So the UK government has decided to drop http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/6181949.stmthe investigation into the bribes/commissions/agency fees paid for BAe Systems' Saudi Arabian defence contracts as was urged in Mannerisms yesterday.
It is pretty absurd to talk about stamping out corruption, like the current government does, when corruption, under the name of agency payments/commission, is necessary to get defence contracts on which the livelihoods of UK workers depend.
As ex-defence minister Jonathan Aitken has been saying for the last couple of days, in the Arab world these payments are regarded as commissions/agency payments while in the UK they’d be regarded as bribes.
There’s no point the government striking moral attitudes which it can’t live up to. It’s a bit like the government’s one-time commitment to an ‘ethical foreign policy’ which preceded a series of gross lies to get us into an illegal war.
It will be interesting to see if the German police are called off the investigation into the Siemens slush fund payments.
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