OECD Criticizes Britain for Corruption

The OECD shook everything with its public denouncement of Great Britain's conduct in its latest corruption report.

The UK lays claim to be combating corruption, and on a regular basis lectures African countries and the like about the need to tidy their acts and stop taking bribes for arms and engineering contracts. But the OECD anti-bribery international working party and its spunky Swiss chairman, Professor Mark Pieth, have drawn up a report that describes the conduct of the UK administration itself as, in effect, corrupt.

The report paints a depiction of a corruption filled Labour government that spent many years, under Tony Blair, impeding justice, eluding action and making a series of dishonest promises about its missing aim to pass legal reforms. Ministers' real designs, it would appear, were to do nothing that would bother British business and its time-honored methods.

Behind closed doors at Chequers, Labour ministers accepted that British companies were themselves also paying big payoffs to get contracts, and so were nationalized aerospace, engineering and shipping firms.