Hi, everyone and welcome to this latest issue of the Brexit and Beyond podcast, brought to you by the UK in a changing Europe.

And I'm absolutely chuffed to have with me today,

Elizabeth David Barrett, who is Professor of Government and Integrity. There's a title at the University

of Sussex. Liz, how are you doing? Great. Good morning. Good to see you. Yeah, nice to see you too.

And Liz is an expert on corruption, which might give you a clue as to what we're going

to talk about today. Corruption is a word that has been bandied about quite a lot of late. It's been

used by John Major. It's been used by a lot of commentators. What, as a social scientist,

do you think corruption means? So I think corruption is the abuse of entrusted power for private

gain. So it applies to people who have been trusted to do some kind of role. Often that's a

public office role but doesn't necessarily have to be it. And then they abuse that power and the

powers that are associated with that role. And they

abused them not just in a way that's kind of incompetent, but the idea of the abuse is that

they're doing it because they're motivated by some kind of private gain. Private gain might be

money, but it might be favours. So it doesn't necessarily need to be a sort of material gain,

but some kind of personal private gain

that's motivating that abuse. And is one of the problems with fingering corruption, the fact that

given that definition, it depends on motive, and that's always quite hard to us to say?

Absolutely. And there are different sorts of motive too and different degrees of motive, I think.

So I think there's always an interesting distinction between, you know, did you mean to break the rules?

And then with what intention did you mean to break the rules?

And that's, I think, actually something that came up quite recently in that discussion of the Owen Patterson case.

It was very clear that he probably

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