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Lord Peter Hain in conversation with the Vice-Chancellor

• Video transcript

  Transcript starts

  Elizabeth (Buzz) Harrison: Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to this first event in our Sussex School for Progressive Futures Launch Series. For those of you who don't know, my name is Buzz Harrison, and I'm the Dean of the Sussex School for Progressive Futures. The School is the University's new flagship hub for interdisciplinary education, research and global engagement. And our three transformational themes that are underlying the Sussex 2035 strategy. These are digital and data futures, environmental sustainability and human flourishing. Over the last few months, we've been busy setting up the school. This included, moving into our wonderful new space in the Library, which we can be using for, for meetings and for public events. Also curating an interdisciplinary teaching offer, including new flagship first year electives in each of our three themes. We've been supporting and amplifying, research and innovation across the four Faculties. And helping to ensure that our students are equipped for global citizenship and for life and work in the changing world. As I said, we're developing a programme of launch events in each of our three themes. Our next event after this one, is entitled 'From despair to action: building progressive futures.' And it will involve our Professor of Practice in Environmental Sustainability, Caroline Lucas, alongside a range of other speakers. So put it in your diary. It will be here in the ACCA on February the 18th at 5:30 pm. And there's information on the ACCA website about that. So for our first event today, we're delighted to welcome Lord Peter Hain, Sussex alumnus, anti-apartheid activist and former government Cabinet member, in conversation with our Vice-Chancellor, Professor Sasha Roseneil. They'll be discussing ideas from Peter's new book, Liberation and Corruption Why Freedom Movements Fail. And you can buy a signed copy of the book in the foyer at the end of this session. From my perspective, the book raises really important questions through, at the heart of the challenges of achieving human flourishing. These include not only the significance of historical legacies, but also the ways in which struggles for power can undermine well-intentioned ideals, of human rights and of social justice. However, I am sure that these are themes which, Sasha and Peter, are going to be picking up on. And so I now hand the floor to you. Over to you.

  Sasha Roseneil: Thank you very much, Buzz. This is actually a very special moment, I think, in the life of the University, not just because we've got one of our most distinguished alumni back here to talk to us, but because this is the first real kind of public event of the Sussex School for Progressive Futures. So thank you all for coming along. And especially Peter, thank you for coming. It's wonderful to welcome you back to Sussex. For those of you that don't know, and I think probably there's probably a mixture in the audience of people who know quite a lot about Peter Hain and others who don't, because I can see quite an intergenerational mix. The Right Honourable Lord Peter Hain, was born in Kenya, to South African parents who were anti-apartheid activists. And you came together to the UK from South Africa. You were a teenager at the time. You'd actually grown up, before that, in Pretoria. And in fact, you've written a book called A Pretoria Boy about that. Peter became very rapidly a very well-known anti-fascist and anti-apartheid campaigner in the 1970s and onward from there. And, you were a student at Sussex. We'll talk a little bit about that. And there's quite an interesting, maybe quite difficult story about that. So we'll ask, ask you about that in a minute. But you've also had, really quite an incredible political career in, in the last 30 years. More than 30 years. You were elected to Parliament, as a member, Labour member for Neath in 1991, and held shadow ministerial roles. Initially serving in Tony Blair's government as a junior minister in the Wales Office. In 2001, you moved briefly to the Department of Trade and Industry, before returning to the Foreign Office as Minister for Europe, and becoming a member of the Privy Council. You later became, in 2002, Secretary of State for Wales as a member of the Cabinet, but also continued to represent the UK at the Convention on the Future of Europe. And in 2003, you became Leader of the House of Commons and Lord Privy Seal, which is an obscure concept, I think, to many non-Brits,

  Peter Hain: Very obscure.

  Sasha: in a cabinet reshuffle, but retaining the Wales portfolio, after the 2005 general election, you were appointed as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland by Tony Blair, whilst also retaining Wales. And you played a big role in negotiating the settlement, in relation to Northern Ireland particularly from 2007. You've also served as Secretary of State for Work and Pensions. Also continuing to contain responsibility for Wales. And, at the department of DWP, you were particularly involved in setting compensation for the taxpayer-funded Financial Assistance Scheme. Similar to that, the industry-funded Pension Protection Fund for those whose schemes had collapsed before that. And this was hugely important to people who had lost pensions, either because their employers became insolvent, or that couldn't, employers that couldn't pay their debts to their pension schemes. So really important with reform there, you served before 2015 then as an MP for almost 25 years,  in a number of different cabinet roles. But you're now in the House of Lords,  you're a Lord. And currently, a backbench peer serving also on the Northern Ireland Scrutiny Committee still and continue to be very active in scrutinising legislation and contributing regularly to debates. We gave you an honorary degree from Sussex a few years ago a, 2023, which was, I think, a great honour for us to recognise your career as a very distinguished, alumnus who really, had spent quite a bit of time at Sussex. And you continue to be part of our Sussex community. Just very recently, you very kindly hosted the launch of Research Plus in the House of Lords, which is our new group of research-focused universities. And it was great to have your support there, and have you speaking with us. But along with all this, I mean, this is what is most phenomenal, Peter has written 29 books. I mean, it just blows my mind. You know, our most prolific academics rarely ever get anywhere near that. You're doing this alongside holding really major political roles that involve a lot of travel. And, we are here to talk particularly about this book: Liberation and Corruption: Why Freedom Movements Fail, which has recently been published. But it's I mean, there is so much more. You've also written a number of thrillers. You've written an autobiography, A Pretoria boy. You wrote a book called A Putney Plot?, which I'll come onto in a moment. Books about sport, racism and resistance. Again, related to things you've been involved in. You've ranged, you know, across sort of politics, biography, history, and, you know, a really sharp political analysis, as well as, you know, writing a very substantial number of fiction books. It's really quite phenomenal. I don't know where, how you get the time. And, all in all, it's an enormous contribution. It's absolutely phenomenal. Now, I'm not going to say it all started at Sussex. It didn't clearly it started. You know, you were born in Kenya. You had your early childhood, in South Africa. You clearly had really interesting parents, but you had quite an interesting time when you were at Sussex. Could we start off by you just telling us a bit about how you came to be at Sussex, what you were doing and what happened during the time you were here?

  Peter: Well, first of all, thank you for hosting me and thank you for all coming. My mother-in-law had a very dim view of the title of Lord. She was devout Catholic, and I said to her, you're going to have to call me the good Lord. And she said to me, I can't think of anybody less like a good lord than you. Anyway, I loved my time at Sussex, save for one particular dramatic incident when I was charged. I just started typing up because in those days you had typewriters in October 1975, the first chapter of my PhD, and there was a knock on the door and I was arrested for a bank theft that I knew nothing about. And this rather completely wrecked the rest of the year. This is my third year and so I had to abandon the PhD, and that was later converted into an MPhil. So I did graduate from from this university, but I loved my time here. But that was the incident that completely changed everything. I should just say I knew nothing about this bank theft. It was. I'm not just saying that to you, it's genuine. But it was, committed, it was shown later by a South Africa agent of apartheid who looked rather likely, and they were trying to set me up, which they managed to do because I landed up in the Old Bailey for two weeks. But that rather, I mean, it just took over my life, and that meant that I couldn't finish my PhD.

  Sasha: And can I ask about your anti-apartheid activism? What, what were you doing? So some of us actually remember, but there are younger members of the audience and perhaps people who weren't,  weren't attuned to what was going on, can you tell us a bit about your involvement?

  Peter: Well, I was always sports, sports fanatic and brought up in South Africa. I mean, the Kenya thing was just was a tiny baby, really. My parents are both South African-born, and they came back to to South Africa with me when I was still a baby. And they got more and more involved in anti-apartheid activism. But, to the point where my mother was banned, issued with a banning order, they were both jailed in 1961 when I was 11 years old, and working in the early hours to explain that had happened, which was pretty scary. Then my mother was banned, then my father was banned, and then they stopped him working, as an architect, and we had to come into exile. But I was always keen on sport. And when I got here, increasingly, as I got a bit older, I became focused on the idea of stopping race, a sport, because in those days, South African teams were all white. You couldn't represent your country if you weren't white, and I remember the Head of South African Rugby saying in 1969 "over my dead body will there ever be a Black Springbok." Well, of course, a Black Springbok captain lifted the World Cup trophy in 2019 and 2024, which, you know is in the sense what we were aiming for. But I focused on sports and I thought, let's use the the non-violent direct action of the late 60s. There were the student occupations, there was in the US, But it's difficult to imagine what would happen if there was a student occupation in the US now. I think Trump would send, you know, aircraft carriers onto campus or something. But, so there was the idea of employing non-violent direct action. There was the Paris student revolt as well, to sport and running on the pitch and, being lifted off and doing all sorts of other things. Well, we, we booked a, a young woman's woman into the Springbok hotel in central London in the middle of the tour, and she discovered it wasn't terribly difficult because they all were very friendly with us. She was extremely attractive. I don't mean that in any kind of, sort of objectified, objectifying way. She just was. And, so all the Springboks were all over her, and she found out where they were staying and injected, solidifying agents to their door locks in the early hours of the morning so they couldn't get out, of the without breaking the doors down. Now, this is on the morning when there is an international. Then we got a guy who was dressed in a suit, which none of us were at the time, and I certainly wasn't when I was a student on this campus, in the early 70s, who was wearing a suit, who went on, climbed onto the Springbok coach, which engine idling, asked the driver to come in and talk to the management took over the coach, chained himself to the steering wheel, drove it off and crashed. Not surprisingly, the Springboks lost to England. Which doesn't happen very much these days, but, so, it was that kind of thing what we were doing. There wasn't violence, but it was militant and it stopped the cricket tour, which was the objective, and it more or less wrecked the rugby tour to the point where there would never was a cricket tour or rugby tour again until Nelson Mandela came out of prison and the transformation began.

  Sasha: So you came to, you came to Sussex to do a PhD, what was your PhD about?

  Peter: It was in, the social sciences, the Institute for Social Sciences or whatever it's called. And it was about neighbourhood participation. So it was about local direct democracy. And that involved studying and do my empirical research in London, but on the back of very good teaching at the, at the University and supervision and so on.

  Sasha: And I mean, Sussex at that point had had a number of South African students in exile.

  Peter: Yeah.

  Sasha: Were you aware of that? Was that part of why you chose to come to Sussex?

  Peter: It wasn't really. There were other reasons. But you had the former president, who succeeded Nelson Mandela Thabo Mbeki; Aziz Pahad became a foreign minister, his brother, Essop Pahad, Essop Pahad, who was a senior minister in the presidency under Mbeki and like his sort of, senior ministry at every respect. So there were a number of anti-apartheid activists who came here before me, actually in the 60s.

  Sasha: But that wasn't what drew you to Sussex?

  Peter: Not especially. I was aware of that. But, there were other, other reasons why I ended up here.

  Sasha: Okay. I mean, there is this remarkable fact that half of Nelson Mandela's first cabinet had studied at Sussex. Yeah, which is really quite phenomenal. But it's also interesting that that wasn't why you came here. So you, you are, of course, now part of that sort of South African Sussex link. Let's get on to your book, your most recent book, Liberation and Corruption, for sale outside at reduced price, and you get it signed. It's, it's a really good read. But it's also, it's also a kind of significant analysis of, the, the significant problem of the kind of disappointment of hope, for political, social, economic change, that comes about, has come about in many countries, when movements of resistance, liberation movements, post-colonial movements come to power, displace the previous authoritarian or colonial regime and, either quite quickly or either don't manage to achieve change or achieve some change and then sort of slip back. So, I mean, I find it a really powerful analysis and actually full of things I didn't know about. Rather, I felt rather ashamed, but I didn't know quite how bad the problem of corruption is globally. But could you say something to start off with about why you wrote this book? Why? Why do you care so much? Why does it matter so much amongst all the other, amongst all the other things you've been writing about, you wrote a whole book on this?

  Peter: Well, I became haunted by the fact that, you know, the anti-apartheid movement, including on this campus, had been massively supported across the world. I say massively, it was always a minority movement, like all, radical change movements are. The suffragettes are praised now, but they were in the minority, vilified at the time. And so we had a lot of people who were rallying to the cause, and I was one of them. And I had then, post-Mandela and especially under former President Zuma, the corruption became absolutely all-embracing in and they say official, rots from the head. And of course the the president was corrupt and he had his business creditors. And then I looked at, Nicaragua and became, and I remember posters of of the Sandinista liberation movement, Daniel Ortega, you nodding, so you remember them within your university. I remember them here, You know, in the the Students' Union along with Mandela. They were the, he was a pinup of of of, radical opinion. And when he got, he's now a corrupt, misogynistic, nepotistic dictator. So I thought, well, you know, we marched, we struggled in my case, and others with this risk quite a lot, and, why did this happen? And the easy answer would be, oh, well, you know, left-wing liberation movements become corrupt in power like happened in Eastern Central Europe in the former Soviet satellites, which I touch upon. But it's much more complex. And so as I searched for the answer, and I didn't really know fully the answer that you've been kind enough to, to the sort of, praise, I realised that actually the corruption that is almost ubiquitous in these countries, whether they've had absolute actual liberation movements like South Africa, the ANC or Nicaragua and the Sandinistas and many others, or independence movements like Gandhi's movements in India, which I look at, when they get into office, they become corrupt. And what what I realised and I think this is explained, I hope so it's explained that colonialism was deeply corrupt, and I explained that. Apartheid was deeply corrupt. Some white opinion says, well, apartheid may have been brutal. I've seen this, you know, written, but at least it wasn't corrupt. No, it was deeply corrupt. Deeply, deeply corrupt. So what you find is these well-intentioned liberation movements as you as you indicated or as Buzz indicated, fighting for social justice and human rights and so on, then inherits a corrupt system which seems to suck them in and the same with, you know, India, The Congress Party, which had been so heroic under Gandhi, became corrupt in power and eventually lost office for that reason. And the ANC supporters crumbled, and so for the first time in 2024, they lost power. Now, the great thing to its great credit, South Africa and the ANC is when they lost power, they accepted that. In too many places you lose power, you don't accept it and you retrospectively rigged the election like, you know has happened in Zimbabwe consistently. So that was, I suppose, a search for an answer and discovering that actually colonialism was corrupt, explaining that, the systems that, for example, the Nicaragua, the Sandinistas, when they took power, they took power in a corrupt system and thus they and this is part of the picture, too. You know, we actually we in this country, China and the UAE and a lot of other countries actually facilitate this corruption because just to give you one, sort of fact, the statistics are explained in the book, Africa is supposedly a recipient of fantastic global North largesse in overseas aid and development funding. And that's true, but more money is robbed from Africans, is looted from Africans and finds its way into London and, and Dubai and Hong Kong and other places by the Global North countries because the looters don't want to keep it in their own country. They want to invest it in the London property market or wherever it might be where, where they think it's safer and gives them a better return. So this is a story which starts off in the way that I describe, it ends up saying, actually, we are all complicit and if we don't do something about it, there's no good complaining about corruption. Five, 6000 miles away in South Africa in this case, or in Nicaragua case, a sort of distance away. You've got to actually realise your own complicity.

  Sasha: I mean, your point of that, how corruption is undermining so undermining, you know, attempts at, aid intervention was was a very powerful one. But, I mean, I think your attempt to sort of show the networks of corruption across the world too, is so important, you know, any sort of sense of sort of Global North superiority about, corruption in the Global South, you really do not let that stand in this book.

  Peter: No, I mean.

  Sasha: Because that's that's very easy, isn't it?

  Peter: It is.

  Sasha:  It's a very easy kind of, well, those countries are all very corrupt

  Peter: Black Africans, they don't corrupt.

  Sasha: Not at all.

  Peter: It's not that they're more innately corrupt than white British.

  Sasha: Yeah.

  Peter: And we saw what happened on the Covid, which I have a whole section.

  Sasha: You do. I wanted to come to that because I say, actually you know, it's not just that you're looking at the kind of global flows of corruption,  which I think is hugely important and the, the ways in which so many kind of global multinational companies, household names, including audit companies, and global consultancy firms. Yes. You know, a whole range of those kind of organisations are deeply complicit. And the banks, you know, the kind of, global banks are involved in that sort of network of corruption. But, you know, you do not let Britain off at all or France and Spain, you know, they get a lot of attention. And, you know, I suppose I remember Covid is a bit of a blur, isn't it, for everyone. It's like what, what went on during those sort of two years? But, you know, the Covid PPE scandal, the kind of corruption in, at the heart of government during Covid. You talk about that a fair bit. I mean, is that something that you've, you got very interested in at the time or is it.

  Peter: Well, I thought it was important. I sort of was aware of it at the time, but I think it was important to point out that this is not a problem just for faraway countries or former colonies, of European powers. It's actually a something that every country, every society can be prone to or tempted by corruption. And it is, it happens, you know, and I mean, we have the famous case of a of a member of the House of Lords who was involved in all sorts of shenanigans and denied it, and then had to admit it, and is now being sort of doesn't ever appear. But then lots of lots of Lords don't appear. Perhaps the most famous one is Ian Botham, who I think was enabled by Boris Johnson, but I just mentioned that in passing, by the way, that's gone. But, the people and so there are over 800 peers, over 800, and we're the second largest legislature in the world after the People's Congress of the Republic of China. So it it's completely indefensible. And now, now there's, you know, having abolished the. Sorry, I'm getting on to a rant about the House of Lords, but, having abolished the the last two, 92 hereditary peers who all and the Conservative Party was just kicking and screaming about this and being really difficult. So, they were all saying, we've got to reform the whole place, and you're only doing this one thing. So we now say, fine, let's look at participation and age. You know, you've got some pretty ancient people there, even older than me, and I'm 76 coming on 76, though, but there's some people who, to be blunt, a bit gaga, and, and they shouldn't be there, and, and others who just don't. There are others who work very hard, who speak a lot, whatever their age. some of them in the late 80s or early 90s, so are giving ageist point.

  Sasha: And some of them are Sussex alum.

  Peter: Some are Sussex alumni. Yeah. And of course they work very hard, the Sussex alum, but so I think it desperately needs reform. But the point I'm, I'm making is that wherever you look in every part of the world, corruption occurs. But I think this particular phenomenon that I'm focusing on here of liberation and independence movements is a post-colonial product phenomenon.

  Sasha: I mean, there's something, I suppose, about the dashed hopes, the, the disappointment, the, the lives lost, the lives dedicated to struggle, you know, that is that accumulates through kind of activism and the hope that's invested in the future, and then the disappointment, the despair when that is not, you know, when it's undone or it's not fully realised. I mean, is that is that part of what motivated this for you? Is there a kind of...

  Peter: Yes. It was, a feeling that, you know, we didn't fight to struggle in the anti-apartheid struggle. All those who were active in the in the Nicaraguan struggle, supporting the Sandinistas, we didn't do it to end up with this stuff of. And so there was that motivation. But, it was also really thinking, realising and particularly in the case of South Africa story, you know, I remember going as a parliamentary observer in 1990 for a British parliamentary observer to observe the South African elections, the first democratic one ever. And they, you know, it moved, moved almost says by what I was witnessing, people sort of steaming out of the early morning mist in Soweto and so on, in the tens of thousands to vote for the first time in their lives. And thinking, job done. Actually, I end up the book saying the struggle is never over.

  Sasha: "A luta continua".

  Peter: "A luta continua" is the last chapter, it's the Portuguese, sort of slogan used by some in the liberation struggle that the struggle continues and it's actually a new, it's a new phase that you, you think you've achieved a great deal. You know, if I go back to the Labour government that I was fortunate enough to serve in for 12 years, we, we achieved a lot. If you take a rock out of this, if you can that look with standing achieved a lot but most of it was reversed by what followed, particularly 14 years of austerity. And in South Africa's case, those values, which were very noble and I think motivating for a lot of people, then got completely betrayed in office by too many people and so I realised that actually the struggle is never over. There are always fresh battles to fight and, and continually to think, well if you just take broad principles like, liberty and human rights and social justice and equal opportunities, those constantly have to be strived for because there's always forces wanting to roll them back or stop them at any point in time.

  Sasha: I mean, what are those forces? I mean, are they are they forces of human nature? Are they, you know, is there something, ultimately corruptible in everyone? Is it, is it something in the kind of, I don't know, you might call the social unconscious that dates back to, you don't use that concept that I might have used, but or

  Peter: something very complicated to me.

  Sasha: Oh, well, I suppose it's about what sits there underneath that isn't explicit? You know, that people are not speaking about explicitly, but what, what continues to exist in society, but doesn't get named publicly, but actually has a powerful impact. I mean, political scientists might talk about path dependency, you know, but actually there are things that are laid down in history and actually, it's very hard to change course, when, when there are kind of, you know, so I suppose it's, it's, it's really interesting to try to understand why do hopes, hopes get dashed? Why, why is this powerful kind of movement of social transformation derailed? Is it a few bad actors? Well, it's not just a few bad actors.  It's lots of bad actors.

  Peter: Yeah.

  Sasha: Why why, you know, is there something in human nature that is kind of, you know, inevitably greedy, selfish, you know, out for themselves? I don't believe that. But you know, that, that would be one sort of way of answering this question of why why does it happen. Another is the more historical kind of argument that there are just incredibly powerful historical forces, whether they're the social unconscious or path dependency of chains, that actually it's really hard to change course.

  Peter: Yeah, I think it's all of those I mean, in South Africa's case, I should just say, by the way, I visit t, I visit the country periodically now, including teaching in Johannesburg, MBA students, postgraduate students. But, I really enjoy it. And I think it's completely different from when I left as a boy. So it's much, much better.

  Sasha: Yeah.

  Peter: You know, you've got a constitution that protects the human rights of everybody regardless of the colour of their skin.

  Sasha: Drafted largely in the Library of the ÄûÃÊÊÓƵ campus by Albie Sachs.

  Peter: By Albie Sachs, yes, and all of its members instructions. The South African constitution is probably the best in the world.

  Sasha: It's a very radical constitution  isn't it?

  Peter: Yeah. It is. We we don't have a proper constitution here in Britain, but that's that's, by the way, so, I don't want to give an impression that the country, you know, is somehow gone back to bad old ways. It's still a much, much better country for the majority of people. But it could have been so much better if this particular, this Zuma episode. But having said that, the ten years in which he shamelessly looted the country and the corruption was really brazen, the problem now is it's so deeply ingrained it's like a cancer in the body. It's really difficult to get out. And, so having said that, there's lots of good about the country there's also this problem. And I think that it's not I think we're all none of us has sense, so you asked about temptation. You know, people do sometimes fiddle their expenses, the ordinary respectable citizens. So I think there's perhaps a temptation in every human being to, to maximise, to to push the boundaries and maximise your, your opportunities. But then there's something else you implied, which is that goes back to what I said at the beginning about the anti-apartheid movement and all of these movements being in minorities, including the suffragettes, now applauded big exhibitions in Parliament and so on, and great. But actually you look at what was said about them at the time, and tons of them at the time, of the Palestinian supporters are on hunger strike at the moment, or at least were I think the last one is nearly, nearly died and just ended his hunger strike. But the suffragettes were on hunger strikes as well, and there was no sympathy for them in the House of Lords at the time. And there's no sympathy for the Palestinian protesters in the House of Lords today, except for myself and a few others. So I think that's the I think it's important to recognise that there were big forces always opposed to these changes. So, for example, you know, Margaret Thatcher was British Prime Minister at the time, was denouncing Nelson Mandela as a terrorist a matter of a year or two before he walked to freedom. So, you know, they're big, whether it's, big corporations,  or arms dealers or whatever, employing a lot of people in places, including in my former South Wales constituency, whose jobs depend on this, that these forces are still there and that you touched upon the multinational that has been consultancies and auditors and so on. The reason why I got first involved in this whole thing was I was asked by senior members of the ANC in 2017 to expose the international complicity and culpability in all of this, which I did under parliamentary privilege in the Lord from information they supplied to me, so that's where my interest in this started. Otherwise I don't think the book would ever have been written.

  Sasha: So. So what needs to be done? I mean, what what are the the answers to, you know, how can the democratic control be reasserted? How can how can corruption be thwarted?

  Peter: Well, I think there are a number of, of, of sort of priorities that I discuss some of these in the last chapter. One of them is in the International Anti-Corruption Court. There is an International Criminal Court at the moment and an International Court of Justice, but those are focused on genocide and, and so on, and war crimes and so forth. They do not have a remit and it's not within their scope to tackle corruption. And yet corruption I think it's something like $2 trillion a year, $2 trillion a year, that's almost unimaginable amounts of money is looted and corruptly money laundered around the world every year. And basically going to people to enrich individuals, to make them richer and richer, and taking money away from public spending. And from some of the poorer citizens of the world. Because, you know, when the looting happened in South Africa or Nicaragua, for that moment, Nicaragua was extremely poor country, one of the poorest in the world. South Africa is relatively better off by comparison, including on the African continent. Well, I think it's still the richest country in the continent per capita. But, these countries are also in the grip of a global system. So one of the chief chiefs, villains that I devote a bit of space to in the book was Bein & Company, internationally reputable management consultancy, got contracts, had contracts with our government, with governments across the world, got offices all over the place. And, you know, there were a big brand in that world. They were, they were used their expertise at President Zuma's personal request to disable the tax agency, South African Tax Agency, so that it couldn't chase down the kind of villains that were funding him and supporting him, and tobacco smugglers and others. That's what that Bain & Company actually advised in 17 personal meetings with Zuma, not in his office, but in his private residence, where there would be no minutes to take his instructions and then go and put a policeman at the head of South African Revenue Service, SARS, in order to to to take it apart.

  Sasha: Was there ever any comeback? Did they ever will..

  Peter:  They were, they actually had to close their office in South Africa though, and I've been trying to get them barred from public contracts in Britain to get any government contracts. And I noticed I had written about the latest one that involved, a, a part the partnership with, to supply training to the Ministry of Defence, and they didn't get that, whether as a result of my letter or other competitive pressures, I don't know. So I'm still chasing them down and they don't like me. But, here we are, you know, none of these people, particularly like me. Although what was interesting was when it broke in the House of Lords and was then reported in the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal and so on, suddenly I got all these chief executives of, of, KPMG and McKinsey and HSBC wanted to come and see me in my office.

  Sasha: They are some of the organisations that are named as being deeply implicated.

  Peter: Yes.

  Sasha: Yeah, interesting.

  Peter: So I was happy to see them, although HSBC said to me, I said, you moved the money out. Yes, we did but we've closed the accounts now. I said, well, good, but what happened to the money? It's gone. It went into Dubai, then went into Hong Kong, and all of the other places, it ended up in UK Overseas Territories like the British Overseas Virgin Islands through a whole series of shell companies front companies where the real owners, President Zuma's business friends, the Gupta brothers, were never revealed but actually were the beneficial owners. So what are you doing about it? This is a, this money went out by the billions of rand, and hundreds of millions of pounds sterling, and dollars through your digital pipelines. Oh, that's client confidentiality, but is it? Client confidentiality applies to honest citizens, doesn't it? To all of you. I'll make an assumption. Sasha and I. You know? I hope I would like to think we're all honest citizens. We we we expect client confidentiality. These guys move hundreds of millions around through these same banks, digital pipelines, and by the way, it leads, I point to this out, leaves a digital trail, so you could track this money down. Oh, no no, no, that's not possible. It's gone, but we've closed their accounts. And then there was one of them I was giving evidence to, it's quite funny actually. It's serious as well. I was giving evidence to the Judicial Commission that had been established to look into the whole Zuma decade by the, by his successor, president was set up under him, and I was asked to give evidence and they wanted written evidence. So, with the help of people who knew a lot more about it than I did, I sent in a 10,000 word written statement and, it circulates to all the people you name, so they have a right to reply. So it's very kind of proper, judicially. I don't mind that. So Standard Chartered received an email saying, oh, Lord Hain's got this completely wrong. Our Johannesburg office is nothing to do with our Dubai office. So all this money, yes, it left our office in Johannesburg,  but then ended in a different jurisdiction, but nothing to do with us. So I don't I take a pretty dim view of that. And my reply was went in whole stop digging. But, you know, these are global institutions, global corporations, they're all digitally connected. So an international court is really the only way. I think that's one of the keys. Yeah. One of the many things it's not going to be a cure all, but it is important to try to achieve it.

  Sasha:  I'm going to open up to see if there are any questions from the audience now. So, yes. Who's got the who's got a, someone got a microphone down here, please? Do you want to just put your hand up so that she can see where you are.

  Thank you. Thanks. I do want to introduce you.

  Attendee 1: Sure. Someone who knows quite a lot about this, little stuff about this. Liz David-Barrett I'm the director of the Centre for the Study of Corruption that we have here at Sussex. So, thanks, Peter, really fascinating talk, and it's a great book, and it really resonates, actually, with a lot of the research that we do at the Centre, particularly on state capture, which is a big theme in our research and in our teaching. It also resonates with me, actually, personally, as someone I used to be a journalist and I was working in the Balkans, and we saw again, a lot of this leaders who were essentially coming to power with an agenda about, you might say, making the country great again or an independence agenda. Then getting into power and essentially selling off all of the state assets to their cronies, in a pattern that becomes very familiar and is very familiar at the moment around the world. But my question to you is that, in a way, what's especially interesting about you writing this book is that you're a politician. So, you've been on that side, you've been in that problem of sort of the individual versus the system, so I'd like to ask you, you know, what you think that we can learn, about the dilemma in that situation and how you deal with those tensions and how you can operate in a system which potentially is systemically corrupt and doesn't have much overall political will to fight corruption.

  Peter: But, well, thank you, and, much to my saying, when, Sasha mentioned, you know, we had a session before this to to just go over what we might talk about. You mentioned the Centre, your centre and much to my shame, I didn't know anything about it, and so here you're doing the similar work. You probably know a lot more about it than me. I, I think the answer to your question is very complicated, but, I think it requires every major capital involved. It requires Beijing and Delhi because the Gupta brothers, President Zuma's cronies, are actually originated from India and went back there when they were chased out of South Africa. So most of the money went through Dubai or Hong Kong, so Hong Kong, former British colony, but Chinese controlled; Dubai, controlled by the UAE, the United Arab Emirates. So you've got, you've got to get every country sort of signed up to tackling this problem or it's just going to go somewhere else. And that includes, you know, we we pride ourselves, including the current British government on being anti-money laundering, anti corruption, anti all of that stuff, but actually a lot of the money ends up in the UK Overseas Territories, a lot of it comes through London. Some of it's invested in the London property markets.

  Sasha: Isn't the London property market absolutely full of it?

  Peter: It is. Yeah. And these you know some of the Russian oligarchs are being hounded down and identified and restricted and that's good, Putin's kind of cronies, that's good because that whole system is corrupt under him, including him. But actually, there's a bigger culpability, and so I think we've got to look closer to home, all of us. But it's an international problem unless you get, a sort of argue that at some point, unless you get a lot of the governments of the world cooperating to do something about this, you're not going to stop it is the truth. And too many people are making too much money out of it still, including in the City of London, because you require, this is the other, you know, you've got a lot of what are called professional enablers. You've got auditors, and accountants and financial advisors and lawyers, and estate agents, who are making this possible. Zuma in the group, his business cronies, the Gupta brothers couldn't do set up these shell companies and move the money around, unless they have professional advice. So all these, all these professionals are actually breaking the codes of the professions, the ethical side of their professions and the standards and a complicit are up to their necks in all of this stuff. So it's, you've got a big challenge on in your Centre to, to, to, to sort of confront all of us. But I hope the book helps anyway.

  Sasha: I mean, one of the things that you were involved in, which I should have said when I was introducing you, but there was so there was so much to say about your career, but, you know, you chaired the UN Security Council.

  Peter: Yeah.

  Sasha: And as well as negotiating, international treaty on nuclear proliferation, you were very involved in, one about trade in blood diamonds. So kind of international treaties targeting particular aspects of corruption. I mean, that's a particularly.

  Peter: Yeah, it's funny, the blood diamonds, when I didn't think about it…

  Sasha: You didn't think it was corruption at the time

  Peter: I didn't think about it but I suppose there was that important dimension to it. It arose because I was concerned as Britain's Minister for Africa. The only African born Briton minister for Africa that there's ever been and maybe ever will be, I don't know, but, I was concerned about going to Angola and Sierra Leone and, I didn't ever go to the DRC, but it was to a conflict zone. And then having this intelligence reports from MI6 and the, GCHQ on my desk, which clearly showed we knew who these arms dealers were, they were flying in the arms of these conflict zones, getting paid in blood diamonds, and I think I might have been one of the first, if not the first, to use that phrase. These are diamonds, mostly alluvial diamonds, scooped off the bottom of rivers rather than, deep, deep mined as, for example, they are in South Africa, in Botswana and Namibia, and paid in diamonds. So I started off thinking, well, how are we going to stop these guys? So, I didn't name them in Parliament, which they didn't like and some of them threatened me, but, there you are. But I then thought, we're going to have to try and get an international treaty banning this. And the trade didn't like it. And I had representations, including from the ANC government in, in Pretoria saying, hang on, you know, diamonds are a big part of our, our economy, Botswana and Namibia and so on as well as, you know, a lot of other countries, Israel and Russia were actually particularly angry about it and not that they mind, well, don't - the Israel has, has diamond mines, but it does process this stuff. So, eventually but I said, look, if you don't clean up your trade and you don't stop the, the illegal blood diamonds coming in from these conflict zones fuelling war, then you're going to tarnish the whole reputation. So they say, somebody getting married is given a diamond ring, they won't know whether that's a blood diamond or a genuine one. So in the end, it took a lot of persuasion, but we managed to persuade the trade to accept, including the World Diamond Council in Antwerp, to actually accept the basis for a treaty.

  Sasha: Interesting. Let's see if there are any other questions. Oh, lots. Okay. There's a woman in the middle here, who's got. Oh, okay. That's fine, that's fine. Okay.

  Attendee 2: Hi.

  Sasha: Might just introduce yourself.

  Attendee 2: Sure. My name is Gurmninder Bhambra, I'm Professor of Historic Sociology here at the University. Thank you so much for the talk. And actually, for all the work that you've done politically over the last decades, it's very much appreciated. I had a question, though, because in the sense you seem to locate your interest in corruption in a post-colonial context and in terms of the failure of liberation movements to achieve what it is that they had hoped to achieve. But it feels like in part you locate that failure in the individuals involved in the liberation movements, as opposed to perhaps thinking about it in terms of the failure to actually transform the conditions that they were seeking liberation or independence from. So in a sense, there's this aspect like, I guess the question is, to what extent do you think that the political transformation you would have liked to have seen could only happen if there had been an economic transformation at the same time? I mean, in the sense that you locate it as post-colonial and you talk about colonialism as corrupt, and what colonialism did was drain resources out of these places.

  Peter: Hounded them. Yeah.

  Attendee 2: And so corruption in a context of a country that's been drained of its resources is different than the corruption that drains the resources, and so I was just wondering about that relationship and to what extent it also features in your analysis.

  Peter: I think it features quite a lot, to be fair. It isn't just about personal feelings. I sort of I think…

  Sasha: Probably I'm a bit of a, you know, I've got my kind of psychoanalytic bent, so I was going down that route. How much is this about individuals? I don't think that's what Peter says.

  Peter: No, I don't think it's an excuse. You shouldn't excuse anybody doing this, but I do think there are systemic reasons why it happened, and I think you're quite right to to to point that out, but in my own defence, I think there's a fair analysis, a fair amount of analysis which points exactly that out. I mean, is there a question also, though, about how far the transformation has gone before the corruption sets in? You know, what point is the is the, the sort of disappointment in the liberation movement happening, you know, is it is it sort of straight away or is it actually some way down the road when the when the movement has really failed to, to deliver the transformation that it set out to, and so then there's the kind of reversion back I do think there's an issue about, the limited amount of transformation which is behind your question as well, especially economic transformation, that, that, you know, in South Africa, it's probably the most unequal society in the world, the most unequal society in the world, in a world where the gap between those at the very top and the rest is widening, but that's a whole critique of neoliberalism, which I'm happy to sort of rant about, but, probably not on this occasion. But, I do think that genuine economic transformation could have, mitigated some of that. On the other hand, you become very aware, so in the ANC case, they came to power, and there are critics now, radical critics, I think they're wrong, and they're historical about Mandela calling him a sellout and so on for not actually,  negotiated the transition because that was genuinely transformative economically as well as politically. I think it's historical because, you know, the white minority at that time, and there were four years of negotiations, and the white minority backed by Margaret Thatcher and others tried to hang on to sort of a veto power in the negotiations, and there was Mandela, amongst others, in the ANC leadership, who refused to go along with that. But, they had all the power, They had all the guns, they had all the army, they had the police, they had the economic power, and when you look at countries which have experienced revolutionary transitions, Mozambique, for example, or Angola, they have civil wars that go on for years and completely decimate the country. One of the things you can say about South Africa is it hasn't had that. It's still got massive problems and there's a lot of social unrest because of the lack of economic transformation. You know, there's a new black middle class and the rich black elite, which is very different when it was a black, a white middle class and a rich white. So that's progress in terms of multiracialism. But the actual fundamental divide is still there. And that is a major factor as well.

  Sasha: Thank you. Okay. Other, other questions. So, in the striped scarf.

  Attendee 3: Hi, Jonathan Woollgar, doctoral student. You mentioned briefly the Nicaraguan leader who you described as a corrupt misogynist and I was curious if sort of gender, is, sort of relevant factor at all in your analysis?

  Peter: It's a good question, Jonathan. I also described him as nepotistic as he is trying to get his family, sort of, you know, to succeed him, and that's, of course, contrary to everything. And Jacob Zuma tried to do that. I, I mean, South Africa has one of the most gender progressive constitutions in the world, but that hasn't stopped a patriarchal society from being very, predominant and including levels of rape and domestic violence, which are horrifyingly large. So I don't think, I don't think, if this is what you're asking, I don't think the gender divide and gender inequality, which affects the whole world, is particularly intrinsic to this, story, though it happens to be that most of the, most of the liberation leaders are blokes, if not all of them, come to power and they're the ones that have ended up betraying the struggle. But I don't know what would have happened had they been women leaders of those liberation struggles.

  Sasha: Other questions? Yes. Here in a brown gilet.

  Peter: Well.

  Attendee 4: My name is Vivian Barton, I'm a local resident and former passionate anti-apartheid activist. My question to you, Peter, is, is the UK more or less corrupt than it was when you began in politics 50 years ago?

  Peter: Well, first of all, Vivian, thank you for what you did, because the, the, the anti-apartheid struggle was based on many thousands of people doing what you did or it wouldn't have been one. Is it worse than when I first became involved? Well, I think it's more, it's more complicated. I think there's always been corruption, including in Britain, but it's it's now more digitised. It's more there's more sort of complicated, complex, which is part of what I, you know, the shell companies and all of this and the moving of money around the world digitally, as opposed to in the brown paper bags and stuff, which it used to be moved around in, that's become both more sort of subterranean, but also actually more difficult to confront and deal with.

  Sasha: Any others? Yes. In the, I've, I'm having to describe colours of clothes. I'm like, because… There the sort of fawn coloured jacket.

  Attendee 5: Thank you.

  Peter: We all be careful what we're wearing.

  Attendee 5: My name is Lerato. I am South African, and I am an undergrad student studying Politics and International Relations. Thank you for the talk. My question, I'll try to phrase it well, my question is, I think obviously in the case of South Africa, we did see a break, or a significant sort of shift between Mandela gets, you know, elected and then we have his presidency and then we have to win back his presidency. So there was a clear shift when Zuma came into power, and I think given you, given the fact that your book is about liberation and corruption, to what extent can we actually place the ANC administration, ANC under Zuma into that whole picture of liberation? Because I think in as much as there was a lot going on with the Mbeki administration, I think it's fair to say that both of those administrations were just presidencies trying to figure out policies in the country, but there was a clear shift when Zuma came. So how much can we tie that shift to liberation when we saw something different under two presidencies, even if it was in the same party? I hope you understand the question.

  Peter: That was a very good question. Which part of the country are you from, by the way?

  Attendee 5: I'm from Limpopo.

  Peter: Yeah, that's north of the Pretoria way, anybody who is not sure of the geography. So you're Limpopo girl talking to Pretoria boy. Yeah, yeah. Well, well, I discuss in the book, a very interesting analysis by Rusty Bernstein, which was written, I think, in 1990, and that they published in early 91. He's a former senior ANC figure, South African Communist Party member, who saw in the ANC even at that stage, well before the transition had been negotiated, the signs of corruption. And his, his analysis is really interesting because, and I quoted quite significantly because it starts with, Eastern Central Europe and communist parties in power there and how the elite gets control and then it becomes corrupt itself. So he started off from that standpoint, begun and then applied it to what he was observing in the country. So you're right to say that it became brazen and shameless and under Zuma, who just plundered the country, but the roots of it were already there, and of course, the arms deal, mainly involving British companies and, and the south of the ANC government was negotiated and done well before Zuma, and that itself was said to me, and I described a lot of evidence as to why it was criticised as being corrupt. It is then rebutted by ANC ministers, including Ronnie Kasrils, for whom I've got a lot of, a lot of time and he's a friend, but anyway, I put his point of view in there. So I think that this is a more systemic thing. I think there's something else that I haven't mentioned but touch upon. If you're a fighter, a freedom fighter in the bush of Africa, in Zambia or one of these camps in Tanzania or Angola or wherever it might have been, you don't have a pension, you don't have a home, you don't have anything of the kind that, you know, the the sort of political class has become accustomed to getting and we have in countries like Britain, which are more established democracies, though very imperfect ones in my view, and that goes right across the former colonial powers. So there's an automatic thing that, you know, some people were brazen about it and up front saying, I'm entitled to, to a bit more than I had, and I've got nothing, I come, you know, suddenly the change happens and I find myself a government minister or a director-general of a department or whatever. And suddenly all these opportunities are opened up to me. So I think there's there's something in the process of change here that we've got to be upfront about. But I don't think it was just the fault of Zuma to, to answer your question directly, I think the seeds of it was sown earlier, but he was absolutely brazen and shameless about.

  Sasha: So, we're going to have to finish in a moment, but, the book ends, with, with a chapter, about the continuing fight.

  Peter: Yeah.

  Sasha: The continuing struggle. But you you actually really finish the book with a quote from Ben Okri, which I'm just going to read out because I think actually, in many ways sums up what I took from from the book, but perhaps also the sort of bigger project that the Sussex School for Progressive Futures has to consider. So, Ben Okri said:

  "They are only the exhausted who think

  That they have arrived

  At their final destination,

  The end of their road,

  With all their dreams achieved,

  And with no new dreams to hold."

  Peter: Yeah, absolutely.

  Sasha: I mean, it's a great book, Peter.

  Peter: Thank you.

  Sasha: You have done the most amazing things since you were at Sussex. We hope you continue doing lots more amazing things. Don't leave the House of Lords yet, even if you think that you're getting old. there's still lots of work to be done. Thank you for coming back.

  Peter: Thank you for inviting me.

  Sasha: And everyone please if you would like to get a copy it's, it's being sold at a discount, £10, outside and Peter will sign them there. Thank you all very much for coming and thank you to Peter.

  Peter: Thank you.

  Transcript ends