With corruption on the rise, here is the real solution

The annual update of the Index of Corruption sees the UK plummet from seventh place to 20th. It is a worrying yet unsurprising recognition of a decline in the expectation that the UK will operate as a democracy based on the consistent application rules and that people working to represent the public through our democracy will do just that.

The Index itself is maintained by Transparency International and is really a summary of perceptions more than a hard measure. A panel of ‘experts and businesspeople' assess what they see as the extent to which a nation is holding to anti-corruption standards. Yet it will reflect most people's perceptions.

There are two strands of increased corruption in Britain which are highlighted in the report. The first is the increasing influence of money on politics and the democratic process. It highlights increased corporate donations to political parties in the last General Election but there are enough revelations in the Epstein Files to question whether we were underestimating our levels of corruption before.

The interactions between incredibly powerful business interests and senior politicians simply do not look like the interactions politicians have with anyone else. There is a self-justification that giving privileged access to people with enormous amounts of money is a necessary part of governing. But it is not.

The second aspect of the decline is effectively about civil liberties and the continual crackdown on NGOs, campaigns and protests. This is in ample evidence, the constant ratcheting-up of anti-protest laws being the underpinning problem but the proscription of Palestine Action being the big ticket item.

Again, this is self-justified inside contemporary politics as necessary to 'protect' the wider public from 'disruption'. Indeed an economic argument is used to; that protest and disruption impacts on the functioning of the economy and so must be constrained for reasons for 'prosperity'. This isn't true either.

What doesn't appear on this list is international relations – to what extent is a nation behaving consistently and fairly on the international stage and operating on the basis of international laws and norms? This above all is being eroded just now. This erosion too is self-justified in contemporary political discourse as 'realpolitik' and is often described as 'grown up foreign relations' in contrast to an expectation laws will be followed which is described as 'student politics'.

Current orthodoxy is moving in the direction of belief that rules must be increasingly overlooked for the pursuit of self interest in corporate economics and foreign relations, and that this necessitates a crackdown on those who object to this weakening of rules for the super-wealthy.

It is part of a narrative of oligarchy which is now routine – whether it is celebrated or simply reluctantly recognised as a reality, we now have an ideology of national development which assumes that progress is all in the give or take of a small elite in society who must be bribed into 'giving' and never regulated to prevent them 'taking'.

There is zero reason to believe that Scotland's trajectory is any different. This has all taken place since 2015 and Scotland's reduction in transparency and accountability and the tempo of new scandals is well documented.

But there is some hope. Thirty-one countries improved their score this year which shows that corruption is not a unidirectional phenomenon, and there is something consistent about the countries which have the lowest levels of corruption: in order, Denmark (population 6 million), Finland (5.6 million), Singapore (6 million), New Zealand (5.5 million), Norway (5.6 million), Sweden (10.6 million) and Switzerland (9 million).

Singapore is a slightly different category because it is a pretty authoritarian state with some draconian anti-corruption laws, but generally states with low level of corruption are democratic, smaller in size , have strong civil liberties protections and highly internally decentralised with strong local government and greater citizen participation in democracy.

Rising elite corruption is not tackled by cracking down on those who protest against it but by strengthening a democratic system in which the people have stronger balance of power in comparison to centralised elites. The solution to corruption is less to do with anti-corruption laws and much more about pro-democracy ones - participatory democracy, direct citizen representation, proper local government and healthy civic cultures lined to democratic engagement. Our proposals for this are all outlined in some detail in Sorted.