Consent is sometimes claimed to be integral to privacy, in that a consensual intrusion should not be counted as a breach of privacy. Though it is true that in common law and data protection law, intrusion with consent is not actionable, this chapter argues that consent itself is independent of the question of whether privacy is breached. That which is consented to is the breach of privacy. Consent is merely a mechanism for achieving, or approaching, one’s privacy preferences. While consent is the current basis of much privacy law, informed consent about what is entailed by a particular breach of privacy, particularly the use of data, is very hard to achieve. Notice must be given, but this is often inadequate. Consent must be voluntary, but it is often required for particular services and may be hard to refuse. Cognitive limitations also mean that understanding all the ramifications of a privacy breach (indeed of all the privacy breaches we encounter daily) is very hard, especially for those who are not specialists. This leads to the transparency paradox, that organisations can be transparent and open about their information use, but this still does not lead to informed consent. Consent also involves a difficult trade-off between present gains and future risk, while many low-risk events might accumulate to create a high risk. However, there are few, if any, alternatives to consent that respect the autonomy of the subject.

This chapter reads A Perfect Spy as a bildungsroman that blurs the distinctions between le Carré and his longtime nemesis. The chapter argues that A Perfect Spy maps the overlapping contours of le Carré’s and Philby’s formative years—the amoral influence of their respective fathers, an alienating public-school experience, exposure to leftist intelligentsia at university, and the disillusionment that came with the demands of national service—to illustrate how resentments against class and country can metastasize into treachery. This chapter also reads le Carré’s novel as an expression of his growing disenchantment with the monetarist agenda under the Thatcher government in the 1980s, particularly what le Carré viewed as a growing climate of greed and the misguided reverence it showed toward the rich. In reflecting on his own family history, le Carré came to recognize such material ambition and quests for social mobility as integral to the growth of the British middle classes to which he belonged. A Perfect Spy, then, suggests that treason signifies an understandable though desperate reaction against a corrupt and exploitative establishment. In A Perfect Spy, le Carré’s obsession with Philby’s treachery evolves from an intense hatred for Philby from the time of the spy’s defection in the 1960s to strong feelings of identification in the 1980s, with his novel serving not so much as an apology for Philby’s actions but as a means of comprehending them and redressing the flawed institutions and middle-class values that produced traitors like him.

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) thus always and necessarily at risk of acting corruptly; and (c) as such, 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.

Despite hopes that the 1832 Reform Act had ushered in a new era of electoral purity in Britain, bribery and other forms of corruption remained persistent problems at elections in subsequent decades. Historians have tended to focus their attention on the major reforms intended to curtail electoral malpractice in the nineteenth century, notably the 1854 and 1883 Corrupt Practices Acts and the 1872 Ballot Act, neglecting the wider trajectory of legislative proposals to improve electoral morality. This chapter aims to redress this gap, demonstrating the ongoing extent of contemporary concerns about this issue by considering the amount of parliamentary time it occupied, both in the Commons chamber and in the committee rooms. It explores the wide range of potential remedies which legislators discussed, including the disenfranchisement of constituencies, curbing election spending by candidates and reforming the system of election petitions, and it reassesses the rationales shaping MPs’ priorities and concerns in their often abortive attempts at reform. It argues that for MPs grappling with this problem, the growing demands on their own pockets due to their constituents’ expectations regarding election spending – corrupt or otherwise – served as a crucial incentive to take decisive action on this question, with the landmark 1883 Corrupt Practices Act eventually tackling the twin evils of electoral corruption and excessive election spending.

The period since 1979 is identified as the period when the historically created foundational economy was comprehensively wrecked by a mixture of public policy and changes in business practices. The UK and Italy are used as two case studies of a process which has proceeded by different routes but arrived at the same destructive destination. The histories of privatisation, of franchising, and of outsourcing in sectors as different as rail transport and personal care are examined for illustrative purposes. The chapter shows how shareholder value priorities and the practices of financial engineering have opened the door to a wide range of opportunistic business practices by private firms that now dominate the foundational economy.

Daniel Solove’s diagnosis of the disarray of the academic privacy literature was that ‘privacy’ was a family resemblance term, in accordance with the theory of meaning of Ludwig Wittgenstein. This chapter explores this idea, looking back at the intent of family resemblance theory as a critique of Gottlob Frege’s and Bertrand Russell’s conceptual analysis. The chapter concludes with Solove that ‘privacy’ is indeed arguably a family resemblance term. However, the historical review shows that the theory cannot explain disagreement over meaning – instead it explains agreement. Hence, while Solove’s analysis was correct, it cannot do the explanatory work he required of it to explain the disarray in the literature.

The final level of the framework covers the value of privacy. While this is often assumed to be positive, it can be negative – either unwanted by individuals or socially undesirable. The chapter begins by considering the intrinsic value of privacy, but it is hard to construct decisive arguments in a liberal society that can balance it against the social value of privacy breaches. Next are considered social functional values, where privacy benefits the whole community, including the importance of privacy for democracy, for preserving conservative institutions that have proved their value through time, and for preserving the virtues of particular practices (for instance, the importance of confidentiality for the practice of medicine). A third strand of thought concerns the functional value of privacy for individuals, including the contribution privacy makes to their dignity and inviolate personality, identity and self, intimacy and autonomy. These ideas ultimately fail – while privacy is important for all of them, it is neither necessary or sufficient. It is difficult to pin them down so that they fit privacy exactly; for instance, intimacy is often defined to exclude ‘undeserving’ types of intimate encounter (e.g. sex work), while Rössler’s liberal account of autonomy invites outside interference in the (private) household, to ensure women and children are autonomous relative to the householder. Finally, rights to privacy resist reduction to other rights. The result is a complex position, in which privacy is underdetermined by the rights-based discourse.

Comparing ordinary language usage of ‘privacy’ with the academic literature, this chapter creates a ‘reference list’ of non-theoretical uses of the term, covering: informational privacy; decisional privacy; private property; psychological privacy; ideological privacy; spatial privacy; attentional privacy and extrinsic privacy (or obtrusion). The reference list is meant as a heuristic device but shows that in ordinary usage the term is wide yet tractable. This contrasts with the ‘disarray’ that commentators have detected in the academic literature.

This chapter explores how the magazines published basic explainer articles about the facts of life, intended to fill gaps or correct mistakes that had resulted from an education informed by friendship groups, when reluctant parents opted not to speak with their children. They also sought to give women agency, by encouraging them to reconsider their attitudes about and personal relationship to intimacy. Sex-positive messages sought to help wives reframe the act as something that could be mutually enjoyable, as opposed to a marital obligation to please their husbands. However, the chapter also demonstrates how any interpretation of content relating to the issue of sex knowledge should be made cautiously, so as not to overemphasise the magazines’ progressive nature. Typically, they approached the subject in the context of marital relations. Sex outside marriage appeared in the magazines only in ways that could be deemed negative. These took the form of letters to the advice columnists from women who feared for their reputations or who worried about unplanned pregnancies, or articles intended to ‘save’ readers from repeating the mistakes of those who had broken with convention. The magazines thus reaffirmed traditional understandings of sexual relationships. Moreover, because of this emphasis on sex as an act between husband and wife, there was no acknowledgement of same-sex relationships or discussions of sexual identity.

The first explanation, from Deirdre Mulligan, is that privacy is an essentially contested concept (ECC), as described by Gallie. The chapter considers and rejects two important criteria for privacy being such a concept. First, privacy is rejected as an appraisive concept. Whereas with an appraisive concept such as an ECC, we agree about its value but disagree about its application in a specific context, privacy has the opposite behaviour. We tend to agree about its application, but disagree about its value. This is shown by contrasting privacy with justice, an ECC. Second, privacy is shown not to be open; its definition has not evolved over time through being contested, as with a typical ECC. New ideas of privacy have tended not to cause adjustment to older views. This is in contrast with the ECC democracy, which has evolved over time; earlier notions of democracy are not seen as democratic now. Furthermore, many apparent changes in our attitudes to privacy are the results of the evolution of privacy law in response to technical change, not the evolution of the concept itself. Privacy fails to be an ECC, but this discussion is instructive: both criteria fail because of the agreement we have about its use.

Between 1781 and 1793 the British government embarked on a programme of what contemporaries called ‘economical reform’, which aimed to address problems of political and administrative corruption revealed by successive defeats in the American Revolutionary War. It triggered a process that would, arguably, root out entrenched or Old Corruption from the British political system by the mid-nineteenth century. The underlying factors for its success have been debated, and one of the suggestions is that the campaign was no mere bureaucratic exercise but involved a series of dialogues between popular demands, political practicalities and administrative realities that made for effective, long-term change. Focusing on a comparable process of economical reform undertaken at the same time but on a smaller scale in Jamaica during the 1780s, this chapter shines some much needed light on the experience of anticorruption initiatives in colonial settings, and contributes to the wider literature by reinforcing the importance of the interplay between political support and administrative direction. It argues that reforms in Jamaica lacking such support failed, but where that support existed, it had to be channelled in productive directions, since the political ideology – Old or Country Whig – that gave the movement its edge could work both for and against effective change. The experience of Jamaica, for all the differences from Britain in its society and economy, also shared some important similarities and helps to clarify what enabled and inhibited successful programmes of anticorruption reform at this critical juncture for the British imperial state.