Dr Tom Crook

How has corruption shaped - and undermined - the history of public life in modern Britain? This collection begins the task of piecing together this history over the past two and a half centuries, from the first assaults on Old Corruption and aristocratic privilege during the late eighteenth century through to the corruption scandals that blighted the worlds of Westminster and municipal government during the twentieth century.

It offers the first account that pays equal attention to the successes and limitations of anticorruption reforms and the shifting meanings of 'corruption'. It does so across a range of different sites - electoral, political and administrative, domestic and colonial - presenting new research on neglected areas of reform, while revisiting well known scandals and corrupt practices.

The year 1848 witnessed the arrival of the first dedicated official home for health policy in Whitehall, the General Board of Health. It marked the advent of a new era of central supervision and accountability in the making and implementation of British health policy. Between 1871 and 1919 the key central office was the Local Government Board.

Throughout this period health policy was always a plural formation, composed of a number of overlapping strands: sanitary reform and environmental health; industrial health and the health of children; state medicine and the control of infectious diseases; and welfare and health insurance.

This made for problems of institutional coordination and administrative clarity, however. The consolidated leadership of health policy proved elusive.  No particular central authority enjoyed a bird’s eye view of health policy across Britain as a whole.

The implementation of health policies was highly variable across time and space. This can be explained by a number of factors: the highly localized culture of administration; a pervasive commitment to economy; and active resistance from multiple groups, among them MPs, owners of capital, councillors and members of the public.       

These administrative problems should not obscure the considerable gains secured to the health outcomes for the British population. This, too, can be explained by a number of factors: the growing professionalization of health policy and its day-to-day implementation; the gradual accretion and refinement of permanent infrastructural and bureaucratic systems that set new standards of health care; and the scope for innovation and experimentation afforded by the relatively localized culture of administration.

This video essay introduces students to the necessity—and difficulty—of engaging with the concept of 'modernity': the quality of being modern. Reflecting recent literature on the subject, it suggests that the best way of understanding this contested concept is to accept that it is an essentially contradictory and complex social condition, one that is composed of a number of different processes that pull in different directions at the same time. It offers two examples of this: (i) urbanisation and the development of domestic privacy; and (ii) the growth of both bureaucracy and democracy.

This concluding chapter explores how the bigger historical picture opened up by the volume might be pursued further in the context of modern Britain. It does so by asking how we should explain the multiple and always problematic forms assumed by ‘the public’ within public health since its inception as a discrete field of government during the first half of the nineteenth century. The answer the chapter offers accords only a limited role to differing cultures of governance and the succession of liberal, social-democratic and neoliberal forms of statecraft. Of more importance, it suggests, has been the enduring interplay of a set of more basic, fundamental factors. The chapter highlights three in particular: democracy, by which is meant, loosely, considerations of citizenship and political subjectivity and inclusion; strategy, by which is meant considerations of organisational logistics and costs; and finally, epidemiology, by which is meant shifting distributions of morbidity and mortality. The chapter deals with each factor separately, but the argument is that they need to be grasped together if we are to understand why, and how, the public has proved such a problematic, yet central actor in the management of modern public health.

During the period 1815-1848, both Britain and France were constitutional monarchies, based on heavily restricted parliamentary franchises. Yet this did not prevent those excluded from the suffrage from participating in regular elections, which lasted for a few days, sometimes longer. This essay undertakes a comparative analysis of the extent and nature of popular involvement on either side of the Channel, and argues that the two countries were home to a broadly similar culture of elections. This culture was highly public, focused on a number of prominent towns, and festive. Crucially, we find the same variety of participatory forms afforded to non-electors in Britain and France: as spectators; as abusive members of a crowd; as violent partisans; as recipients of largesse; and as agents of mockery, ‘rough music’, and symbolic protest. Ironically, the advent of a wider franchise, which was accompanied by closely regulated and more confined electoral procedures, brought about the decline of this colourful culture. Nonetheless, the strength of this kind of popular electoral agency, beyond the vote, should not be exaggerated, for while a role for ordinary people was acknowledged, elections were decided by those wealthier citizens who monopolized the suffrage at this point. Ultimately, established power relations, though they might be challenged and mocked, were left intact.      

This final chapter summarises the key contributions that emerge from the volume as a whole and develops their significance in terms of how they might be used to rethink the bigger picture of how corruption has informed – and undermined – the making of a democratic state in modern Britain. In particular, it cautions against dominant social-scientific approaches and argues for the essentially political nature of corruption, both as an analytical category and as a problem of governance. It then turns to how the volume opens up new ways of engaging the historic peculiarities of the British case, arguing that existing social-scientific accounts fail to accord enough importance to the British Empire. Once we put the British Empire back into the picture, it suggests, we end up with a decidedly more complex, and above all critical, sense of Britain’s status as an historic pioneer of clean government. It ends by once more affirming the essentially political nature of corruption.

This introductory chapter sets out the aims of the volume and how it develops and challenges an existing body of work on the history of corruption and public life in modern Britain. Broadly speaking, it proceeds in two parts and is designed to help readers new to the subject negotiate what was become a complex field of study and historiography. The first part introduces readers to the concept of corruption, and provides a brief survey of how the term has been used in British public life from the early modern period through to the modern period covered by the book. Critiquing recent literature on this subject, it argues that although ‘corruption’ underwent a process of conceptual and regulatory refinement after roughly 1800, it remained highly politicised, reflecting the persistence of different ways of understandings the public good. The second part introduces readers to the key elements of British public life traversed in the chapters that follow and is more straightforwardly historical. These elements are: the central administrative state; the civic realm of elections and municipal government; and, finally, the party-political domain of ministers, MPs and Parliament.

This chapter argues that the problem of corruption mutated in some key respects during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In particular, it argues for the development of a new and essentially vigilant culture of reform, based on the assumption that all public office-holders, of whatever party-political stripe, were: (a) inevitably sustained by – and at the very least exposed to – networks and relations of financial self-interest; (b) were thus always and necessarily at risk of acting corruptly; and (c) that as such, they were constantly exposed to a speculative, cynical watchfulness on the part of the press and their political opponents. In short, though few regarded corruption as inevitable, it was at this juncture that the culture of liberal-patrician reformism that had done away with ‘Old Corruption’ was surpassed by one that took it for granted that corruption formed an ever-present object of party-based agitation and public cynicism. One example of this, the chapter suggests, is the new premium placed on ‘conflicts of interest’ and ensuring that there were no grounds whatsoever even for public suspicion (the ‘rule of Caesar’s wife’). But the argument is also developed through an examination of three key scandals centred on the Westminster elites: the Hooley affair (1898); the Kynoch affair (1900–01); and the Marconi scandal (1912–13). Overall, it suggests that the turn of the twentieth century should be seen as a key moment of transition in the politics and politicisation of corruption in public life.