The truth about corruption

Here's David Leigh on the Guardian website talking about New Labour and Old Labour's phoney efforts to tackle bribery:

The OECD bursts the banks of normal diplomatic nicety with its public denunciation of Great Britain's behaviour in its latest bribery report.

The UK claims to be fighting corruption, and regularly lectures African countries and the like about the need to clean up their act and stop taking bribes for arms and engineering contracts. But the OECD anti-bribery international working party party and its feisty Swiss chairman, Professor Mark Pieth, have drawn up a report that depicts the behaviour of the UK administration itself as, in effect, corrupt.

The report paints a picture of a Labour government that spent many years, under Tony Blair, obstructing justice, evading action and making a series of dishonest promises about its non-existent intention to pass legal reforms. Ministers' real intentions, it would appear, were to do nothing that would inconvenience British business and its traditional methods.