The UK and US have sunk to new lows in a global index of corruption, amid a “worrying trend” of democratic institutions being eroded by political donations, cash for access and state targeting of campaigners and journalists.

Experts and businesspeople rated 182 countries based on their perception of corruption levels in the public sector to compile a league table that was bookended by Denmark at the top with the lowest levels of corruption and South Sudan at the bottom.

The Corruption Perceptions Index, organised by the campaign group Transparency International, identified an overall global deterioration, as 31 countries improved their score, while 50 declined.

In particular, the report identified backsliding in established democracies, warning that events during Donald Trump’s presidency and the revelations contained in the Epstein files could fuel further deterioration.

  • HamFistedVegan@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    20
    ·
    12 hours ago

    Transparency International highlighted the UK has slipped due to record spending on election campaigning . Labour, Conservatives and Reform have been guilty of this in various instances.

    It’s easy to blame a single party, as some commenters in here might, but this is very clearly a systemic issue.

    There need to be strict limits on campaign spending and absolute transparency about where that money has come from.

    No more overseas donors. No more Think Tanks taking donations for “research”, from opaque sources and funneling it back to the party.

    Politics needs to be cleaned up and freed from the grasp of these rich wankers who think because they have more money they can set the rules on how we as a people are governed.

  • CheeseNoodle@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    48
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    16 hours ago

    The country with a leader who accepts any and all bribes + the country with a leader so spineless that you don’t even need to pay him? Who’da thought?

    • realitista@lemmus.org
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      25
      ·
      15 hours ago

      Yeah the US should be a lot worse in this list than they are. They were just afraid to drop them so many points in a single year.

      • Viking_Hippie@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        5
        ·
        12 hours ago

        Being simultaneously spineless and desiring power tends to be a reliable indicator, though, and nobody who doesn’t desire power (for good reasons or bad) seek high political office.

    • HamFistedVegan@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      5
      arrow-down
      9
      ·
      15 hours ago

      a leader so spineless that you don’t even need to pay him? Who’da thought?

      Sorry but what do you mean by this? I’m struggling to see how this is bad. Would you rather a leader took all the money they could get their hands on? Because that’s how you end up with Trump.

      • hector@lemmy.today
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        edit-2
        9 hours ago

        Well how did it turn out with Biden? He handed the government over to fascists that are trying to fix their party into power permanently, and the whole nazi thing. All of the nazi thing. We knew they were going to do that, but our leader was to weak to do anything about it.

        He also let things get worse, let captured government continue to be so, to be corrupt. It absolutely is bad to have a spineless leader, now more than every. Starmer is a poster child for how our “left” options have been seized by the rich, and are corrupted enough, through weakness to oppose it as much as outright corrupted against freedom and western values, which Starmer IS. And if it wasn’t clear to you yet, that status quo governing leads to the far right running as reform winning. Not just in the US, in the UK, in France, it will happen everywhere unless we get popular reform. But, and no offense, you [redacted] motherfuckers don’t get it, keep defending and supporting these tools throwing us into the arms of fascists by surrendering us, and our ancient freedoms, to the oligarchy.

        • HamFistedVegan@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          arrow-down
          2
          ·
          8 hours ago

          I’m not quite sure what it was that I said to trigger that response but I was referring to a leader not accepting a salary to do the job, rather than a leader who doesn’t even have to take bribes which is what the user meant. It was a misunderstanding that was cleared up further in the comments.

          I have no idea what part of my comment you’re responding to though. I apologise of this isn’t the case but it looks to me as though you’ve interpreted something in a particular way and used that to go on an angry tirade against Kier Starmer and the rise of right wing politics.

          That’s fair enough but not what I was talking about. I’ll leave you to it.

          • hector@lemmy.today
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            3
            ·
            8 hours ago

            I am disagreeing with ‘Sorry but what do you mean by this? I’m struggling to see how this is bad. Would you rather a leader took all the money they could get their hands on? Because that’s how you end up with Trump. …’

            That how we ended up with this president is exactly by trusting leaders like Starmer to be the opposition to them. By allowing our captured political parties run as the status quo in a rapidly degenerating plutocracy, not only are they just running as the lesser of two evils, they are actively making things worse themselves. Never more true than with Starmer, guy has presided over more damage than happened in the last 20 years arguably.

            ie Losing the right to protest when disfavored, right to a jury trial for up to 3 years in prison, creating a masterbaitorbase to keep a database of every web page you considered whacking off to, age checks, which together with the porn laws are the most insidious, the trojan horse brought behind the walls of liberal democracy, with Peter Thiel’s crack soldiers hidden inside it so to speak. A surrender to the worst of the technofascists for a cut of the information and some control on whose secret social scores are what and how they are treated. Then bad faith terror proscriptions and other perversions of the justice system. Starmer is full on fascist, and it’s more insidious because the groups that most oppose it are “his side,” and therefore allowing the ancient freedoms of English Common Law to be taken from them, without a fight, by a captured political party of the oligarchy, that is throwing the country into the arms of fascists, in league with the US and Russia, that plan on fixing elections.

            Even if Reform doesn’t know they plan on fixing elections, even if you guys think that wouldn’t be accepted there, that is what is going to happen. And having powerful foreign intelligence agencies involved in your politics is extremely dangerous, not something to just slough off. All it takes is a leader to champion some popular reform, to sweep the country and negate the death of democracy in all but name to put the worst people in the world in charge indefinitely, but we still refuse to do that, believing the “safe” choice, is the sold out corporatists that no one likes and is actively betraying us, and western values.

            Sorry to be so long winded, I was just trying to explain to you where I was coming from in that, I could’ve written a whole lot more this is me holding back.