Abstract

Banks accused of rate-fixing. Members of Parliament cooking the books. Major defence contractors investigated over suspect arms deals. Police accused of being paid off by tabloids. The headlines are unrelenting these days. Perhaps it's high time we ask: just exactly how corrupt is Britain?

David Whyte brings together a wide range of leading commentators and campaigners, offering a series of troubling answers. Unflinchingly facing the corruption in British public life, they show that it is no longer tenable to assume that corruption is something that happens elsewhere; corrupt practices are revealed across a wide range of venerated institutions, from local government to big business. These powerful exposes shine a light on the corruption fundamentally embedded in UK politics, police and finance.
'What concerns the writers is that the public will regard corruption as unstoppable and something they can do nothing about. That each crime reported will lead to apathy, alienation and atomisation. Unite remains committed to ensuring this will not be the case'
Unite the Union - Book of the Month
'This excellent book should be read by everyone but particularly by those who harbour a belief that our liberal democracy protects against the worst forms of state-corporate crime'
Penny Green, Professor of Law and Globalisation, Queen Mary University of London, Director of the International State Crime Initiative
'Whyte deserves huge credit for bringing different aspects of the picture together into a coherent, disturbing and persuasive expose of the hypocrisy of a country that so often likes to portray itself as some sort of beacon of probity in a corrupt world'
The Tablet
'A game-changing book. It should be read by everyone'
George Monbiot, the Guardian
'NGO Transparency International tells us that Britain is the fourteenth most corrupt out of 177 nations and Whyte demonstrates exactly how in this myth-busting work ... Many of the examples are familiar, but together they provide an unsettling narrative'
Big Issue in the North
'An ambitious collection of essays ... which point to a contemporary malaise'
New Statesman
'Concentrates on new forms of corruption associated with the reorganisation of the state in the neo-liberal era, detailing the new ways in which the state has been infested by private interests'
Times Literary Supplement
'At last, a book that asks the right questions about corruption, and provides some fascinating and important answers. Corruption isn't what — or where — most people think it is'
Nicholas Shaxson, author of Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men who Stole the World