden.
You don't go out and declare, well, I, you know, I stole various things from government this week. So the best approach is a transparency international corruption perceptions index where they ask people who are exposed in particular countries, you know, how much corruption do you think there is in that country? You also get surveys of people, have you paid bribes?
To which in Britain the answer is almost invariably no. I mean, there's almost nobody in Britain who's ever paid a bribe. You don't have to bribe a nurse or a police officer in Britain. And so Britain was with a cohort of Northern European countries.
I think about a decade ago it would have been considered one of the better ones in this Northern European cohort, now considered one of the worst in that particular cohort. So it's not going to be Nigeria, it's not going to be Russia, but it doesn't really compare with, say, Denmark anymore, which is a very clean country.
It's fallen quite sharply in just a few years down the Transparency International Rankings.
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