But our sense of self is a skewed one. We may be incorruptible at home, but when dealing with Johnny Foreigner all bets are off. The moral transgressor is the receiver of bribes, not the payer. It’s Johnny’s fault, of course; we can’t expect the same standards from a foreigner.

There was even a time, a quite recent time, when such bribes paid to Johnny Foreigner were tax deductible on the company P&L.

I\’ve even had the quite open conversation with an Inland Revenue man (as was then) as to what was an acceptable amount for me to claim as \”unreceipted expenses\” as business expenses while working in Moscow. The response was along the lines of \”well, yes, we understand that things are a little different there, there are a lot of things that you just can\’t get a receipt for. $200 a day would be about right we think.\”

But I would go much further about how and why bribery takes hold and the most important thing we ought to be doing at home to make sure that it doesn\’t. It\’s about the amount and detail of regulation.

There was a day when there was little detailed law in the UK. Little detailed regulation of the everyday that is. What law there was was either criminal law which (with some grating errors, like the criminalisation of consenting adult buggery and such) almost all supported or Common Law which again almost all supported. Other countries were not so lucky: they had the imposition from the centre of detailed laws, rules and regulation about what you could or could not do in matters of daily life. Perhaps my favourite example is the one that until after WWII you had to have the permission of Paris for a club which had any more than 25 Frenchmen in it. Yes, for anything, sports, debates, cookery, anything. We in England had been free of such since the 1650-1700 timescale.

So there was no point in bribery here in the everyday while in other societies it was not possible to do anything without it.

Yes, I\’ve lived and worked in a society where bribery is commonplace and yes, I\’ve done my fair share of it. From $100 to get a falsely accused driver out of a police cell through a few hundred to smooth over an expired visa all the way to handing over wedges of cash in \”commissions to agents\”. That\’s just the way certain places are (although I would note that all such were entirely legal under UK law when I was partaking of such activities).

What worries me about the UK, a country in which I\’ve never even considered paying a douceur for anything, not even an \”advance tip\” to book a restaurant table, is that now we\’re moving to that more Continental system of law, where everything is regulated, from what light bulbs you can use to how you can sort your rubbish, is that we\’re creating the same breeding ground for corruption.

Not something I consider an advance in our civilization, let alone our freedom and liberty.

Having our society run by the clipboard wielders will inevitably lead to our bribing the clipboard wielders to leave us alone.

Our favourite accountant (yes, one Murphy, R) is fond of saying that we should never do any tax planning other than simply coughing up whatever it is that the authorities demand of us. Certainly we should never stoop to tax avoidance, that terrible idea of doing exactly what the law says rather than simply accepting the spirit of it. That is, don\’t pay attention to what is in the legislation, but attention to what those drafting it really meant: then sign the cheque and hand it over.

One little story that rather undermines that:

In a landmark case, HSBC has won a ruling that the UK stamp duty reserve tax it was charged when it bought CCF, the French bank, contravened EU law. The bank is now in line for a £27m tax refund.

Tax experts believe the ruling will set off a wave of similar claims from firms that have been involved in cross-border takeover activity in the past 23 years.

Stamp duty reserve tax was introduced to simplify the collection of stamp duty due on the transfer of shares in cross-border M&A activity. Rather than trying to collect 0.5pc of standard stamp duty on shares issued through a foreign clearing company or US depository receipts, the HM Revenue & Customs introduced a one-off payment of 1.5pc of the value of the transaction, called \”stamp duty reserve tax\”.

Craig Lesile, head of stamp taxes at PricewaterhouseCoopers said: \”The tax was designed as a season ticket – a one-off payment on the shares issued that would then make them exempt from stamp duty.\”

However, HSBC used an even older directive – the Capital Duty Directive of 1969 which banned capital duty on the issuance of shares – to argue that the UK\’s stamp duty reserve tax is incompatible. Following the ruling, HMRC said it would stop levying the 1.5pc tax immediately on share transactions using a clearing service elsewhere in the EU pending a review.

You see, sometimes the laws that are being enforced are in fact illegal themselves. The second of these laws is entirely clear: cough up the 1.5%. The intent of the law is also entirely clear: companies should cough up on capital transactions. Yet the first law makes both the details and the intent of the second illegal.

So where does this leave the argument that we should not obey the law as it is written and simply cough up under the intent? Rather tattered I would say, in that at least in this case the intent is directly illegal.

So, umm, no, we shouldn\’t just trust in nice Mr. Revenue to tell us how much the cheque should be, should we? In this instance they were wrong (that is, wrong in law) to the various estimates of £5 billion to £20 billion.

No, tax must be paid according to what the law says, not according to what those who wrote the law were thinking of. And we must have clarity about what that law is, not simply an assumption that it is whatever HMRC says it is.

It\’s a system known as \”the rule of law\” and it\’s one of the things that keeps this the relatively free country it is. Here\’s the rules, written down in this book. The social contract is that you obey them: and the other side of the social contract is that those rules, as written down in the book, are all the rules that you must, by law, obey.