Why politicians are such couch potatoes when it comes to corruption
HELLO AND GOODBYE
This is going to be my last newsletter for a while because I need to focus on writing my next book (about the fight against money laundering), so I’d like to start by thanking you for reading my weary and cynical thoughts every week, and to apologize for the fact I’m not going to keep sending them out.
Looking back at the last couple of years, I see that one of the key themes that I’ve been banging on about is the question of why Western governments fail to do anything (much) about corruption, despite the clear and obvious evidence that it makes all bad things worse. Is it incompetence — or corruption? Is the problem just too hard for honest people to solve? Are politicians themselves on the take, and thus personally invested in perpetuating the situation?
Or is it both of the above, plus something else entirely?
I had a meeting recently with a think tank employee who was tasked with coming up with some policy ideas for a senior British politician to announce at a party conference. As you are no doubt aware, Britain has a bit of a dirty money problem, so I was delighted to sit down with them. For anyone who’s read this newsletter before, you’ll have noticed that I regularly talk about the need to adequately resource law enforcement, so that’s what I led with. I described how ordinary police forces can’t investigate fraud because they lack trained officers, and how the national-level agencies fail to prosecute kleptocracy for the same reasons. If the politician wanted Britain to stop being “butler to the world,” what they really needed to do was announce a vast increase in funding and pledge to maintain funding levels for the foreseeable future.