At the start of this year Britain was relegated from the Premier League of clean countries, as Dan Hough put it at the time in City AM. Transparency International (TI), a think tank which publishes an annual Corruption Perceptions Index that ranks the countries believed to be doing better or worse at rooting out public-sector corruption, gave the UK its lowest ever ranking at 73 (the closer to 100 the better), behind Denmark (90), Finland (87) and New Zealand (85), and on a par with France and Austria, if thankfully a long way ahead of the likes of Somalia (11), Syria, Venezuela and South Sudan (all on 13).
That doesn’t sound too bad, you might think, but it places the UK out of the top 20 and with the lowest score it has ever achieved – it was just outside the top ten in 2021. And whatever the flaws in the methodology – the score is distilled from surveys of the views
