Never in the history of sociology has so much been made of so little by so many.
I’m abroad at the moment, but I can hear triumphant noises thundering from our press as if they came from around the corner. Apparently University of Nottingham researchers staged a rather crude experiment proving that the Brits are the most honest people in His Creation.
About 2,500 students from different countries were locked up in a room with some dice and told to roll them. The higher the score, the greater the cash reward they would receive. Unbeknown to the guinea pigs, they were secretly videoed for the researchers to see if they were lying about their roll.
British students, just ahead of those from Sweden, Germany and Italy, were found to be the most honest, while those from Tanzania, China, Morocco and Vietnam the most cheating.
So far so good. Alas, the conclusions drawn from this exercise weren’t so much far-reaching as far-fetched.
Honesty, said the researchers with that Eureka smugness that’s their stock in trade, isn’t a universal trait. It depends on the corruption level in the country’s government. The more corrupt the politicians, the more dishonest the populace, and vice versa.
Actually, the presence of Italians among the most honest people should have alerted the academics to the foul-smelling rat somewhere. After all, in Italy the dividing line between government and organised crime is more smudged than anywhere else in Europe, this side of Russia.
But this is a minor matter. Much more worrying is the researchers’ obvious ignorance of what constitutes corruption in politics. They, along with even such respectable pundits as Tom Utley, seem to think that politicians who don’t take backhanders aren’t ipso facto corrupt.
By those standards, Edmund Burke, one of our history’s greatest parliamentarians and political thinkers, was crooked as a corkscrew — he accepted large donations for raising questions in Parliament. So large, in fact, that he could afford a sizeable estate in Buckinghamshire solely from the proceeds.
And Benjamin Disraeli was even worse: his aristocratic patrons actually gave him an estate down the road from Burke’s so that he could be gentlemanly enough to found the Conservative Party.
At the same time, a respectable pundit like Tom Utley is cloyingly proud that, with the possible exception of Tony Blair, our politicians are exemplars of incorruptibility. If only it were so.
If only Messrs Cameron, Osborne, Hague and their ilk practised fiscal corruption and no other. If only they could take a few quid here and there while discharging their duties with statesmanlike integrity, we’d be so much better off.
Even on the most elementary of levels, can you name off-hand a politician who, when in office, does all he promises when campaigning? Surely going back on a promise constitutes lying, which is rather the opposite of honesty?
I won’t bore you with the list of campaign promises and pledges all our PMs, including the present one, broke. The list would be way too long for this space.
But even that isn’t as bad as their corruption goes. For every day of their miserable lives they corrupt the very constitutional integrity of the realm in their charge.
They routinely corrupt Britain’s sovereignty, an effort of which Cameron’s cynically mendacious IN campaign is a glaring example.
They corrupt Britain’s financial integrity, saddling future generations with a ruinous debt that can never be repaid and that already costs us more than our defence budget to service.
They corrupt Britain’s security by refusing to spend enough on defence, laying the country bare to attack.
They corrupt British families by creating a welfare system that makes the father redundant, by encouraging cohabitation instead of marriage and by promoting homosexual marriage that destroys the very notion of matrimony.
They corrupt Britain’s education by failing to teach children to read and write, while stuffing their heads full of subversive, egalitarian, multi-culti rubbish.
They corrupt Britain’s ancient institutions by destroying the Lords and reducing Parliament to the dictatorship of the Commons, stuffed to the gunwales with unprincipled spivocrats.
They, with their Midas touch in reverse, corrupt everything they can — and our pundits, including such respectable ones as Tom Utley, scream hosannas because our spivs don’t take bribes, thereby allegedly setting a shining example of incorruptibility for us all.
I wonder how many of those British students who didn’t lie about their dice rolls think it’s perfectly fine for the state to marginalise the church, to operate its finances as a pyramid scheme, to turn Her Majesty the Queen into merely an EU citizen, to teach pupils how to use condoms instead of how to add up, to have an army barely fit to perform police duties, to legalise homosexual marriage, to abort hundreds of thousands of foetuses every year, to admit millions of cultural aliens, to… well, this can go on indefinitely.
My bet is that most of them do, because these are the sort of things they learn from our ‘incorruptible’ politicians and our respectable pundits. If this is honesty, I’ll take corruption any day. And twice on Sundays.