Paliamentary Bribery Impoverishes a Nation

Truscott, Taylor, and the Misery of Millions. May 25th 2009

Two Lords have been suspended for allegedly offering to take money to change legislation. The trouble with bribery is that the millions who are victims of that original bribe are generally hidden from public view.
Take the many MPs who continue to take ‘Consultancy Fees’. It is, of course, a fancy word for a bribe. And the whole purpose of the bribe is to initiate, or to change legislation, so that a few benefit, and many suffer.
The former Labour MP, and television presenter, Brian Walden, once happily admitted that back in the sixties and seventies, he accepted a ‘Consultancy fee’ of two hundred pounds a week from a British Motor Manufacturer's Lobby. Two hundred a week is equal to two thousand a week today. A tidy sum. But what, on earth, could they have wanted for their money?
My guess is that they wanted a harsh tightening of the MOT Certificate test. They wanted tough ‘roadworthy’ tests to get all cars, seven years and older, off the road, so that people would be forced to buy new from BMC/British Leyland. Remember all those Austin 100 and Austin 1800, with ‘hydro-elastic suspension’ designed to collapse in seven years precisely, and Allegros who‘s wheels fell off? So badly-designed and short-lived were British cars, that the commercial way forward for sellers of cars, was to take older cars off the road. And so the MOT test became ludicrously severe, with older cars taken off the poorer people, on account of pin-holes in the floor-pan, or touches of rust, or slight play in a king-pin; - nothing that had anything to do with safety.
What was the impact of Walden’s little ‘consultant’s fee’? Well, I remember it. I was a student at that time. The MOT Test rapidly became so tough that scarcely a car passed. I lost one good car after another to the scrap heap as the MOT Garage detected minor and trifling ‘faults’, that had nothing to do with safety. It was such a scam.
I know this to be true because, in the nineteen eighties, the American State of Florida banned the MOT Test upon the grounds that it unfairly took old cars from the poorest people. They replaced it with a simple roadside check on brakes, lights and steering.
In desperation I took my Minicar to two differing garages in the City of Oxford. Both found eight faults, and quoted several hundred pounds for ‘repairs’. But only two of those imaginary faults were common to both garages. It was all a gigantic scam. Two hundred pounds a week to Walden, and three million of poorer folk had to pay hundreds of pounds a year for bogus repair to imaginary faults.
And that is the disproportionnality of bribery. Very few benefit, but millions suffer. In my work around the Third World (now called ‘Developing Countries’, which they are not!), I see the dead hand of bribery everywhere. The peoples of most African countries may be seen to work as hard or harder than those in the West, but a bribery is like a tea-spoonful of shit added to a cauldron of stew… it ruins the whole stew; the whole economy, no matter how hard people work.
The problem is that our hereditary system of choosing law-makers throws-up some of the dimmest and least socially aware people in the country. Frankly, they haven’t a clue concerning the social implication of changes in law. And so when some chancer with a fist-full of money sidles-up to an MP or a corrupt member of The Lords, with some wheedling request, quite reasonably put, to initiate or to alter legislation, you can be sure that millions of single parents, the elderly, the unemployed or the low-paid, will suffer years of misery.
The answer is to make ‘Consultancy Fees’ a thing of the past, and to bring-in legislation that any MP, in any circumstance, taking money to initiate or to alter legislation, serves an immediate one year in clink, and permanent dismissal from public life.

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