A Bribe Blinds

I complained to my bank. The latest statement had shown a couple of direct debits taking money out of my account and instead of saying to whom or to what they were going, it simply said they were ‘direct debits’, which is less than helpful. I therefore suggested that this was not good enough.

An Indian employee responded, saying that he noted my concerns, but would I drop the complaint if I accepted a one-hundred-pound payment? I thought that this was jolly kind of him, and that it would certainly come in useful, but this rather defeated the object as I still cannot discern the recipients of these direct debits. The money was already in my account and he sent me a long reply stating how I could always raise it another way as ‘feedback’.

I reflected: had I accepted a bribe? One hundred quid to make NatWest feel better, to reduce its monthly number of complaints so some manager can prove to the Board that there are record levels of customer satisfaction? Perhaps I helped my Indian friend gain some bonus for dealing with a complaint in so speedy a manner. Readers can judge for themselves if I broke Moses’ prohibition of Exodus 23:8, though the money was whizzed to my account before I had even accepted. Yet that text's explanation is most revealing:

…for a bribe blinds the discerning and perverts the words of the righteous.

One less complaint made against National Westminster Bank, and one hundred pounds taken from its shareholders, who may, admittedly, be unlikely to feel the pain of what to them is a trifling sum.

I visited Indian friends recently, and we naturally got onto the subject of comparing our respective homelands. Unsurprisingly, they satisfied me that their system of healthcare was better than ours, but they were agreed that the United Kingdom is considerably less corrupt. Although greed and dishonesty is concealed in every human heart, the prevailing culture may encourage or discourage its execution. Let us therefore keep ourselves clean. NatWest has been blinded by its decision, and I feel a little less righteous.