Britain is the most corrupt country in the world?
independent.co.uk
independent.co.uk
Hint: corruption isn't just about simple bribery and envelopes full of banknotes passing hand. Ask yourself why so many cabinet ministers retire and end up on the boards of large conglomerates that specialise in bidding for government outsourcing contracts, or why so many long-term viable agencies of government (the Post Office, the Land Registry, the National Air Traffic Control System, the NHS ...) find themselves in need of privatization in the name of "efficiency". You can make any agency -- however potentially profitable -- fail if you run it into the ground through deliberate mismanagement, then show a rebound improvement when you sell it (or the service it provides) off to your golf-course cronies. And when you roll up to the banquet later, there's no evidential chain that can prove beyond reasonable doubt that what you did was grand theft.
While I agree with you, I find the bare-faced cheek of publicly-advertised "donor clubs" that promise access to the Prime Minister for a mere £50k/year absolutely sickening:
> Labour has said that they would turn their backs on our nuclear deterrent, abolish our armed forces and has openly sympathised with terrorist groups who seek to destroy our way of life. Their policies for the continued economic recovery of our great nation should make alarm bells ring.
> Labour are steadily building an army of far left-wing supporters and we should ignore this at our peril.
What the actual? These people are bats.
Do you think they are planning a 70's style coup?
[NB I'm probably already on a watch list after paying for a book with a debit card (duh!) in a Sinn Féin shop in Belfast)]
They're just self-hating socialists.
However in this case, the tories are just scaremongering.
[1] They're not really socialist anymore, since Tony Blair & New Labour back in the 90s at least.
Ask yourself why so many cabinet ministers retire and end up on the boards of large conglomerates that specialise in bidding for government outsourcing contracts, or why so many long-term viable agencies of government
Doesn't this happen elsewhere too? Example - revolving door in financial institutions
(Pressure for social change tends to come from the young, voters skew old, so in practice many direct democracies tend to be very slow to adapt to widespread grassroots social change.)
It's worse than that. One small place didn't extend it till 1990.
And you may or may not have noticed, but most citizens don't seem to take the time to be up on the pros and cons for each and every provision of each and every piece of legislation that are debated today on the floor of parliamentary bodies.
In other words: it might solve what economists call the "principal-agent problem", but at a (potentially very high) cost.
A person who should not necessarily be considered a political system theorist once declared that freedom and democracy are incompatible. This may or may not be true, and for those pushing for democracy, maybe freedom is a non-issue from the start, but I think it needs to be at least considered whenever pushes for "moar democracy" come around.
-mandatory referendum each year (question added to referendum once enough votes have been gathered) - anyone avoiding taking a vote is fined.
-3 answers under each question - Yes, No and Not Voting (so people wont just cast votes for subjects they are not interested in)
-2/3rds votes needed to pass the vote (to avoid 51% vs 49% - votes that count are only yes or no votes, "Not Voting" is not included)
-Then once the system matures proper democracy should have vote strength system - lets say 3 stages. 1st stage gets 1 vote, 3rd stage gets 3 votes. Higher stage = less taxes and more votes. You work + do some community voluntary work + have no issues with criminal law = you are 3rd stage.
I'd like to see a feature that allowed cooler heads to prevail over time (like the US Senate was originally designed for). How would you keep the passions of the moment from being inflamed enough to blow by your almost super-majority rules?
In the US, you'd have problems getting your stage concept past "disparate impact" studies, but since we're speaking in hypotheticals anyway - this seems very Jeffersonian. How do you get something like this past the people who would cry (rightly or not) that your stage-3 continues to favor the historically privileged?
I would see many people avoiding doing the 40 hours of mandatory public work per year, so that would release them from being strong majority and their passion/patriotism would be graded this way.
Yes, public sector competence is very high but that's not exactly difficult in an authoritarian and highly educated city state.
If the Lee family have a cult of personality it's invisible to tourists too. And Cambridge didn't even put the thumb on the scales to let in the current generation of the royal family, you really think they care about the Lees?
Universities do this all the time, accepting children of foreign oligarchs who have CVs and test results padded with dubious measures. Why do you think the LSE brushed under the table Saif Gaddafi's ghostwritten doctorate? (a) because they didn't notice, or (b) the network effect of having the presumed (at that time) next dictator of Libya?
Cambridge never needed to put the thumbs on the scale for the current generation of the UK Royal Family because they never applied.
Lee Hsien Loong's story just seems like a propaganda story tailored for the perfect Singaporean technocrat (clever, driven, and can fit himself into any institution). While he's no idiot, his life could have been dreamed up by the North Koreans, a meteoric career in the army, receiving the title 'Chief Wrangler' at Cambridge. It sounds like propaganda.
Regardless Singapore has very low levels of corruption from what I have seen and experienced.
...or if you are interested just google it and read about it somewhere else.
If Singapore were corrupt it would be more like Malaysia (it used to be a part of Malaysia). Instead Singapore is an economic miracle surrounded by hostile countries. The anti-corruption culture Lee Kuan Yew developed permeates every layer of society here. Try bribe a Singaporean cop and see how far you get. My brother-in-law works for the Land Transport Authority. He will not discuss the details of any up-coming projects with anyone, not even close family members, for fear that word will get out and speculators will take advantage.
Finally if you think the chewing gum law is draconian I can't really help you. It is completely inconsequential and I say that as someone who likes to chew gum. More worrying are the corporal punishment laws, lack of press freedom and civil rights violations (gays sex is still illegal for example) however 2 of 3 of these problems also exist in the USA today and 1 in the UK.
There's other possibilities (low press freedom, etc).
The UK establishment have perfected the art of making the immoral legal. They are patient and wait for their reward.
Let's have another enquiry into it all! A "thorough" one that takes 5 years and costs millions only to find "systemic" issues with no individuals to blame.
The UK's USP is "no time for financial crime".
The banking system is where most of the world's wealth resides, and since the London banking system dominates most of the global financial system, a lot of dodgy dealings happen in London. If you move it to the jungles of deepest darkest Peru, then the deepest darkest jungles of Peru will become corrupt.
I'm as disappointed as anyone about the cesspool of immorality that is modern finance, but David Cameron passing a few laws or conducting some kind of investigation is not going to change human nature. These are essentially the same problems that the Ancient Romans and Greeks complained about.
I dislike this kind of argument. Sometimes you see it trotted out regarding crime, and that it's impossible to e.g. stop people killing or burgling or thieving in general.
Except - we're doing a pretty good job of reducing such crimes.
It's easy to write off pretty much well any undesirable action as being "human nature" and I implore you to reconsider.
> David Cameron passing a few laws or conducting some kind of investigation is not going to change human nature
I agree that change is possible, but it's not going to come from the top. We the people need to push for that kind of change, but half the population is too busy repeating the establishment's line that "it's all the fault of immigrants".
I'm doing a poor job of explaining myself; it's reasoning corruption as "human nature" that I have the bigger issue with.
(I do agree that few issues are ever going to be solved with politicians' soundbites!)
It's even harder to identify how to fix it. In North Korea, we could just say "wipe out the leaders and it will fix the problem". In the rich world, the cronies don't belong to any one family, country, or business. It's an international aristocracy consisting of 1000s of people.
I dunno, I'd say a lot of them in the UK went to Eton.
A few articles in The Guardian recently on neoliberalism: First, from Goerge Monbiot's book, "Neoliberalism – the ideology at the root of all our problems"
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/15/neoliberalism-...
and secondly "You’re witnessing the death of neoliberalism – from within"
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/may/31/witness...
Also, what is your definition of corruption?
"More than half of the companies listed in the leaked Mossack Fonseca documents are registered in the U.K. or its overseas territories [...] If we want to understand modern Britain, we first need to realize that our primary economic function in the world today is probably our network of tax havens."
http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/04/04/britains-empire-of-tax-e...
So around the world, basically, the good honest career politicians from Argentina to Zambia are going around to profitable businesses saying "hey, nice business you have there! We'd like to take, say, 50% of your profits, if you don't mind, and spend it on our friends - government contractors, public-sector unions and the like. All the donations to our campaign afterward are purely incidental, I assure you, and none of the subsidies or handouts we'll use your money for are vote-buying schemes, none at all. Thanks for your cooperation."
... and the UK provides places where they don't do that, not on the top-line profit anyway. Sure. I can see how having that would be attractive to both legitimate and illegitimate operators. Its net impact on corruption, though, would be a little tricky to sort out.
(Postscript. As I'm being moderated down without comment, I assume that those doing so are those privileged enough to be in a nice low-corruption Western economy where we have a slightly better grade of politician than, say, Dilma Rousseff and her legislature. So I wish to note that despite cynicism about world governments I retain due respect for anti-corporate sentiment as well...)
Hard to say. Depressing to think about.
source: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-01-27/the-world-...
Tax havens are the only defence against rapacious politicians who, unlike business people, do not suffer the ill effects of their policies. You can always get votes for promising bread and circuses! Do you think that's true or false? The enormous debt burdens we see across the world attest to that.
For those who enjoy looking at both sides: http://www.conservativehome.com//platform/2011/08/in-defence...
Tax havens aren't bastions of freedom. Load of rubbish. They are allowing massive inequalities and letting rogues plunder common wealth.
Did Abmramovich personally add billions in value? Or did he claim he, not the Russian people, "owned" much of Russia's oil and then washed a good part of it through London property?
The article also talks about British overseas territories as though their laws are written in Westminster. They aren't. All these places make their own tax laws without any reference to the British government. Is this mentioned anywhere in the article? No, instead it's spun as though it's all a Westminster plot. Suppose Westminster did start imposing laws on these territories, would the Independent be applauding this as an example of responsible action or condemning it as an illegal and unconstitutional abrogation of Britain's responsibility to protect the independence of these territories? I think we have a right to know their opinion on that.
Of course Britain has a responsibility to fight crime and work with other governments to crack down on abuses, but we can't singlehandedly be the policemen for the whole world.
It's not rich to criticise London if London is aware of or suspects that it's the Mafia they are dealing with and that the "legitimate" assets are simply laundered.
I also don't see why it's rich for an Italian to do the criticising. Perhaps you can explain that one.
It's rich because the police and banks in the UK can and do co-operate with the Italian authorities on criminal activities occurring in Italy, but at the end of the day the crime happened in Italy. Only someone with an axe to grind and predisposition against London would blame that on London.
Would this mean that the independence of "these territories" is dependent on Britain somehow? Quite an independence, heh? And now, Britain, the ultimate power that backs up the laws of the said territories can at the same claim to be absolved of whatever is happening under its protected domains? Astonishing, isn't it?
Er, no. Everyone needs their independence to be protected. Just ask Tibetans, or Kuwaitis, or most of Europe. The fact is these offshore havens being nominally under British protection doesn't make one iota of difference to their tax laws or whether or not the businesses registered there do business with Britain. In fact Britain loses tax revenue just as much as anyone else, and has been working hard for decades to get these havens to tighten up their rules. But unfortunately annoying things like facts don't match the narrative this article is trying to spin
By similar logic, I could claim that Washington DC is the most violent city in the world, because the illegal drug trade is very violent and drugs are illegal because of politicians and there are lots of politicians in Washington DC.
But banks' trustees aren't the public. It's their depositors, shareholders and customers. And by most accounts, they serve those reasonably well.
So yeah, they could maybe make a case that Britain is the most corrupting country in the world. But that is not the same thing. Compared to other nations, Britain's public trustees probably aren't so bad at serving the interests of the public.
Dave & Co have probably been the worst offenders in recent recent years for selling public assets and companies they have nationalized to buddies of theirs at massively discounted prices, beginning with the RBS.
"Oliver Holbourn, head of market investments at UKFI, said some City firms had even offered to pay the government to work on its privatisations."
"The banks, however, eventually concluded that such arrangements could be an offence under the US foreign corrupt practices act."
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/sep/08/mps-warn-uk...
What? I guess you have much evidence.
http://www.express.co.uk/finance/city/595769/RBS-privatisati...
I think anyone who had RBS shares before the bailout might disagree with you on that point!
Also, I wonder who the single largest shareholder of UK banks might be?
So what? Money corrupts, this is not news. In any economy where you have regions of the world that specialise, there will be regions with lots of banks.
The premise was that the banks of London launder huge amounts of drug money... I don't necessarily agree with this article but you're just avoiding the points it makes.
We can see the slide in the USA PATRIOT Act which removed the "knowingly" from the original definition. Now you can do money laundering without even being aware of it, under the American definition, simply by interacting with money that was earned by criminals.
Once they started chipping away at the mens rea requirement, the standards had to be redefined. Now it's not enough to avoid money you know to be criminal. You also have to avoid money you merely suspect might be criminal, lest it later on turn out to be the result of crime and you get sucked in after the fact. Hence banks turning away people who want to deposit cash. The fact that the cash has innocent origins is insufficient.
Then they went further and defined money laundering as failing to do 'enhanced due diligence' on any transactions related to a 'politically exposed person'. There is no clear definition of either term, meaning banks have to make it up as they go along. But the spirit of the law is that a PEP is anyone who might conceivably be corrupt. This was meant to fight corruption by forcing banks to investigate anyone who might be receiving bribes. With no definition and heavy penalties for non-compliance, which by this time is entirely in the eye of the beholder, private firms sprang up to compile blacklists of PEPs, some of which contain millions of people. There is of course no way to get yourself off such a blacklist.
Now throw sanctions compliance into the concept of money laundering and now you can be an evil corrupting money launderer simply by processing a payment from a firm in country A to a firm in country B where there are no laws in either country A or B against the trade, and the firm in country B is run by a guy who some powerful bureaucrat has decided is in some way shady. No evidence or trial is required and there's usually no way to get yourself off such sanctions lists. One US list of sanctioned people is simply a list of names with no other clarifying information, meaning people with generic names end up being treated as guilty-until-proven-innocent.
By the time we're done, you realise that every bank in the world is guilty of the modern definition of money laundering, simply by virtue of working with money.
If you're interested in the topic of abuse of AML laws, read the book "Treasuries War".
If you hear only the government's story and the other side is gagged, the listener will always conclude the perp is guilty. You can dig in and find the other side if you like: I did. The case looks a lot less clear, then. For instance HSBC was accused of laundering lots of money for Mexican drug cartels. Most people think that means "knowingly laundering". It doesn't: the money in question actually came from remittances firms. The American's case was something like this: there's so much money being remitted across the border, there must be drug money in there. HSBC is moving money for remittances firms. Therefore HSBC must be moving drug money without knowing. Therefore their AML standards are too low, therefore they are money laundering.
As you can see, I am not sympathetic to this kind of logic or "justice". Certainly the US case would not have been successful in court under the original definition as they never presented evidence any kind of conspiracy inside HSBC to launder drug money. The allegations revolved entirely around HSBC not trying hard enough, which is not the same thing.
Actual convictions for anti-money laundering offences are very rare. This kind of fine-and-silence outcome is much more common.
The reasons are simple. The current situation is kind of like a Cuban missile crisis. It's very volatile and unstable. Every banker knows that every banker is guilty of some kind of AML offence, because it's impossible to work in finance and not be guilty. The laws are just that badly written. What's more, western governments know this too. Almost every big bank has been fined under AML laws in the past 20 years or so.
But American justice is extremely vicious (and it's in America where the whole idea of anti-money-laundering originated). Like many laws, AML offences can carry 20 year jail sentences.
If you mix 20 year sentences with "everyone is guilty" you have a situation that is like a minefield. If the government actually started prosecuting bankers under these laws, there's a risk they might win and that could be apocalyptic - it could trigger a collapse of the entire financial system as bankers exited the industry en-masse.
In the HSBC case, one part of the US Gov (either Treasury or DoJ, I forget which) actually did want to prosecute. The other part convinced them not to, using the above logic. The chance of successfully jailing a banker is high enough that they can't actually do so, lest it cause the industry to self destruct.
HSBC was fined because it failed to follow the rules put in place to prevent money laundering. Often it completely failed to make any attempt to follow those rules. E.g.
"...The monitor’s findings described several incidents, among them one where an HSBC branch in Sinaloa, a Mexican state that has experienced much drug-related violence, opened a private-wealth account for a 19-year-old man who arrived with a bag containing thousands of dollars in cash. The man described himself as a shrimp farmer."
http://www.wsj.com/articles/hsbc-struggles-to-bring-money-la...
There was a consistent pattern of failing to flag, investigate, or report transactions that were clearly suspicious.
That's why HSBC was fined. There's no grey area here, and the laws aren't particularly onerous. They were simply ignored.
>it could trigger a collapse of the entire financial system as bankers exited the industry en-masse.
Considering the close association between banks and fraud/criminality, that would hardly be a bad thing.
So far in the UK we've had prosecutions for fraudulent mis-selling of payment protection insurance; fraudulent mis-selling of premium accounts; LIBOR rate fixing; forex rate fixing; and insider trading.
Last month DB settled out of court with traders who alleged - and provided evidence - of precious metal price fixing.
The entire financial industry is rotten to the core. It's the single biggest destroyer of genuine economic growth in the planetary economy, and it also has anti-democratic political influence which operates outside the usual constitutional checks and balances.
There is nothing remotely positive here. The industry needs to die, and it needs to be replaced by completely new structures and institutions that use the profit motive as an excuse for criminality in quite the same psychopathic ways.
First, failing to follow rules put in place to prevent money laundering is not itself money laundering. Just like failing to follow rules put in place to prevent traffic accidents is different than driving your car into someone.
Second, the true story is one degree removed even from what you say. A key element of the government's case against HSBC was that it classified Mexico as "standard or medium risk" when classifying it as high risk would have triggered additional controls intended to prevent money laundering: https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/opa/legacy/2012/... (pages 7-8). The government states that HSBC "should have known Mexico was high risk" based on various publications discussing money-laundering risks in Mexico.
HSBC was not an innocent party, but it was guilty of regulatory rather than criminal violations. It failed to put country X in risk category Y; it failed to adequately staff it's AML department, etc. For those regulatory violations, it paid a fine, which was the appropriate punishment.
Not quite. I said explicitly that all banks are guilty of violating AML laws, because it's impossible not to be guilty.
You then go ahead and prove my point: someone turned up with some cash, and gave an explanation of where he got it. The banker in question accepted the story and the monitor found it to be "clearly suspicious".
"Suspicious" is such a vague standard that nobody can ever comply with such laws. There will always be transactions that are debatable, grey area, or turn out to be suspicious in hindsight but weren't at the time. Your own example proves this: apparently if you ran a bank nobody would ever be able to open an account and deposit money there, which is a problem, because being able to do that is kind of the point of having banks.
The story you link to admits as such in the very next paragraph after the shrimp farmer quote:
Compliance officials who must decide whether a bank should open an account or extend a loan can face a tough job, having to make the call based on the movement of money through existing accounts or sketchy data such as local knowledge and material found online. Regulators want to see signs that compliance departments are at least flagging suspicious transactions and customers. That didn’t appear to happen in the Sinaloa matter.
Maybe people open accounts that way in this part of Mexico all the time? Heck, maybe the person who opened the account thought it was suspicious but was afraid of turning up inconveniently dead if he turned the guy down. It's very easy for Americans to sit around on their Aeron chair in nice safe Washington DC and criticise people on the front line of the drug war for not trying hard enough.
But I'm not sure I'm arguing with a reasonable person. Your response to "the banking system might collapse" is "that would hardly be a bad thing", which is a position so far out that I doubt you will ever change your mind. What's your intended alternative? Bitcoin?
That said, my focus in this thread has been on money laundering rules, not trading fraud.
Is all of the above just 'moving money for remittances firms'? Or is it the US govs propaganda, reprinted by the BBC?
Your comment just seems winding and lacking logic. First you argue that HSBC didn't really do anything wrong and then that the US gov didn't even want to prosecute them because they knew the consequences would be 'apocalyptic'. If these things are both true then why did HSBC settle out of court? Why did they publicly appologise? Why not just see the case through to save face and $1.9 billion.
The Americans took a novel position in that case: that because the payments were denominated in dollars and were processed by computers in New York, American sanctions should apply to foreign payments. They then proceeded to punish HSBC for "evading sanctions" that didn't actually exist. It did achieve one thing though: it sent a powerful message that US law is in fact international law.
Saying "Mexican banks should have been high risk instead of low risk" is the kind of subjective judgement call that highlighst my entire point. Maybe the high risk category was reserved for places like Congo or Nigeria or Pakistan, and Mexico - being a relatively stable state that engages in heavy trade with America - did not justify the same level of scrutiny as those.
My logic is very simple. The laws are so vague that any kind of activity can be retroactively labelled as 'suspicious' and thus illegal. But that is not the rule of law.
Your final paragraph shows you didn't understand what I wrote at all. HSBC is absolutely guilty of violating AML laws, as are all other banks, and if they went to court then a whole lot of bankers would have gone to prison for a long time ... just for engaging in the business of banking. This is not in the best interests of society because we then might find ourselves without banks, and neat though such a world might seem, we'd need an alternative first.
The public apology was a part of the plea bargain struck with the US Gov. They were forced to do it. You'd do the same if the alternative was spending the rest of your life rotting in jail.
The parent comment may or may not be correct (I honestly don't know), but author makes it really, really clear what his logic is, and it's nothing like it.
If you came to such a conclusion, it means that you skimmed through the comments above in 2 seconds, and not even trying to understand what was actually written.
I see this as an absolute. I don't really see how it can be otherwise.
This is the justification that sievebrain used for the selective application of what he considers to be poor laws.
I say we need to enforce poor laws too, because otherwise it's rule by men, not laws.
I thought it was based on the premise that:
London is the drug money laundering capital
of the world
90 per cent of drug cash ends up in
the US and Europe via London
criminal corporate activities within the City of
London which have dominated the headlines
over the past decade
an alternative metric for financial corruption
[puts Britain and its dependencies] top of the list
the four companies in line to buy [from the Government]
the UK Land Registry [which tracks the (often foreign)
ownership of UK properties] are all based in or have
close links to the offshore tax havens of Jersey,
Cayman Islands or Delaware
AKA:
powerful financial firms will destroy the lives
and reputations of whistleblowers [claiming] a
100% success rate
The BBC spoke to one such whistleblower who wrote
to the FSA [UK financial services regulator] on
numerous occasions with his concerns about
behaviour at his then-investment bank.
The FSA refused to act on the information
and even requested that the whistleblower
never contact them again.
This is about financial corruption; corruption in other spheres - police, judiciary and politics - is rife in the UK too.
The only question about whether the UK is the "worst" is whether other so-called open, accountable democracies are any better, which I doubt.
But it's about time we started putting our own house in order, instead of blindly pointing the finger at the usual suspects, poor developing countries, who can only dream of having corruption so established that it's not even referred to as such; and when someone does call it what it is, people instinctively write it off as "idiotic".
According to our whistleblowing source, who has been asked to give evidence to the new Parliamentary Committee on Banking Standards, set up in the wake of the Libor scandal in June, banks tend to take a very dim view of employees who break ranks.
"No risk manager wants to admit that he didn't do his job. So an unholy alliance of mutual self-interest kicks in," the source, who asked to remain anonymous, said. "So they'll do anything to bad-mouth a whistleblower as an underperformer. They have a 100% success record."
This is literally a figure of speech from a single guy who considers himself to have been "bad-mouthed as an underperformer", yet in the Independent article it became:
Powerful financial firms will destroy the lives and reputations of whistleblowers. Newsnight found they have a 100 per cent success rate
... which not only mis-attributes the quote but makes it sound like an actual statistic related to "destroying lives".
This is the worst piece of journalism I've seen for a while.
Here's another quote from it:
Newsnight can reveal that not a single UK-
based bank has ever been punished for firing
a whistleblower within its ranks - even though
these individuals are protected in law
The issue is that the UK has serious corruption and (organized) crime problems, seemingly tolerated (at best) at some of the highest levels in the UK.
However hyperbolic you may find the journalism to be, it's a lot more instructive and interesting than yet another bullshit list designed to show just how jolly honest and law abiding we are, compared to the developing world.
And yet you proffer no evidence.
Saviano is officially known in Italy to be a writer, way more than a journalist - actually he was completely unknown before his first book "Gomorra", which made him famous, and he admitted not to be "a journalist, (nor a reporter), ... but a writer" (http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/09/24/mafia-autho...). I would add that in Italy he is pretty known to be a good show-man, even more than a writer.
No, because the English are a race apart. No Englishman is too low to have scruples: no Englishman is high enough to be free from their tyranny. But every Englishman is born with a certain miraculous power that makes him master of the world. When he wants a thing, he never tells himself that he wants it. He waits patiently until there comes into his mind, no one knows how, a burning conviction that it is his moral and religious duty to conquer those who have got the thing he wants. Then he becomes irresistible.
Like the aristocrat, he does what pleases him and grabs what he wants: like the shopkeeper, he pursues his purpose with the industry and steadfastness that come from strong religious conviction and deep sense of moral responsibility. He is never at a loss for an effective moral attitude. As the great champion of freedom and national independence, he conquers and annexes half the world, and calls it Colonization. When he wants a new market for his adulterated Manchester goods, he sends a missionary to teach the natives the gospel of peace. The natives kill the missionary: he flies to arms in defence of Christianity; fights for it; conquers for it; and takes the market as a reward from heaven.
In defence of his island shores, he puts a chaplain on board his ship; nails a flag with a cross on it to his top-gallant mast; and sails to the ends of the earth, sinking, burning and destroying all who dispute the empire of the seas with him. He boasts that a slave is free the moment his foot touches British soil; and he sells the children of his poor at six years of age to work under the lash in his factories for sixteen hours a day. He makes two revolutions, and then declares war on our one in the name of law and order.
There is nothing so bad or so good that you will not find Englishmen doing it; but you will never find an Englishman in the wrong. He does everything on principle. He fights you on patriotic principles; he robs you on business principles; he enslaves you on imperial principles; he bullies you on manly principles; he supports his king on loyal principles, and cuts off his king's head on republican principles. His watchword is always duty; and he never forgets that the nation which lets its duty get on the opposite side to its interest is lost.
They should set this to music. Fuck Jerusalem.
There's nothing new under the sun, just the sensationalist Bremain propaganda you'd expect a few weeks before an EU referendum.
"The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist"
Also looking at you Switzerland.
You change the laws and you have tacit agreements over several years for payback. That's how "gentlemen" do it.
USA etc think they have it down. These boys have been running this sort of thing for a long time.
If we're going by most corrupt, the UK is absolutely not at the top of that list, nor is Spain, in regards to Europe.
I'll go with Transparency International's rankings of most corrupt in Europe, I find it far more plausible: Ukraine at #130 globally, Russia at #119 globally, Belarus at #107. Those last two are fascist dictatorships, the corruption is nearly absolute in terms of state power and abuse.
EDIT
Why the downvotes?
Factually incorrect? Don't think so: http://www.theguardian.com/news/2016/apr/07/david-cameron-ad...
You don't like it. Fine, but don't downvote it.
0 - https://www.gov.uk/tax-on-your-private-pension/pension-tax-r...
It's widely known Cameron's dad was in the PP but also that he was not a British politician. It still stinks but there's no evidence of David Cameron being directly involved.
> Cameron also admitted he did not know whether the £300,000 he inherited from his father had benefited from tax haven status due to part of his estate being based in a unit trust in Jersey.
Maybe he was not directly named in the papers, but he committed as much (or as little) corruption as the Spanish politicians.
The same can be said about this accusation since he doesn't provide evidence, just moral outrage. How do you measure corruption? How do you know that there is more crime-originated money in Jersey than in Moscou, Lagos or Caracas?
The corruption described is almost entirely contained within the area of high finance; it's not a very corrupt country from the perspective of the average John Bull. It is however quite deferential, which means that power and prestige let you get away with things.